FRY THE FEMALE COP KILLER: LYNDA LYON BLOCK (EXECUTED BY ELECTRIC CHAIR ON MAY 10, 2002 IN ALABAMA)

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.