On this date in 1992, Robyn Leroy Parks was executed by lethal injection for stabbing an Edmond, Okla. gas station minder to death 15 years before. Parks was afraid that Abdullah Ibrahim would call police to report the stolen credit card he was using to gas up, but he left behind at the murder scene a scratch pad on which Ibrahim had noted his license plate number.
Parks’s execution by lethal injection was very badly botched in a scene that anticipated the better-publicized tribulations this supposedly antiseptic execution process has inflicted in recent years.
Parks appeared to suffer a violent reaction, possibly allergic, to the execution drugs. “I’m still awake,” he said after the drugs were dispensed — said that “lightheartedly,” according to the New York Times.
Parks then endured what looked like a waking strangulation: “the muscles in his jaw, neck, and abdomen began to react spasmodically … [he] continued to grasp and violently gag until death came, some eleven minutes after the drugs were first administered,” in the words of Michael Radelet’s compendium of botched executions.
Tulsa World reporter Wayne Green, an official witness to the debacle, recounted events in the next day’s edition under the discomfiting headline “11-Minute Execution Seemingly Took Forever.”
It was overwhelming, stunning, disturbing — an intrusion into a moment so personal that reporters, taught for years that intrusion is their business, had trouble looking each other in the eyes after it was over.
On this day..
- 1653: Felim O'Neill
- 1431: Thomas Bagley, Lollard martyr
- 1931: Alfred Arthur Rouse, Blazing Car Murderer
- 1714: A Tyburn dozen
- 1899: Cordelia Poirier and Samuel Parslow
- 1865: Amy Spain, liberation anticipation
- 1777: James Aitken, aka John the Painter, terrorist of the American Revolution
- 1762: Jean Calas, intolerably
- 2010: Jihan Mohammed Ali and Atef Rohyum Abd El Al Rohyum, lovers
- Themed Set: The Contemporary Middle East
- 1799: The defenders of Jaffa, at Napoleon's command
- 1615: St. John Ogilvie
- 1302: Dante Alighieri condemned
I imagine being stabbed to death is worse. Lethal injection gives those on death row a death the majority of us will never have, that is, quiet and in your sleep (assuming no complications.) It’s hard to sympathize with lethal injection knowing I’ll probably die painfully of a heart attack, or a stroke, or linger with cancer or dementia. Now, burning alive at the stake is cruel and unusual.