Posted on 08/29/2006 6:42:51 PM PDT by DuxFan4ever
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. — Gov. Mike Rounds today halted the execution of the state's first prison inmate in 59 years just hours before it was scheduled.
Elijah Page, 24, had waived his appeals and asked to be executed for the torture slaying of a Spearfish man six years ago.
A spokesman for the governor had said earlier that Rounds had no plans to intercede. But this afternoon Rounds delayed the execution and said he would talk about his decision at a news conference later in the day.
Page rejected pleas from friends and death penalty opponents that he reconsider as his execution drew near.
The last execution in South Dakota was in 1947, when George Sitts died in the electric chair for killing two law enforcement officers.
Earlier this year, Page persuaded a judge to let him fire his lawyer and face the executioner for his role in the 2000 slaying of Chester Allan Poage, 19.
Page and two other young men killed Poage in Higgins Gulch in the Black Hills so that there would be no witness to the theft of a Chevy Blazer, stereo, television, coin collection, video game and other items from the victim's home.
As Poage begged for his life, the three men made him take off most of his clothes and forced him into an icy creek. His killers stabbed him repeatedly, kicked him in the head 30 to 40 times, tearing his ears off, then bashed him with large rocks. He was also forced to drink hydrochloric acid. The torture lasted at least two hours.
Page and Briley Piper, 25, pleaded guilty and a judge sentenced them to die. Darrell Hoadley, 26, was convicted, and a divided jury sentenced him to life in prison with no parole.
Page's case was considered unusual because a judge, not a jury, imposed the death sentence, because he asked to die, and because of his age. Death penalty groups said only seven people younger than 25 had been executed in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume in 1976.
Amnesty International USA urged Rounds to grant Page clemency.
"Elijah Page's case clearly demonstrates that our capital punishment system is a lottery of death," said the group's executive director, Larry Cox, noting that one of Page's co-defendants was sentenced to life in prison.
Would you post this when it happens?
In South Dakota, Gov. Mike Rounds halted the state's first execution in 59 years just hours before it was scheduled Tuesday, saying the 1984 state law detailing how to administer lethal drugs is obsolete.
Rounds and the attorney general said the law requires the state to use two drugs to kill a condemned person - but that prison officials planned to use a three-drug combination, potentially putting them in legal trouble.
The Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals has upheld the state's current execution procedure as humane.
Richard Kirby, the general counsel for the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, said the changes were the result of recommendations by an expert who testified during Patton's challenge.
The old process called for inmates to receive a second dose of the sedative thiopental after two injections of sodium chloride already had caused their heart to stop.
Now, an inmate will be injected with a double dose of the sedative at the beginning, reducing the chance that a condemned inmate could wake up.
Patton, who had a lengthy criminal record of burglaries and robberies in Oklahoma and California, was accused of attacking Charlene Kauer, 56, after he knocked on her door and asked her for money.
Her husband found her nude body with multiple stab wounds from several knives, a barbecue fork and a pair of scissors that were left protruding from her chest, court records show.
Patton later confessed to the crime, but claimed in his appeals that he was so intoxicated and high on cocaine that he could not form the intent to kill.
RINO!
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