A federal judge on Tuesday rejected a request to postpone the planned execution of an Arizona prisoner in what would be the state’s first use of the death penalty in nearly eight years.
FILE - This undated file photo provided by the Arizona Department of Corrections shows Clarence Dixon. A judge ruled Tuesday, May 3, 2022, that an Arizona prisoner convicted in the 1978 killing of a university student is mentally fit to be put to death next week. Dixon was convicted of murder in the killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin.
The Arizona Supreme Court on Monday declined to review a state judge’s decision that rejected Dixon's arguments, leading his attorneys to introduce similar claims in federal court. Dixon was sentenced to life sentences in that case for sexual assault and other convictions. DNA samples taken while he was in prison later linked him to Bowdoin’s killing, which at that point had been unsolved.
Defense lawyers have said Dixon has been diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia on multiple occasions, has regularly experienced hallucinations over the past 30 years and was found “not guilty by reason of insanity” in a 1977 assault case in which the verdict was delivered by then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O’Connor, nearly four years before her appointment to the U.S. Supreme Court. Bowdoin was killed two days after the verdict, according to court records.
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