Christopher Scott Emmett will not vote for Governor Tim Kaine in the next Virginia election. Emmett was executed after losing his appeal which claimed the State’s lethal injection method would cause excruciating pain.
After stating, “Tell the Governor he just lost my vote,” Emmett added, “Y’all hurry this along. I’m dying to get out of here.”
His executioners did indeed hurry things along; Emmett was pronounced dead just five minutes after he was painlessly sedated.
Just shy of five decades after he was sentenced to hang at the age of 14, Steven Truscott has been awarded $6.5 million in compensation for his wrongful conviction in the rape and murder of 12 year old Lynne Harper.
In June of 1959, Lynne Harper went missing in a small community in Ontario, Canada.
Her body was found two days later.
Two days after that, Steven Truscott, 14 years old, was arrested and charged with her murder. He was tried and convicted later that year. His sentence: Death by hanging. His sentence was commuted to life in prison in 1960 and he was released in 1969.
In August 2007, the Ontario Court of Appeal pronounced that Truscott’s conviction had been a “miscarriage of justice” and acquitted him.
While Steven is grateful for the acknowledgment of his innocence and for the financial stability the money provides, he says the announcement is “bittersweet.” No amount of money can truly compensate for the terror he experienced, for the loss of his childhood, for the LSD treatments he was subjected to in prison, and for the decades of ignominy living as a convicted rapist and murderer.
In 1992, two men kidnapped a couple, tied up the man and sexually assaulted the woman, and then held another couple at gunpoint. All four victims identified Patrick Waller as one of the two assailants.
All four victims were wrong.
After spending more than 15 years in prison, Waller was released and exonerated this month when DNA tests conducted last year confirmed what he had always maintained, that he was innocent.
That same DNA test implicated another suspect who then identified his accomplice. Both men confessed to the crime but neither will face charges; the statute of limitations has expired.
Waller has already served the time for them.
Mark Dean Schwab was pronounced dead at 6:15 PM EDT today, executed for the 1991 kidnapping, rape, and murder of an 11-year old boy, Junny Rios-Martinez.
Schwab, who admitted kidnapping and raping the boy, and who led police to a footlocker holding Junny’s nude body, challenged Florida’s new execution procedure, claiming it would cause him unnecessary pain and suffering.
Florida’s old lethal injection procedure was halted after the execution of Angel Diaz went awry in 2006, causing serious chemical burns to his arms.
In the new procedure, the inmate is rendered unconscious with sodium pentothal, paralyzed with pancuronium bromide, and then dispatched with potassium chloride which stops the heart.
Angel Diaz took thirty-four minutes to die in 2006. Today, Schwab passed away painlessly in twelve.
In 1989, Anthony Hanemaayer pleaded guilty to a knifepoint sexual assault on a 15-year old girl. But Hanemaayer was innocent. So why did he plead guilty? Because he was afraid he couldn’t prove his innocence, that the courts would find him guilty, and that he’d be sentenced to a heavy term in federal prison. In exchange for his plea, he was given a lesser sentence of two years less a day in a provincial reformatory.
In June 2006, Scarborough rapist and serial killer Paul Bernardo confessed to this attack, providing details that only the attacker would know. Police, convinced Bernardo was the real perpetrator, then spoke to Hanemaayer but didn’t tell him Bernardo had confessed to the crime.
Lawyers for the Association in Defence of the Wrongly Convicted didn’t find out about Bernardo’s confession until late 2007, and then only by happenstance. They were working on another case in which Bernardo may have played a role, the murder of Elizabeth Bain and the wrongful conviction of her boyfriend, Robert Baltovich. It was only this past week that Hanemaayer was finally and fully exonerated.
So, would you plead guilty if you were really innocent?
