English

Prima Esecuzione dell'anno In Texas

10 gen. 2001

Jack Clark � stato messo a morte nella serata di marted� nel Texas. Si tratta della prima esecuzione del 2001 nello Stato finora governato da George W. Bush, che detiene il record delle esecuzioni negli Usa.

Clark � stato ucciso con un'iniezione letale nel carcere di Huntsville per lo stupro e l'omicidio di una giovane donna nel 1989. L'uomo era inizialmente reo confesso, ma poi ha ritrattato proclamandosi innocente. Luned� il nuovo governatore del Texas Rick Perry gli aveva rifiutato la grazia.

Nel 2000 il Texas ha messo a morte a Huntsville 40 persone. Altre due persone sono in attesa di esecuzione entro la fine del mese.

Texas, Oklahoma Carry Out First Executions of Year

OKLAHOMA CITY  - Texas and Oklahoma both carried out executions on Tuesday, the first of 10 scheduled for January by the two states that led the country last year in putting criminals to death. Oklahoma executed Eddie Leroy Trice, 48, for the 1987 rape and beating murder of an 84-year-old woman, the first of a state record of seven lethal injections scheduled in one month. Trice, put to death at a state prison in the southeastern town of McAlester, was convicted of raping and beating Ernestine Jones and beating her retarded son in a drug-induced rage while robbing her home. Jones later died of her injuries. Three hours earlier, Jack Clark, 37, was executed by lethal injection at the Texas state prison in Huntsville, 75 miles north of Houston, for abducting, raping and killing a 23-year-old woman more than a decade ago. Clark's execution was the first of three slated for January in Texas, which last year executed 40 people, the most by a U.S. state since authorities began keeping records in 1930. Oklahoma put 11 people to death in 2000, ranking only behind Texas.  Texas, which holds the U.S. record for most executions in a month at eight in both May and June of 1997, has executed 240 people since resuming capital punishment in 1982, six years after the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a ban on the death penalty. Oklahoma state officials have said their sudden cluster of executions was a coincidence caused by a backlog of death penalty cases stretching back into the 1980s that have finished the appeals process. If all seven scheduled executions are carried out, Oklahoma will have executed the most inmates in one month in its history, surpassing its previous record of four in May 1933. Oklahoma's busy execution schedule has drawn fire from death penalty opponents, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who have staged a series of protests and rallies calling for a state moratorium on capital punishment like one adopted by Illinois in 2000. ``In light of the U.S. Justice Department's findings released this past September, detailing disturbing racial and geographic disparities in the application of the federal death penalty, I urge you, as governor of Oklahoma, to examine these same questions as they apply to your state,'' Jackson wrote in a letter to Gov. Frank Keating.Keating has repeatedly dismissed calls for a moratorium and told the Tulsa World newspaper this week that capital punishment ''is a statement of moral outrage and justice sought and received.''   Protesters have focused in particular on the case of Wanda Jean Allen, scheduled for execution on Thursday as the first black woman put to death in the United States since 1954. Her defenders say Allen, convicted of shooting her lover to death in 1988, should be spared because she is borderline retarded. Texas Gov. Rick Perry on Monday rejected Clark's request for clemency in the first case he has handled since taking over the office from president-elect George W. Bush.