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| Convicted killer struggles with officers right up to execution |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 01/19/2004 |
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A convicted killer struggled with officers and shouted for God's help last week before the state executed him for the death of a woman during a robbery. The execution team had to forcibly lift Lewis Williams from his knees and pry his hand off the edge of a table next door to the death chamber. It was the first time in nine executions since Ohio resumed the practice in 1999 that an inmate has struggled with officers in the death chamber. Williams was the first Ohio inmate executed after a claim of mental retardation was rejected. The execution process, the first that allowed witnesses to see the shunts placed in a condemned inmates' arms, left witnesses shaken. Reginald Wilkinson, Ohio's prisons director, called the scene disturbing and traumatic. Williams' peaceful mood while reading the Bible and talking with his lawyer in the hours before his death disappeared when the execution process began at 9:51 a.m. Williams, 45, professed his innocence even as he was carried into the death chamber by four officers. He continued to cry out as his mother, Bonnie Williams, 66, of Columbus, sobbed in a room separated by windows from the death chamber. He kept pleading even in his final official statement, given at 10:07 a.m. ''God, please help me. God, please hear my cry,'' Williams said. Williams' yells continued after warden James Haviland pulled the microphone away. Williams continued yelling until 10:08 a.m. when he abruptly stopped speaking. His chest rose and fell a couple times. He was declared dead at 10:15 a.m., executed for shooting Leoma Chmielewski, 76, in the face during a robbery in her Cleveland home in 1983. |
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