On
this date, December 16, 2010, a prison killer, John David Duty who needed a
suicide assist got his wished by getting executed by lethal injection in Oklahoma.
I will post information about him from Wikipedia and other links.
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John David Duty, Photo by the Oklahoma Department of Corrections
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Born
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April 25, 1952
Oklahoma, USA |
Died
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December 16, 2010 (aged 58)
McAlester, Oklahoma, USA |
Other names
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John David Hall
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Criminal penalty
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Life imprisonment
Execution by lethal injection |
Criminal status
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Executed on December 16, 2010 at Oklahoma State
Penitentiary
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Spouse(s)
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Pam Duty
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Children
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2 sons, 1 daughter
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Parents
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Charles Houston Duty
Mildred Duty Hall |
Conviction(s)
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Kidnapping, rape, robbery, shooting with intent to kill
– July 18, 1978
First-degree murder – October 28, 2002 |
John David Duty
(April 25, 1952 – December 16, 2010) was an American who was executed in Oklahoma
for first-degree murder. According to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections,
he is the first person in the United States to have been put to death with pentobarbital.
A nationwide shortage of Sodium Thiopental led the state to incorporate the
substitution into their protocol for lethal injections. Duty's case gained
media attention because pentobarbital had typically been used to euthanize
animals.
Duty
was sentenced to death for strangling a fellow inmate at Oklahoma State
Penitentiary in December 2001. At the time, Duty had been serving a life
sentence for a 1978 conviction of rape, robbery and shooting with intent to
kill. He did not contest the murder charge and vowed that he would kill again
if he was not executed.
Duty
later filed appeals that the change to the method of execution could be
inhumane, but was denied. Though his case had gone all the way to the U.S.
Supreme Court, opponents of capital punishment claimed that Duty had
manipulated the system to be executed as a method of escape from life
imprisonment. He was put to death at the same penitentiary where he had
committed the murder nearly nine years earlier.
Background
John
David Duty was born on April 25, 1952, to Charles Houston Duty and Mildred Duty
Hall. Duty stated that he had been raised in a broken home, his mother having
remarried twice. His family included two brothers, a sister, a half-brother,
and a half-sister. For some time, Duty went by the name of John David Hall;
there had been some confusion over the identity of his biological father as his
mother had married O.H. Hall at Atoka, Oklahoma in 1950, but his birth
certificate listed Duty as his surname. According to Duty, he lost an eye due
to an accident in the third grade and suffered a head injury from a collapsed
brick wall; the latter incident led him to be hospitalized for scarlet fever.
Duty's mother died from an illness in Altus, Oklahoma at the age of 46 on
August 24, 1973.
Duty
worked as a manager at Central Manufacturing in Vernon, Texas before being
employed at Sonic Drive-In and PepsiCo in Wichita Falls, Texas, which lies
south of the border with Oklahoma. He and his wife Pam had two sons and a
daughter.
Kidnapping
case
On
February 16, 1978, Duty and Anthony Trombitas, whom he had met about four to
five days earlier, robbed the Jiffy Mart convenience store on Falcon Road in
Altus, north of the border with Texas. During the robbery, which netted some
beer and money, ranging in various accounts from $7.66 to $18, the two men
abducted store clerk Linda Hall (no relation). After driving her to a barn in Tillman
County, Duty raped Hall and shot her in the back of the head three times with a
.22 caliber pistol. Trombitas then hit her with a stick, which Duty identified
as a broom handle. Though left for dead, Hall was able to walk a mile
(1.6 km) to a house for help and recovered at Tillman County Memorial
Hospital. The two men drove off to Frederick, then Electra, and proceeded to Fort
Worth. Upon hearing a radio report about her on the next day, Duty said,
"I was surprised that she was still alive." Duty returned to Altus
the following month, presuming that law enforcement officers were going to
catch up with him anyway. He was arrested on the street after calling the
police and hanging up from a payphone at another Jiffy Mart near the downtown
square.
In
July 1978, Duty, represented by Clyde Amyx and John Wampler, was placed on
trial in the Jackson County Courthouse before Judge Weldon Ferris. Duty stated
that he had no criminal record besides three traffic violations, and that he
felt that he could be rehabilitated in prison. He pleaded guilty on July 18 to
charges of rape and shooting with intent to kill in Tillman County and was also
convicted of robbery in neighboring Jackson County. Under cross-examination by
prosecutor Mike Evans, Duty stated that he had been depressed and had been
drinking for two days before the crime, which he admitted was his idea. Judge
Ferris sentenced Duty to serve concurrent life terms for the charges of
robbery, rape and shooting with intent to kill, and 20 years for kidnapping.
Trombitas was sentenced to 25 years for armed robbery and 20 years for
kidnapping.
Hostage
incident
At
11:30 am on August 8, 1979, Duty grabbed a pair of scissors and held eight
people hostage in the medical unit of Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester,
Oklahoma. Officials did not know what prompted Duty, who had entered the unit
for treatment, to take hostages as he did not make any demands. Duty soon
released six of the hostages unharmed, and let nurse Virginia Nelson go about
two hours later. The last remaining hostage, psychologist Jim Fenwick, took
Duty into his office and conducted negotiations until Duty surrendered at 4:02
pm on the same day.
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Murdered Cellmate, Curtis J. Wise Jr.
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Prison
murder
On
December 13, 2001, officials at the penitentiary placed 22-year-old Curtis J.
Wise Jr. in the same cell with Duty; Wise had been convicted in October 1999 of
burglary, larceny, and contributing to the delinquency of a minor. On December
19, Duty offered Wise some cigarettes in exchange for allowing himself to be
tied up to make the guards think that he had been taken hostage, with the goal
of having Duty transferred into administrative security. The prosecutor's
report stated that after tying Wise's hands and feet behind his back, Duty
strangled him to death with a shoelace. Duty then wrote a letter to Wise's
mother Mary, in which he stated: "Well by the time you get this letter you
will already know that your son is dead. I know now because I just killed him
an hour ago. Gee you'd think I'd be feeling some remorse but I'm not." The
letter was intercepted at the prison.
Murder
trial
At
his arraignment at the District Court of Pittsburg County on June 4, 2002, Duty
asked Judge Steven Taylor to enter a guilty plea to the murder and requested
the death penalty, against the advice of his defense counsel. On October 28 of
that year, Duty was deemed competent to enter the plea after court-ordered
evaluations by the Carl Albert Community Mental Health Center and Eastern
Oklahoma State Hospital. While testifying on his own behalf, Duty declined to
present any mitigating evidence and said that he preferred death over spending
a life sentence in lockdown 23 hours day. He also wrote to the prosecutor that
he would kill again. Mary Wise pleaded to the court to sentence Duty to life in
prison without the possibility of parole, stating: "I don’t believe he
ought to have a choice. I think he ought to sit in that cell and face those
four walls and think about what he did for the rest of his natural-born life. And
I hope and pray to God that you live to be 110 years old, because that’s how
long I want you to think about what you did." Judge Taylor denied her request,
calling Duty a "textbook case for the death penalty". Duty was
initially scheduled to be executed on February 24, 2005.
Appeals
In
2004, Duty filed an appeal with the Oklahoma
Court of Criminal Appeals. He cited the U.S.
Supreme Court decision of Ring v. Arizona, arguing against the
constitutionality of his "continuing threat" being used as an
aggravating circumstance for his death sentence. However, the court noted that
the issue was not raised by Duty during trial and upheld his judgement on April
23, 2004.
In
2010, a nationwide shortage of the lethal injection drug, sodium thiopental,
led the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to instead consider pentobarbital,
which is commonly used for animal euthanasia. Oklahoma state law is not
specific in prescribing the use of a fast-acting barbiturate, allowing
flexibility for such a substitution. Duty and two other inmates on death row
filed a federal appeal that the new protocol would constitute cruel and unusual
punishment. In a hearing before the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals, the
professor of anesthesia from Harvard Medical School testified for the defense
that pentobarbital might not succeed in preventing "severe, excruciating
pain". However, the professor of anesthesiology at the University of
Massachusetts Amherst countered in a deposition for the state that 5 grams
of pentobarbital would be sufficient to cause unconsciousness and death in
minutes. Representatives from the Oklahoma Department of Corrections and the Death
Penalty Information Center both testified that no other state had used
pentobarbital and that they believed Duty would be the first person to be
executed by the drug. On December 14, 2010, the Circuit Judges Jerome Holmes
and Neil Gorsuch joined Chief Judge Mary Beck Briscoe in a unanimous decision
upholding the use of the drug, citing that the state witness had demonstrated
"substantially more clinical experience with the use of
pentobarbital". An appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court over the
constitutionality of the state's execution protocol was also denied.
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Duty was executed at Oklahoma State Penitentiary, where he
had previously strangled fellow inmate Curtis Wise.
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Execution
Duty's
execution was carried out on December 16, 2010, at Oklahoma State Penitentiary.
At noon, Duty was granted his last meal request, which included a double
cheeseburger with mayonnaise, a foot-long hot dog with cheese, mustard and
onions, a cherry limeade, and a banana shake. He then met with a prison
chaplain, his attorneys, and his family. Duty addressed the family of the
victim in his final statement, "I hope one day you'll be able to forgive
me, not for my sake, but for your own. Thank you, Lord Jesus. I'm ready to go
home." The witnesses included the media, Duty's legal team, his brother
and sister-in-law, but the Wise family did not attend.
Duty
was strapped to a gurney with a patch over his right eye when the drugs were
administered at 6:12 pm; a second intravenous line was prepared as a backup.
The injection protocol included pentobarbital for sedation, followed by vecuronium
bromide to paralyze his breathing, and finally potassium chloride to stop the
heart. Duty repeated, "Thank you Lord. Thank you Lord." while he lost
consciousness; he appeared to stop breathing 3 minutes later and was pronounced
dead at 6:18 pm. Duty was the last prisoner to be executed in the United States
in 2010. He was survived by his two sons, a daughter, and several
grandchildren.
Death
penalty debate
Main
article: Capital punishment debate
The
National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty used Duty's case to argue that
capital punishment had actually set a dangerous precedent of encouraging a
murder, rather than deterring it. Though the group never questioned Duty's
guilt, they cited his premeditation in killing Wise, followed by his guilty
plea and request for the death penalty, as an example of exploiting the system
to effectively turn the state into "an agent of suicide".
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