S. Dakota readies for 2 executions in next 3 weeks
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. (AP) — South Dakota rarely has executions, but now prison officials are getting ready for two in the next three weeks, barring last-minute legal twists involving inmates who have said they're ready to die.
Corrections Department spokesman Michael Winder led local media on a tour Tuesday of the South Dakota State Pennitentiary's lethal-injection room and the holding cell where the inmates are to be served their last meals before execution.
The prison is readying final details, such as where death-penalty supporters and protesters will be allowed to demonstrate outside the prison.
South Dakota's last execution was in 2007, and that was the first one in the state in 60 years. The state now has four inmates on death row.
Eric Robert is scheduled to be put to death sometime next week. The exact day won't be released until 48 hours before the execution.
Robert pleaded guilty to the April 2011 beating and suffocation of prison guard Ronald "R.J." Johnson, for whom the prison's training center is now named.
Robert, 50, has publicly embraced his impending death, telling a judge last October that he would kill again. In a June letter to The Associated Press, Robert repeated the sentiment, saying the state should put him to death so Johnson's family can have justice.
Donald Moeller, 60, is expected to be put to death in the week beginning Oct. 28. Moeller was convicted in the 1990 kidnapping, rape and murder of 9-year-old Becky O'Connell.
Moeller's last legal hurdle lies with a federal judge who's been asked to determine whether the state's one-drug capital punishment procedure is constitutional.
Moeller's federal attorneys, in a July filing, said they were seeking information on how the state is obtaining its supply of pentobarbital, whether it's from an FDA-approved company, how the drug is stored and how it's delivered. A decision in that case is pending, but Moeller last week told U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Piersol that he wants to die.
"I killed. I deserve to be killed," he said in court.
Moeller on Tuesday wrote Piersol a letter from prison asking that the case be dismissed. Moeller's attorneys say he's incompetent and incapable of making voluntary and rational decisions and want to press forward with arguments in the case.
http://www.necn.com/10/09/12/S-Dakot...cf0e480b62553e
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