Clarence Wayne Dixon, a 66-year-old inmate in an Arizona prison, was executed on Wednesday despite objections to the sentence due to his mental illness.
Dixon was sentenced to death in 2008 for the 1978 murder of Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin. Dixon's attorney attempted to have the sentence repealed, arguing that Dixon's diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia rendered him mentally unfit for capital punishment. The Arizona Supreme Court struck down that attempt in April.
On May 11 at approximately 10 a.m. local time, Dixon was executed via a lethal injection of pentobarbital, a drug that has been used at both state and federal levels in recent years. Dixon was the first inmate to be executed in the state of Arizona since the botched execution of Joseph Wood in 2014.
According to the Arizona Department of Corrections, Dixon's last meal consisted of Kentucky Fried Chicken, a half-pint of strawberry ice cream and a bottle of water.
The execution struck a chord in many concerning the ethics of capital punishment in cases regarding mental health. USA Today reported that two advocacy groups held vigils for Dixon the night before.
Dixon's representatives argued that his diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, as well as suffering from blindness and hallucinations, made him unfit for punishment. According to Slate, a doctor who previously evaluated Dixon stated that without the presence of mental illness, he most likely would not have committed the gruesome acts for which he was executed.
Prosecutors said that 21-year-old Bowdoin was raped, strangled and stabbed to death in her apartment in January 1978. Dixon lived across the street from Bowdoin in Tempe, Arizona, at the time of her killing.
However, it was not until 2001 that Dixon was linked to Bowdoin's murder. He was already serving life in prison for a 1986 sexual assault conviction and in 2001, a detective tested DNA from Bowdoin's case against a national database and found that it matched Dixon's profile. He was indicted for the murder in 2002 and sentenced to death in 2008.
According to a previous Newsweek report, then–Maricopa County Superior Court judge and later U.S. Supreme Court justice, Sandra Day O'Connor, ruled that Dixon was not guilty of a separate attack on a woman just days before Bowdoin's murder. He had been released from a state hospital without supervision or mental health resources.
Dixon's attorney, Dale Baich, argued that Dixon's death sentence had been the state's attempt to "skirt its own responsibility" for failing to protect Dixon "from the horrific abuse and neglect he suffered as a child," failing to conduct a thorough investigation and failing to supervise him after he was found to be "not guilty by reason of insanity."
Newsweek reached out to the Arizona Supreme Court for comment.
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