Execution ends Arizona 8-year hiatus with the death penalty

PHOENIX — Arizona’s nearly eight-year hiatus in using the death penalty ended with the execution of Clarence Dixon for killing a college student 44 years ago, making him the sixth person to be put to death in the U.S. so far this year. Dixon’s death Wednesday for the 1978 killing of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin broke the lull in Arizona’s use of capital punishment caused by a 2014 execution that critics say was botched and the difficulty that state officials faced in sourcing lethal injection drugs. Now, let’s do this.” And as prison medical staff put an IV line in Dixon’s thigh in preparation for the injection, he chided them, saying: “This is really funny — trying to be as thorough as possible while you are trying to kill me.” Leslie James, Bowdoin’s older sister and a witness to the execution, told reporters after it was conducted that Deana Bowdoin had been poised to graduate from ASU and was planning a career in international marketing. Defense lawyers said Dixon was repeatedly diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, 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.