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| Supreme Court Refuses Ohio Execution Request |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 09/17/2001 |
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The Supreme Court recently turned down Ohio's request to move ahead with the execution of a killer who has chosen the electric chair over lethal injection. The court, with three justices dissenting, refused to overturn a stay that an appeals court granted earlier this week to John W. Byrd Jr. Chief Justice William Rehnquist and Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas said Ohio should be allowed to immediately put Byrd to death. 'John Byrd's case has lingered in the courts long enough,' Ohio Attorney General Betty Montgomery told justices in an appeal filed yesterday. Byrd was convicted in the 1983 stabbing death of a Cincinnati convenience-store clerk. He has chosen the electric chair over lethal injection to illustrate what he says is the brutality of capital punishment. Ohio gives its death-row inmates their choice of execution methods. A three-judge panel of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Monday denied Byrd's requests to re-examine his appeal. The execution was postponed from 10 a.m. Wednesday until Oct. 8, however, because one judge asked for more time for the full court to study the case. The dissenting justices said that was not enough justification to delay his execution. Byrd has maintained that an accomplice killed Monte Tewksbury. The state said that Byrd's 'claim of innocence - like his dozens of other claims raised over the past 18 years - has been rejected by every court to consider it.' 'To be sure, Byrd faces a terrible penalty for a terrible crime, but at some point, Ohio's long-delayed interest in enforcing a final judgment in its favor ought to be vindicated,' state lawyers wrote. |
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