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| Alabama Executes First Woman In 45 Years |
| By Associated Press |
| Published: 05/13/2002 |
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A political extremist convicted of murdering a policeman in 1993 was put to death in the electric chair Friday, becoming the first woman executed in Alabama in 45 years. Lynda Lyon Block declined to pursue final appeals late Thursday, claiming the courts were corrupt and lacked jurisdiction in her case. She was put to death shortly after midnight. Block made no final statement before she was executed. ''She seemed to be somewhat stoic,'' prison commissioner Mike Haley said. ''She displayed no emotion.'' Block, 54, may be the last person forced to die in the state's electric chair. Under a law that takes effect this summer, condemned inmates in Alabama will be executed by injection unless they choose the electric chair. Block and her common-law husband, George Sibley, were sentenced to death for killing Opelika police officer Roger Motley Jr. in a burst of gunfire in a shopping center parking lot. The couple said Motley was reaching for his gun when they shot him. Block and Sibley, who decried government controls over individuals and renounced their U.S. citizenship, were on the run at the time to avoid being sentenced in the stabbing of Block's former husband in Orlando, Fla. ''The Bible says when murder happens and a person has no sorrow, they are to be immediately executed,'' said Anne Motley, the victim's mother. Alabama's electric chair, built in 1927, has been used for 176 executions since it replaced hanging as the state's primary mode of execution. Block was the fourth woman put to death in Alabama by electrocution and the first since 1957, when Rhonda Bell Martin was executed for poisoning her husband with arsenic. |
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