Results 1 to 6 of 6

Thread: Ronald Gene Simmons - Arkansas Execution - June 25, 1990

  1. #1
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217

    Ronald Gene Simmons - Arkansas Execution - June 25, 1990






    Summary of Offense: Ronald Gene Simmons was a retired Air Force Sergeant. Over the Christmas holidays in 1987, he methodically executed 14 members of his family: six daughters, three sons, two grandsons, one son-in-law, one daughter-in-law and his wife (one of his daughters was also his granddaughter). Two days later, he went into town and killed two others. He waived all appeals.

    Victims: Rebecca Simmons, Gene Simmons, Barbara Simmons, Loretta Simmons, Eddy Simmons, Marianne Simmons, Becky Simmons, Billy Simmons, Renata Simmons, Trae Simmons, Sheila McNulty, Dennis McNulty, Michael McNulty, Sylvia Simmons, Kathy Kendrick and James D. Chaffin

    Time of Death: 9:19 p.m.

    Manner of execution: Lethal Injection

    Last Meal: Did not order a special last meal.

    Final Statement: “Justice delayed finally be done is justifiable homicide.”

  2. #2
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    April 25, 1990

    Court Rejects Death Sentence Appeal by Outsider

    WASHINGTON, April 24 — The Supreme Court today barred outsiders from bringing Federal court challenges to the death sentences of convicted murderers who have decided not to appeal their own cases.

    By a vote of 7 to 2, the Court ruled that an inmate on death row in Arkansas did not have standing to challenge the validity of the death sentence imposed on, and apparently welcomed by, a fellow inmate, Ronald Gene Simmons.

    Last year Mr. Simmons was convicted of the murders of 16 people, including 14 members of his family. He waived all appeals, telling the trial judge, ''It is my wish and my desire that absolutely no action by anybody be taken to appeal or in any way change this sentence.'' He also asked to be executed expeditiously. A psychiatrist found that Mr. Simmons was competent to make the decision to forgo his appeals.

    But a fellow inmate who had also been sentenced to death, Jonas H. Whitmore, asked the Arkansas Supreme Court for permission to bring an appeal on behalf of Mr. Simmons. He argued that under the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, appellate review was required before the state could carry out a death sentence.

    Ruling Ends Stay of Execution


    After the Arkansas Supreme Court refused to hear Mr. Whitmore's case, he appealed to the United States Supreme Court. The Justices accepted the case a year ago, at the same time granting a stay of Mr. Simmons's scheduled execution. With the Court's ruling today, that stay expires automatically, and Arkansas is free to set a new execution date.

    The decision, Whitmore v. Arkansas, No. 88-7146, made little new law and has only a limited application. According to briefs in the case, Arkansas is the only state that does not require automatic appellate review of death sentences and does not prevent a defendant from waiving such a review.

    But the case nonetheless has symbolic importance for the continuing debate over the death penalty. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's majority opinion and Justice Thurgood Marshall's dissent highlighted the deep differences on the Court over the role of appellate courts in monitoring the fairness of the death penalty.

    The majority said it viewed the case as involving solely the technical doctrines of Federal court jurisdiction and standing to sue.

    A Question of Standing


    ''It is well established,'' Chief Justice Rehnquist wrote in the majority opinion, ''that before a Federal court can consider the merits of a legal claim, the person seeking to invoke the jurisdiction of the court must establish the requisite standing to sue.''

    The Chief Justice said Mr. Whitmore had an insufficient personal stake in obtaining appellate review of Mr. Simmons's death sentence to establish such standing. He said the Court consequently had no jurisdiction to consider the merits of Mr. Whitemore's argument that the Eighth Amendment required automatic review of all death sentences.

    Mr. Whitmore's lawyers tried to show that he had standing because he might be injured by Mr. Simmons's failure to appeal. The Arkansas Supreme Court, in handling an appeal of a death sentence, compares the case to other death sentence cases it has reviewed. If Mr. Simmons's brutal mass murders were missing from this comparison, Mr. Whitmore said, his own crime, a single murder, might appear more deserving of the death sentence.

    Chief Justice Rehnquist dismissed this argument as ''nothing more than conjecture.''

    Relaxing of Rules Rejected

    The majority opinion also rejected another argument by Mr. Whitmore that the death penalty raised such important issues that traditional rules of standing should be relaxed.

    The majority opinion was joined by Justices Byron R. White, Harry A. Blackmun, John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia and Anthony M. Kennedy.

    Justice William J. Brennan Jr. joined Justice Marshall's dissenting opinion. Justice Marshall said the Court should have relaxed the barriers to hearing the merits of Mr. Whitmore's Eighth Amendment argument. ''By refusing to address that question,'' he said, ''the Court needlessly abdicates its grave responsibility to ensure that no person is wrongly executed.''

    In the dissenting Justices' view, society at large has an interest in the question that Mr. Whitmore raised, transcending the interests of Mr. Whitmore or Mr. Simmons himself. ''Because a wrongful execution is an affront to society as a whole, a person may not consent to being executed without appellate review,'' Justice Marshall said. ''A defendant's voluntary submission to a barbaric punishment does not ameliorate the harm that imposing such a punishment causes to our basic societal values and to the integrity of our system of justice.''

    http://www.nytimes.com/1990/04/25/us...xecuted&st=nyt

  3. #3
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    June 26, 1990

    Arkansas Executes Man Who Killed 16

    PINE BLUFF, Ark. — A man who killed 14 members of his family and two other people in a 1987 Christmas holiday spree was executed by injection Monday night.

    Ronald Gene Simmons, 49, of Dover, Ark., who authorities said went on the murder binge because his daughter had broken off an incestuous relationship with him, was declared dead at 9:19 p.m.

    No appeals were pending in the case because Simmons said he wanted to be executed. "I only ask for what I deserve," he said recently. "Let the torture and suffering in me end."

    Simmons was put to death at Cummins Prison, about 20 miles southeast of Pine Bluff.

    http://articles.latimes.com/1990-06-...tes-man-killed

  4. #4
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Ronald Gene Simmons (1940–1990)

    On December 22, 1987, Ronald Gene Simmons began a killing spree that would be the worst mass murder in Arkansas history and the worst crime involving one family in the history of the country. His rampage ended on December 28, 1987, leaving dead fourteen members of his immediate family and two former coworkers.

    Ronald Gene Simmons was born on July 15, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois, to Loretta and William Simmons. On January 31, 1943, William Simmons died of a stroke. Within a year, Simmons’s mother married again, this time to William D. Griffen, a civil engineer for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. The corps moved Griffen to Little Rock (Pulaski County) in 1946, the first of several transfers that would take the family across central Arkansas over the next decade. On September 15, 1957, Simmons dropped out of school and joined the U.S. Navy. His first station was Bremerton Naval Base in Washington, where he met Bersabe Rebecca “Becky” Ulibarri, whom he married in New Mexico on July 9, 1960.

    Over the next eighteen years, the couple had seven children. In 1963, Simmons left the navy and approximately two years later, he joined the air force. During his twenty-two-year military career, Simmons was awarded a Bronze Star, the Republic of Vietnam Cross for his service as an airman, and the Air Force Ribbon for excellent marksmanship. Simmons retired on November 30, 1979, at the rank of master sergeant.

    On April 3, 1981, Simmons was being investigated by the Cloudcroft, New Mexico, Department of Human Services for allegations that he had fathered a child with his seventeen-year-old daughter, Sheila. Fearing arrest, Simmons fled first to Ward (Lonoke County) in late 1981 and then to Dover (Pope County) in the summer of 1983. The family took up residence on a thirteen-acre tract of land that would become known as “Mockingbird Hill.” The residence was constructed of two older-model mobile homes joined to form one large home and was surrounded by a makeshift privacy fence, as high as ten feet tall in some places. The home did not have a telephone or indoor plumbing.

    Simmons worked a string of low-paying jobs in the nearby town of Russellville (Pope County). He quit a position as an accounts receivable clerk at Woodline Motor Freight after numerous reports of inappropriate sexual advances. He went to work at a Sinclair Mini Mart for approximately a year and a half before quitting on December 18, 1987.

    Evidence indicates that Simmons bludgeoned and shot his wife on December 22, 1987. Simmons also bludgeoned and shot his visiting son, twenty-nine-year-old Ronald Gene Simmons Jr. He then strangled his three-year-old granddaughter. All three bodies were later found in a shallow pit Simmons had instructed the children to dig months before for a third family outhouse.

    Later the same day, the Dover school bus dropped off the younger Simmons children for their Christmas break from school. Based on crime scene investigation, it is believed the Simmons children (ages seventeen, fourteen, eleven, and eight) were separated and killed individually, by strangulation and/or drowning in a rain barrel. Their bodies, too, were found in the hole for the outhouse.

    The older Simmons children had been invited to the Simmons home on December 26, 1987, for an after-Christmas dinner. Twenty-three-year-old William H. Simmons II, his twenty-one-year-old wife, Renata May Simmons, and their twenty-month-old son, all of Fordyce (Dallas County), were likely the first to arrive. William and Renata were shot, and their bodies were left by the dining room table, and covered with their own coats and some bedding. The child was killed and placed into the trunk of a car behind the Simmons home.

    Next to arrive were Simmons’s twenty-four-year-old daughter, Sheila, and her husband, thirty-three-year-old Dennis Raymond McNulty, as well as their children, seven-year-old Sylvia (the daughter of Sheila and her father) and twenty-one-month-old Michael. Sheila was shot, and her body was laid on the dining room table and covered with a tablecloth. Simmons shot Dennis and strangled Sylvia. Michael was strangled and placed into the trunk of yet another parked car.

    Later this same day, Simmons drove to Russellville, where he stopped at a Sears store and picked up Christmas gifts that had been ordered but had not made it in before the holiday. Later that night, he drove to a private club in Russellville. Then he went home and waited out the weekend.

    On Monday, December 28, 1987, Simmons drove a car that had belonged to his son, Ronald Jr., to Russellville. He purchased a second gun from Wal-Mart. His next stop was the Peel, Eddy and Gibbons Law Firm. After entering the building, Simmons shot and killed receptionist/secretary Kathy Cribbins Kendrick. He next went to the Taylor Oil Company, where he shot and wounded Russell “Rusty” Taylor, the owner of the Sinclair Mini Mart where he had worked, and then shot and killed J. D. (Jim) Chaffin, a fireman and part-time truck driver for Taylor Oil. Simmons shot at and missed another employee before exiting the building. Simmons then went to the Sinclair Mini Mart, where he shot and wounded Roberta Woolery and David Salyer. His last stop was the Woodline Motor Freight company. Simmons located his former supervisor, Joyce Butts, and wounded her in the head and chest. He then took worker Vicky Jackson at gunpoint into the computer office and advised her to phone the police. Simmons allegedly told Jackson: “I’ve come to do what I wanted to do. It’s all over now. I’ve gotten everybody who wanted to hurt me.” He surrendered to Russellville police when they arrived.

    Simmons was sent to the Arkansas State Hospital in Little Rock (Pulaski County) for a competency evaluation by staff psychiatrist Dr. Irving Kuo. Kuo found Simmons to be sane and capable of standing trial. Public defenders Robert G. “Doc” Irwin and John Harris were appointed to represent Simmons. The prosecuting attorney was John Bynum. Jury selection for the first trial took less than six hours. Simmons was convicted on May 12, 1988, in the Franklin County Circuit Court for the deaths of Kendrick and Chaffin. On May 16 Judge John Samuel Patterson sentenced Simmons to death by lethal injection plus 147 years. Simmons refused all rights to appeal.

    Simmons was found guilty of fourteen counts of capital murder in the deaths of his family members on February 10, 1989, in the Johnson County Circuit Court, with Judge Patterson presiding. Bynum offered a possible motive when he presented an undated note that was discovered in a safe deposit box at a Russellville bank after Simmons’s arrest. The letter seemed to indicate a strong love/hate relationship between Simmons and his daughter Sheila. After the judge ruled the letter admissible, Simmons lashed out at Bynum, punching him the face, and then unsuccessfully struggled for a deputy’s handgun. Officers rushed him out of the courtroom in chains. Simmons was sentenced to death by lethal injection on March 16, 1989. He again waived all rights to appeal.

    On March 1, 1989, Simmons was found competent to waive his rights to appeal his conviction. However the filing of Whitmore v. Arkansas challenged this right. Reverend Louis Franz and Jonas Whitmore contended that Simmons using his right to refuse appeal in fact jeopardized the appellate rights of other death row inmates. By 7–2 vote, the Supreme Court justices threw out this appeal; however, the ongoing legal proceedings had prevented the execution of Simmons from being carried out. Simmons was watching television and eating what he thought would be his last meal when the news of his stay of execution was announced.

    On May 31, 1990, Governor Bill Clinton signed Simmons’s second execution warrant for June 25, 1990. This was the quickest sentence-to-execution-to-death time in United States history since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976. Simmons refused all visitors, including legal counsel and clergy. His last words were: “Justice delayed finally be done is justifiable homicide.” No family members claimed the body, so Simmons was buried in a paupers’ plot at Lincoln Memorial Lawn in Varner (Lincoln County).

    http://www.encyclopediaofarkansas.ne...x?entryID=3731

  5. #5
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    INTERESTING BITS:

    - For some bizarre reason he soaked the bodies in kerosene, he said he believed that it would stop the smell coming out of the ground and attracting animals and people.

    - Simmons's death warrant was signed by Bill Clinton.

    - While on Death Row Simmons had to be separated from other prisoners as his life was threatened constantly. This was because he refused to appeal his death sentence. The other prisoners believed Simmons was damaging their chances of beating their own death sentence. "To those who oppose the death penalty in my particular case, anything short of death would be cruel and unusual punishment." (Simmons statement before the court at his first trial.)

    - After Simmons had a stay of execution put in place the local Sheriff showed his concern for human life: "I'm angry that a country such as we live in can go through with this kind of thing, I had hoped our U.S. Supreme Court judges would have a little more sense than to listen to some cockeyed death row inmate."

  6. #6
    Administrator Heidi's Avatar
    Join Date
    Oct 2010
    Posts
    33,217
    Song about the wonderful Mr. Simmons

    Macabre - Holidays of Horror

    Simmons went crazy
    Murdered sixteen
    Fourteen of them family
    He killed them
    For the holidays

    Merry Christmas
    He gunned his family down
    His bullets were their presents
    Dead relatives all around

    Happy New Year
    One they won't be here to see
    It's the holiday of horror
    Because of Ronald Gene Simmons

    He built a wall
    Around his trailer home
    So the neighbours would leave him alone
    And he didn't want them to see
    How he abused his family

    Merry Christmas
    He gunned his family down
    His bullets were their presents
    Dead relatives all around

    Happy New Year
    One they won't be here to see
    It's the holiday of horror
    Because of Ronald Gene Simmons

    (All lyrics by Macabre)


Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •