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Thursday, December 10, 2009
Ind. Courts - "After Wrinkles, 12 Others Await Execution in Indiana"
Indianapolis WIBC's Eric Berman reports this afternoon in a comprehensive story:
The early-morning execution of Eric Wrinkles will be Indiana's first in more than two years...and could be the last for a while.Besides Wrinkles, 12 killers are awaiting execution in Indiana. But Death Row appeals first go through the state courts, then climb the ladder from federal district court to the Chicago-based Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Fort Wayne quadruple murderer Joseph Corcoran's case is pending before the Chicago court -- the Supreme Court ordered a review of whether he's mentally ill.
The other cases are pending at the district court level or lower. And the pipeline is slowing -- only two death sentences have been ordered in the last four years. One of those two, Roy Ward, had originally been sentenced to death in 2002 for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl in Spencer County. His original conviction was overturned, prompting a new trial and death sentence in 2007.
Indiana's longest-pending death sentence isn't an Indiana inmate. Debra Brown was sentenced to death in 1986 for the murder two years earlier of a seven-year-old Gary girl, part of a multistate killing spree. Brown is imprisoned not in Indiana, but in Ohio, where then-Gov. Richard Celeste commuted a second death sentence to life in prison in 1991.
In addition to the 12 inmates awaiting execution, three more have had their death sentences overturned, but are still considered Death Row inmates while the state pursues further appeals.
Three Marion County murderers are awaiting execution: Benjamin Ritchie, who killed Beech Grove police officer William Toney in 2000; Eric Holmes, who killed two of his managers at an Indianapolis Shoney's restaurant hours after his firing in 1989; and Howard Allen, who stabbed a 73-year-old woman to death in her northside home in 1987.
Wrinkles waived further appeals for the 1994 murders of his estranged wife, her brother, and the brother's wife in Evansville. He is the 20th person put to death by the state of Indiana since the reinstitution of capital punishment in 1976.
Posted by Marcia Oddi on December 10, 2009 02:13 PM
Posted to Indiana Courts