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Thread: Jesse Walter Bishop - Nevada Execution - October 22, 1979

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    Jesse Walter Bishop - Nevada Execution - October 22, 1979


    Jesse Walter Bishop born in Glasgow, Kentucky on March 1, 1933.


    Facts of the Crime: Convicted and sentenced to death in the 1977 murder of David Ballard, aged 22.

    In 1977, Bishop was in the process of robbing El Morocco Casino, a Las Vegas Strip casino, when he was interrupted by Ballard, who had left his nearby wedding reception to intervene. According to a witness, Bishop shot Ballard "like a dog".

    Time of Death: 12:21 AM

    Manner of Execution: Lethal Gas

    Last Meal: Bishop had a last meal of steak, sent his compliments to the cook and refused to pick up the telephone which had been provided so that he could make a last-minute appeal.

    Final Words: "This is one more step down the road of life that I've been heading for all my life."

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    Jesse Bishop - A killer smiles at his own execution

    A smile flickered across the face of Jesse Bishop as the cyanide pellets dropped into the acid. Then the killer took deep gulps of air, as though deliberately trying to inhale the deadly fumes.

    He took nine minutes to die. But he was 'like an iceman' and 'as tough as nails to the end,' according to prison director Charles Wolff.

    Bishop, a professional gunman who bragged about his life of fancy cars, beautiful women and drugs, had spurned all attempts to save him.

    His death in the gas chamber at Carson City, Nevada, made him the second man to be executed in the United States this year and the third since the Supreme Court ordered stricter capital punishment laws in 1972

    His final words to Mr Wolff were: 'This is one more step down the road of life that I've been heading for all my life.'

    Before his execution, 47-year-old Bishop had a last meal of steak, sent his compliments to the cook and refused to pick up the telephone which had been provided so that he could make a last-minute appeal.

    Cyanide

    Dressed in denim trousers, white shirt and white socks, the man whom psychiatrists pronounced sane enough to die was strapped into the chair.

    A stethoscope was taped to his chest. This was attached to a long tube which extended from the gas chamber, so a doctor could tell when he was dead.

    The heavy metal door to the ten foot by ten foot death chamber, which had not been used for 18 years, clanged shut. Three volunteer guards flicked switches which activated a device to drop dozens of cyanide tablets into a black vat beneath Bishop's chair filled with diluted sulphuric acid.

    During the execution his body twitched, his head rose and fell several times to his chest, his eyes closed and his mouth fell open. After several minutes, his body was motionless, except for an occasional shudder.

    Outside the prison, about 75 opponents of the death penalty held a candlelight vigil. They recited the Lord's prayer when they learned Bishop was dead.

    But H miles away in Carson City, it was business as usual in the casinos.

    Bishop, who had spent a total of 20 years in prison gunned down newlywed David Ballard. The bridegroom had left his celebration champagne to try to stop Bishop robbing a Las Vegas casino.

    But shortly after the execution, Nevada District Judge Paul Goldman, one of the three who sentenced Bishop to death, said he had spoken to the killer in August. Bishop told him he had been involved in 18 contract killings, apparently involving drugs.

    http://www.dougiethompson.com/jesse-bishop.htm

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    Death comes to a Bishop

    Dressed in a crisp white shirt and pressed Levis, he strode purposefully into the freshly whitewashed chamber at Nevada State Prison, near Carson City. "He looked as if he were ready to go to a disco," recalls TIME's Guy Shipler, one of 14 official witnesses. The man was then strapped into a metal chair, a long stethoscope tube poking out from his collar and snaking through a wall socket into a side room, where a doctor waited to monitor his heartbeat. At 12:14 a.m., a capsule of cyanide gas tumbled down a tube and plopped into a dish of acid. The man sniffed the air expectantly and shrugged nonchalantly. Seconds later, he grimaced and began breathing deeply. His face turned red and then his head dropped to his chest. At 12:21 a.m., the doctor pronounced the man dead.

    Thus ended the life of Jesse Walter Bishop, 46, heroin addict and career criminal who committed his first armed robbery at age 15 and passed 22 of his last 27 years behind bars. With similar steadfastness, Bishop had denounced all efforts made on his behalf by civil libertarians to stay his execution for the 1977 murder of Newlywed David Ballard, 22, during a casino stickup in Las Vegas. Indeed, Bishop waived his right to a jury trial and immediately pleaded guilty to the killing.

    When his public defenders attempted to argue that their client did not deserve a death sentence because of ''mitigating circumstances'' (Bishop won a Purple Heart while serving as a paratrooper during the Korean War and became hooked on heroin only after being administered morphine by medics for a battle injury), he promptly fired them.

    Terming the death penalty ''an occupational hazard'' in his line of work, Bishop refused to authorize an appeal of his case even when given the chance to do so minutes before entering the gas chamber. Said he: ''This is just one more step down the road of life that I've been heading all my life. Let's go.''

    Bishop is the third person to walk that road in the U.S. since 1967.* According to the N.A.A.C.P. Legal Defense Fund, 550 men and six women in 28 states now remain on death rows. Who may die next is uncertain, since none of the cases has yet exhausted its appeals. But opponents of the death penalty have little doubt that others will soon be executed, and that, though Bishop's case is unusual, his demise further hurts their cause. ''Each execution makes it easier to kill the next time,'' says former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who tried several times to dissuade Bishop from his course of action. But the killer argued that his execution might be so repulsive that it would weaken support for the death penalty.

    Adds Clark glumly: ''I don't think he's right.''

    *In 1977, Gary Gilmore was executed by firing squad in Utah, and last May, John Spenkelink was electrocuted in Florida. Spenkelink, unlike Gilmore and Bishop, went to his death involuntarily

    http://www.time.com/time/magazine/ar...#ixzz14GMVa15C

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    February 8, 2013

    Birth of Gas Chamber and Death of an Inmate

    By Carl M. Cannon
    The Historiat

    Good morning. It’s February 8. And today in 1924, the state of Nevada employed a new method of executing prisoners. It became known as the gas chamber.

    The man who earned the dubious historical distinction of being the first condemned prisoner to die this way was Gee Jon, a Chinese-born gang member from San Francisco who shot an elderly member of a rival tong in a railroad town just across the Nevada state line.

    Jon, who was 28 on February 8, 1924, was strapped in place when journalists were ushered into the death chamber in the Carson City penitentiary. He had cried earlier, one of the guards mentioned. “Brace up!” the captain of the guards told him -- and the prisoner did as he was told.

    It was cold in Carson City that morning, however, and some of the lethal gas liquefied and trickled under his feet. This must have terrified Gee Jon, but seconds later he was unconscious. It wasn’t perfect, but prison reformers still found it less grisly than electrocution or hanging – and it was presumably easier on the executioners than a firing squad.

    In any event, Nevada adopted this method, as did California, and in the ensuing five decades, 31 more men went to the Carson City prison gas chamber. The last to die this way was Jesse Walter Bishop, a man I interviewed at length two months before he was executed in 1979.

    Bishop earned a Purple Heart as a paratrooper in Korea. But he also picked up a heroin habit and a dishonorable discharge, after which he embarked on a life of robbery and drug dealing, mostly as a way to feed his addiction.

    By the time I met him, Jesse was 46 years old and had spent more than half his adult life behind bars. He’d also committed a crime for which there would be no reprieve. On Dec. 29, 1977, he strode up to a female teller at the old El Morocco on the Las Vegas strip, told her he had a gun, and demanded money.

    She screamed, and a casino pit boss drew his revolver. In the gun battle that ensued, he and Bishop wounded each other, neither critically. But a 22-year-old bystander from Baltimore named David Ballard, who was honeymooning in Vegas, heard the teller cry for help and came running. By the time Ballard saw what was happening, he tried to run away, but it was too late. In the frenzy of the gunfight, Bishop whirled and fatally shot the unarmed newlywed.

    The U.S. Supreme Court had recently reinstated capital punishment; Jesse Bishop was apprehended, put on trial, and swiftly sentenced to death. He was hoping for a life sentence, but when the judge pronounced death, Bishop acquiesced, choosing not to appeal and forbidding his court-appointed lawyers from prolonging the case.

    Defense attorneys and many journalists deemed these actions self-destructive. But those who wanted Bishop to appeal and appeal were missing precisely the point Bishop was making. He was resigned to his fate, but he was hardly suicidal. He was actually one of the clearer-minded participants in the criminal justice system whom I ever encountered.

    Jesse’s view was that it was sophistry to claim that the death penalty constituted “cruel and unusual punishment” -- because capital punishment was considered neither cruel nor unusual at the time the Bill of Rights was adopted -- and not a word was said about abolishing it. In Bishop’s mind, what violated a defendant’s Eighth Amendment rights were the interminable delays and false starts and umpteen execution dates with their last-minute stays.

    “They want to force me to appeal, to wait just so the lawyers can play their games,” he told me. “I feel that’s cruel and unusual punishment.” He added, “I never asked for the death penalty. They gave it to me. I’m only asking that they either give it to me or commute it.”

    What was troubling to those who took Jesse at his word was his unwillingness to express remorse for his young victim. In our interview, he called Ballard “a fool” for getting involved in something that did not concern him.

    Bishop thought the system was trying to get him to beg for his life, which he was too proud to do. “Now they got me dead bang on a cold murder beef I can’t beat,” he told me. “I’m not going to turn to God, or to snivelin’ or snitchin’ or rattin.’ They got their gas chamber … they should get it over with.”

    Jesse Walter Bishop got his wish on October 22, 1979.

    True to his word, he went to the gas chamber bravely. One of the 14 witnesses slumped to one knee as the cyanide pellets were dropped into an acid bath, releasing the deadly fumes, but Bishop merely made a thumbs-down sign, took a few deep breaths and was gone. The only concession he made to his tough guy persona was to admit privately to a Nevada judge two days earlier that he was indeed remorseful about killing David Ballard.

    Somehow that made it better.

    http://www.realclearhistory.com/hist...inmate_55.html
    Last edited by Helen; 11-27-2014 at 09:20 PM. Reason: spacing, incorrect bolding of author's name

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