On this date, May 10, 2002, a female Cop
Killer, Lynda Lyon Block was executed by the electric chair in Alabama for the October 4, 1993 murder of Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley. I always prefer the electric
chair to the lethal injection, as it more painful and more frightening.
Lynda Lyon Block |
Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley
|
INTERNET SOURCE: http://www.clarkprosecutor.org/html/death/US/block775.htm
Lynda Lyon Block’s case: Block,
54, and her common-law husband, George Sibley Jr., were on the run after
failing to appear on a domestic battery charge. With Block's 9 year old son in
the car, they stopped so Block could use the telephone in a Walmart parking
lot. Opelika Police Sergeant Roger Lamar Motley had just finished lunch and was
shopping for supplies for the jail when a woman came up to him and told him
there was a car in the parking lot with a little boy inside. The woman was
worried about him. She was afraid that the family was living in their car.
Would he check on them? Motley cruised up and down the rows of parked cars and
finally pulled up behind the Mustang. Sibley was in the car with the boy,
waiting for Block to finish a call to a friend from a pay phone in front of the
store. Motley asked Sibley for his drivers license. Sibley said he didn't need
one. He was trying to explain why when Motley put his hand on his service
revolver. Sibley reached into the car and pulled out a gun. Motley uttered a
four-letter expletive and spun away to take cover behind his cruiser. Sibley
crouched by the bumper of the Mustang. People in the parking lot screamed, hid
beneath their cars and ran back into the store as the men began firing at each
other. Preoccupied by the threat in front of him, Motley did not see Lynda
Block until the very last moment. She had dropped the phone, pulling the 9mm
Glock pistol from her bag as she ran toward the scene, firing. Motley turned.
She remembered later how surprised he looked. She kept on firing. She could
tell that a bullet struck him in the chest. Staggering, he reached into the
cruiser. She kept on firing, thinking he was trying to get a shotgun. But he
was grabbing for the radio. "Double zero," he managed to say -- the
code for help. He died in a nearby hospital that afternoon. In letters to
friends and supporters, Block later would describe Motley as a "bad
cop" and a wife beater with multiple complaints against him. As part of
the conspiracy against her, she said, she was prohibited from bringing up his
record in court. His personnel file makes no mention of any misbehavior. His
wife says he was a kind and patient man. Both Block and Sibley received death
sentences. True to their "patriot" ideologies, Block waived her
appeals. She has refused to accept the validity of Alabama’s judicial system,
claiming that Alabama never became a state again after the Civil War. She has
been completely non-cooperative with her court-appointed attorney, who
nevertheless attempted to work against her death sentence. First execution of a
female in Alabama since 1957. She is the 9th female executed in the U.S. since
reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976.
"Lyon-Sibley
Dies In The Alabama Electric Chair," by Robert Anthony Phillips. (May 10,
2002)
ATMORE, AL - (May 10,
2002) -- Cop killer Lynda Lyon-Sibley, making no last statement and appearing
to pray silently with her eyes shut, became possibly the last person to be
executed in the electric chair in Alabama early Friday morning.
Wearing white prison
issues, her head shaved and face covered in a black veil, Lyon-Sibley was
strapped into “Big Yellow Mama,” the macabre name given to the electric chair,
at 12:01 a.m. and received two jolts of electricity over two minutes. “She was
read the death warrant (while strapped to the chair) and asked if she had a
final statement,” said Brian Corbett, an Alabama Corrections Department
spokesman who witnessed the execution. “She said, ‘No,’ and that was that.” “I
can tell you her demeanor was stoic,” said Corbett. “She displayed no emotion.
She had very wide eyes with a defiant look on her face. She did make eye
contact with our commissioner (Corrections Commissioner Michael Haley) and it
looked like she was trying to stare a hole straight through him.”
Corbett said that one
2,500 volt jolt of electricity was sent through Lyon-Sibley’s body for 20
seconds and a second jolt of 250 volts was sent through her for 100 seconds.
Corbett said that he saw steam rise from the wet sponge placed under the
electrode on her left leg. A reporter from the Birmingham News newspaper wrote
in her story that Lyon-Sibley “clenched her fists, her body tensed” as the
electricity rammed into Lyon-Sibley’s body.
Lyon-Sibley, a former
Cub Scout mom and library volunteer in Orlando, Fla., was pronounced dead at
12:10 a.m. Lyon-Sibley, who is listed in prison records as Lynda Block, became
the first woman put to death in Alabama since 1957, when Rhonda Martin was
executed in the electric chair for poisoning her husband. Before Lyon-Sibley
was executed, the condemned woman spent time in an isolation cell with three
visitors from Florida. Her spiritual advisor, a former chaplain at Tutwiler
Correctional Facility, where she was held before her execution, was with her,
Corbett said.
The execution, at
Holman Prison here, marked both the end of Lyon-Sibley, an anti-government activist,
and the end of the Alabama electric chair as the official execution device in
the state. Alabama is officially switching to lethal injection on July 1, now
leaving only Nebraska as the only state that will still use electricity to kill
convicted murderers. Condemned men or women in Alabama, however, can still
choose to die in the electric chair if they choose.
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