Category Archives: 21st Century

2010: William Garner, arsonist

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(Thanks to Meaghan Good of the Charley Project for the guest post. -ed.)

On this day in 2010, at 10:38 a.m., at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, convicted arsonist and quintuple murderer William L. Garner got the needle for the crimes he had committed eighteen years earlier.

Garner had burglarized the Cincinnati, Ohio apartment of Addie F. Mack on January 26, 1992, after he stole her purse and keys while she was being treated in a hospital emergency room.

After taking some electronics, Garner set three fires within the residence, although he knew there were children asleep inside it. Markeca Mason and Richard Gaines, both 11, Denitra Satterwhite, 12, Deondra Freeman, 10, and Mykkila Mason, 8, all died of smoke inhalation. Addie Mack’s oldest child, 13-year-old Rodriczus Mack, escaped through a window; he was the only survivor.

Rodriczus, Denitra, Deondra and Mykkila were siblings, and Markeca was their cousin. Richard was a friend of Rodriczus who happened to be spending the night.

Thanks to a tip from an observant taxi driver, Garner was arrested the next day and quickly confessed. He considered the children’s deaths to be “accidental” because he only set the fires to obliterate his fingerprints and he believed the children would smell the smoke and be able to get out in time.

Unfortunately, the apartment’s smoke detector was inoperable.

Garner was nineteen years old at the time of the murders. He had a criminal record dating back to age eleven, and following his January 1992 arrest he racked up thirteen behavior infractions in prison … including a fire-setting incident.

A psychologist who interviewed him said he functioned at the level of a 14-year-old, and his IQ tested at 76, barely above the juridical cutoff mark for mental retardation. When asking for clemency, Garner’s attorneys cited these factors as well as his “extremely violent and dysfunctional” upbringing, and also argued that he was brain-damaged due to lead poisoning.

In June 2010, the parole board voted unanimously to reject Garner’s clemency request, stating in its report, (pdf)

Considerable weight was afforded the considerable mitigation presented. It is clear that Mr. Garner suffered developmentally and was raised in an exceptionally and horrendously abusive environment. However, we cannot conclude that the mitigating factors are significant enough to outweigh the aggravating circumstances of an offense resulting in the death of five innocent children.

Garner was executed a month later, using Ohio’s recently-adopted “one-drug” lethal injection protocol (most states use, as Ohio had previously, a cocktail of three). It didn’t go smoothly.

A Toledo Blade article provides a detailed account of his last moments. The prison had to open a second viewing room to fit all the people who came to watch him die.

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2006: Rocky Barton, suicidal

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On this date in 2006, Ohio murderer Rocky Barton died by lethal injection for murdering his wife.

Say this for Barton: the experience of failed marriages had not jaded him on the institution. When his fourth wife, Kimbirli Jo, proposed to leave him, he was distraught enough to shoot her dead in a fit of passion, and then turn the gun on himself, too. “I couldn’t stand the thought of living without her,” he explained.

And say this, too: he wasn’t one for any special pleading.

“”It was an act of anger. Evidently it was not too thought out or I wouldn’t be where I am today,” he told a reporter just days before his execution. “I strongly believe in the death penalty. And for the ruthless, cold-blooded act that I committed, if I was sitting over there [in the jury box], I’d hold out for the death penalty.”

Voluntarily dropping his appeals, he spent less than three years on the “greased lightning” track to the Ohio gurney, only some 42 months overall from murder to execution. Kimbirli’s daughter, and Rocky’s stepdaughter, got a special release from a county jail where she was serving a drug sentence to witness the execution.

His suicide attempt, though unsuccessful, required “four surgeries to insert pins, wires and screws to hold his eyes in their sockets and the cadaver’s jaw to replace his shattered one,” and hundreds of thousands in public expenses to post special guard details for said reconstructive surgeries.

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2010: 18 in Libya

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Last year on this date, Libya — having just days prior been controversially elected to the United Nations Human Rights Council* — celebrated by conducting 18 firing squad executions.

State media reported that 14 were shot in Tripoli, and four more in Benghazi, in unspecified cases that Amnesty International “fear[ed] … fail to satisfy international standards for fair trial.”

Among them were nationals of Nigeria, Chad, and Egypt who, particularly in the first case, might have been condemned at a tribunal entirely conducted in a language they could not understand.

Qaddafi’s Libya has always been opaque about its practice of capital punishment; if it met the international outcry for more information about these 18, this site is not aware of it.

But as with Libya’s neighbor in the so-called Arab Spring, it’s one small reminder that what goes around occasionally (maybe) comes around too.

* In view of the current unpleasantness, Tripoli has recently been suspended from the body.

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2007: Christopher Newton

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After Christopher Newton’s death in Lucasville, Ohio by lethal injection on this day in 2007, his attorney read a prepared last statement that apologized for the murder of a fellow inmate: “If I could take it back, I would.”

But the evidence of the “bizarre” execution says Newton was right where he wanted to be.

From the time the obese career criminal (pdf) garroted his cellmate in 2001,* he cooperated with investigators only to the extent that cooperation would grease the wheels of that so-called machinery of death. The entire thing was engineered to get Newton his last parole.

It still took him over five years to land on a gurney, but if you think that’s inefficient, get a load of the execution itself.

For going on two hours, the injection team poked and prodded at Newton’s veins in vain, trying to squeeze a lethal shunt into its gargantuan subject.

“We have told the team to take their time,” read a sign that a prison spokesperson held up in the hush-hush viewing chamber an hour into this discomfiting procedure. “His size is creating a problem.”

Minutes later, the 19-stone condemned man got a bathroom break during his own execution.

So far as anyone could see, the delay was anything but agony for Newton, who was generally observed smiling, laughing, and chatting it up with the prison personnel who were struggling to kill him. Finally, they managed to do it — an achievement which Ohio has latterly demonstrated is by no means a given.

* And allegedly drank some of Jason Brewer’s blood to boot, though this claim proceeding from a man who was intentionally pursuing a death sentence merits skepticism.

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2001: Terrance Anthony James, snitch-killer

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On this date in 2001, Terrance Anthony James suffered lethal injection in Oklahoma for the vicious murder of a suspected jailhouse snitch.

Awaiting trial in 1983 for theft of government property, James became convinced that a fellow-inmate was responsible for his arrest, and proceeded to strangle Mark Allen Berry with a wire.

Usually, in death penalty cases, it’s the jailhouse snitch who does the killing.

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2005: Shanmugam Murugesu, for the chronic

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On this date in 2005, Singapore hanged a 34-year-old for pot.

Shanmugam Murugesu, an ethnically Tamil Singaporean, was nabbed carrying a kilo of marijuana.

Your basic “wtf drug war” case study, this divorced father actually represented Singapore at international watersports competitions and otherwise led a productive, non-criminal life.

The city-state: a mite crazy over drugs. (And over the death penalty.) Mere mary jane is among the substances that can get you a death sentence there — carrying 500 grams or more is supposed to trigger automatic execution.

While awaiting that fate, Shanmugam befriended the young Australian drug mule and “simple soul” Van Tuong Nguyen, who was bound to follow in his footsteps; Shanmugam’s last appeal to his lawyer was “to save Nguyen Tuong Van’s life at all costs.”

(No luck, but it’s the thought that counts.)

Shanmugam Murugesu’s hanging was also notable as a civic event in Singapore for the landmark public protest (organized in large measure by the hanged man’s own family) it generated — a rarity for that “Disneyland with the death penalty”.

Public Forum on Death Penalty and Campaign for Shanmugam Murugesu from Jacob George on Vimeo.

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2001: Five machine-gunned in Thailand

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On this date a decade ago, Thailand machine-gunned in Bangkwang Prison five men — four convicted drug-smugglers, and one murderer.

Lee Yuan-kuang, one of those executed this date.

Bazillionaire populist Thaksin Sinawatra had just become the country’s Prime Minister, and would soon stake his administration on a notorious drug suppression push that would be linked to 2,000-plus extrajudicial killings.

This date’s harvest, perhaps, was its judicial preview. Amnesty International complained that it was “outrageous … to flaunt its tough anti-drugs stance by executing people,” and that’s probably exactly the sort of reaction Thaksin had in mind.

According to the BBC, one of the traffickers had been caught with 50,000 methamphetamine pills — meth being the rising drug problem (pdf) du jour — and another with 30 kilos of heroin.

Thailand executed three more drug traffickers later in 2001.


Thailand’s execution arrangement, further described here.

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2011: Three Philippines drug mules in China

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Today in China, overseas Filipino workers Ramon Credo, 42, Sally Villanueva, 32, and Elizabeth Batain, 38, were executed by lethal injection in China as drug smugglers — the first two in Xiamen, and the last in Shenzhen.

The three had been arrested in 2008 and convicted in 2009 for carrying heroin — they said unknowingly — into the People’s Republic.

The fate of these three aroused an outpouring of sympathy in their native land, where economics drives up to 10% of the population to work overseas, often at a hazard.

Vice President Jejomar Binay, who personally traveled to China to plead their case, called it “a sad day for all of us.” (Unusually, China actually granted a few weeks’ reprieve from the original February execution dates. This was viewed as a concession, and why not? China has rolled stronger countries in similar cases before without even that courtesy.)

While this case was in the headlines for weeks in the Philippines and around the world, the condemned at the heart of it seem not to have realized their deaths were imminent until relatives flew in from China to meet with them on this very day, just hours before execution.

These seem to be the first known Philippines nationals executed in China for drug trafficking, and if that’s a surprising milestone for the world’s most aggressive executioner to be setting with a regional neighbor noted for its many overseas workers … it bears remembering that it’s only China’s stupendous economic growth in the past generation or so that has made it such an especially attractive migrant worker destination.

This execution date also happens to be the 40th anniversary of another landmark event in Sino-Filipino relations, the hijacking of a Philippines airliner by six students, who diverted it to China. Those illicit airborne arrivals were greeted with considerably more leniency than our present-day drug couriers enjoy.

Seventy-two more Philippines nationals are reportedly under sentence of death in China for drug crimes(or not), and around 120 more for various offenses throughout the world.

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2009: Four Iranians

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If not for China, Iran’s hundreds of annual executions would put it in a class all its own for capital punishment.

The legions of hanged in Iran are more than this site will ever manage with the biographical care that their friends might demand for their lives: we are doomed to know only a few, and often what we “know” is little more than a name and what an authority figure has accused him of. Ever it is thus: the kings and potentates, the star-crossed lovers and epic villains, make the history books. But most of the headsman’s clients are, like he himself, obscurities.

From Iran Human Rights, March 14, 2009.

March 14: Four people were executed by hanging in the Adelabad prison of Shiraz, reported the Iranian daily newspaper Etemaad today.

According to the report the men were identified as:

  • Abolhassan (age not given), convicted of a murder in 1981
  • 26 years old man (name not given), convicted of murder
  • Young man (name and age not given), convicted of murder
  • 23 years old man (name and age at the time of committing the offence not given), convicted of raping two boys.

    According to our sources, there are several minor offenders on death row in the Adelabad prison of Shiraz.

    In 2008, at least two minor offenders were executed in the Adelabad prison of Shiraz.

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2005: A gay couple in Saudi Arabia

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Stay classy, Saudi Arabia.

RIYADH—A gay couple was beaded in a public execution Sunday [March 13, 2005] in Saudi Arabia after being convicted of killing a blackmailer. If they had been exposed as gay they could have been executed anyway.

Homosexuality is punishable by flogging, lengthy prison terms or death under Sharia Islamic law.

The Saudi Interior Ministry issued a statement Sunday announcing the execution. It said that Ahmed al-Enezi and Shahir al-Roubli, both Saudis, ran over Malik Khan in their car, beat him on the head with stones and set fire to his corpse “fearing they would be exposed after the victim witnessed them in a shameful situation”.

The term “shameful situation” is regularly used by the government to refer to homosexual acts.

The ministry said the two men were executed in the northern town of Arar, near the Iraq border.

The Saudi government routinely rounds up people suspected of being gay. All that is needed is a complaint from someone. In some instances men who are not gay who have been arrested were picked up on the complaint of a neighbor following a dispute.

The kingdom also, on a number of occasions, has blocked access to the only gay Arab news and information site on the internet.

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