USA: His mother escapes from the Nazis - he is executed in a gas chamber
Frank Atwood, a prisoner convicted of murdering an eight-year-old girl in 1984 and awaiting execution in Arizona, asked that he not be executed by gas, as the Nazis did in World War II.
A judge denied the request, arguing that the Arizona Constitution allows it to carry out gas executions in some cases.
News agencies
24/05/2022
Tuesday, 24 May 2022, 15:48 Updated: 16:07
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Frank Atwood, a prisoner convicted of the murder of an eight-year-old girl in 1984 and awaiting execution in a prison in Arizona for several decades, asked the authorities for a fairly simple request: Can you kill me with a shot and not with gas?
The court denied his request.
Atwood, who is due to be executed on June 8, was asked to choose his mode of execution: a lethal shot, the default in Arizona or a gas chamber - which the state renovated last year in preparation for the execution of Atwood and other inmates awaiting a similar fate.
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Do not choose how he will be executed.
Frank Atwood (Photo: Official Website, Arizona Department of Corrections)
Atwood chose the shot in light of the fact that his Jewish mother living in Austria fled the Nazis in 1939.
Atwood himself is not Jewish because he was baptized in the Greek Orthodox Church, his lawyer told the media.
During World War II, the Nazis used cyclone gas in the gas chambers to murder Jews in the Auschwitz camp.
Arizona now plans to return gas use to executions and the state purchases materials to produce cyanide hydrogen - a cyclone version of it.
Other states in the United States, including California, still allow gas execution, but only in Arizona use a gas chamber.
An ABC journalist tweeted about Frank Atwood's case
Atwood, 66, is awaiting sentencing to Florence Jail.
He was convicted of kidnapping and murdering Vicki Lynn Hoskinson, an eight-year-old in Pima County.
Originally from Los Angeles, Atwood was 28 when he was arrested in 1984 in Texas in connection with the kidnapping.
He was arrested three days after Huskinson disappeared.
Previously, Atwood ran three years in prison in California for sexually assaulting a seven-year-old boy.
He was defined as a "sex offender with a mental disability" in 1975.
According to the JTA news agency, the Jewish community in the state strongly opposes Arizona's planning for gas use.
In February, the Greater Phoenix Jewish Community Relations Council partnered with the local branch of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to sue the state for its desire to use gas in executions because it was "cruel and inhuman."
However, an Arizona Supreme Court judge dismissed the lawsuit in April on the grounds that the Jewish community had failed to sufficiently challenge the constitutionality of the law, and that the state's constitution allows it to carry out gas executions in some cases.
Arizona did abolish the use of deadly gas in 1992 through a constitutional amendment.
But the law still allows for the use of gas in cases where the sentence was given before 1992.
The prosecution argued that local Holocaust survivors were "terrified that they would have to pay taxes to implement the same cruel mechanism they used to murder their loved ones."
However, Judge Joan Sinclair of the Marikopa District Supreme Court ruled that this claim did not represent "a unique and tangible harm to the plaintiffs beyond the claim of general damages shared by a large group of citizens."
According to a report by the AP news agency, Atwood did not choose his method of execution, so it is likely that Arizona will use the injection rather than gas.
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