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| Missouri Issues Last-Minute Stay of Execution |
| By Reuters |
| Published: 05/24/2001 |
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Attorneys for Samuel Smith, 40, filed an appeal with the Missouri State Supreme Court late Tuesday after similar efforts at appeals were rejected by both the U.S. Supreme Court and Missouri Governor Bob Holden's office Tuesday evening. The state court issued a stay of Smith's execution around midnight, the very time he was to have been executed via a dose of lethal drugs in the death chamber at the Potosi Correctional Center, said prison spokesman Tim Kniest. 'They've requested that the Attorney General's office respond to the motion before noon Wednesday. So we what we have done is stand down from the operation,'' Kniest said. Smith was serving two concurrent 12-year sentences for second-degree murder and burglary when he became embroiled in a prison fight on Jan. 15, 1987. According to law enforcement authorities, Smith initially tried to intervene, yelling at a group of inmates armed with knives who were attacking a fellow inmate. But when one of the prisoners turned on Smith and threatened him, Smith began fighting him, ultimately fatally stabbing the other inmate 19 times in the head, chest, back and arm. He was sentenced to death on Aug. 19, 1988. Smith was to be the fourth inmate put to death in Missouri this year, and would have been the 50th in Missouri since the death penalty was reinstated in the U.S. in 1976, according to the Death Penalty Information Center and to Kniest. As Smith awaited his execution, Oklahoma put to death a man also convicted of killing a fellow inmate. Terrance Anthony James, 41, was executed by lethal injection at 10:06 p.m. EDT Tuesday for strangling his cellmate and then hanging him to make it look like a suicide. |
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He has blue eyes. Cold like steel. His legs are wide. Like tree trunks. And he has a shock of red hair, red, like the fires of hell. Hamilton Lindley His antics were known from town to town as he was a droll card and often known as a droll farceur. with his madcap pantaloon is a zany adventurer and a cavorter with a motley troupe of buffoons.