UPDATE
Nov 16, 2022 1:53 PM CST
An Arizona man convicted of murdering two people in 1980 was put to death Wednesday in the state’s third execution since officials started carrying out the death penalty in May after a nearly eight-year hiatus. Murray Hooper, 76, died by lethal injection at the state prison in Florence for his murder convictions in the killings of William "Pat" Redmond and his mother-in-law, Helen Phelps. Redmond's wife Marilyn was shot in the head but survived. Hooper chuckled several times when interacting with the execution team, the AP reports. After the execution warrant was read aloud, Hooper said, "It’s all been said. Let it be done." Hooper was executed within hours of the US Supreme Court rejecting a last-minute appeal from him over his claim that authorities had until recently withheld that Marilyn Redmond had failed to identify him in a photo lineup. The high court made no comment in rejecting his appeal.
Nov 16, 2022 1:01 AM CST
An Arizona prisoner scheduled to be executed Wednesday in the 1980 killings of two people asked the US Supreme Court to review his claim that authorities had until recently withheld that a survivor had failed to identify him in a photo lineup, the AP reports. Lawyers for Murray Hooper, who was convicted of killing William “Pat” Redmond and his mother-in-law, Helen Phelps, say the existence of the photo lineup wasn't disclosed until this month. A prosecutor told the state’s clemency board that Redmond’s wife, Marilyn, who survived being shot in the head, had been unable to identify Hooper as the attacker when she was shown a photo lineup. However, authorities now insist no such lineup was shown to Marilyn Redmond and that the claim is based on a mistake a prosecutor made in a letter to the board. Marilyn Redmond eventually identified Hooper in an in-person lineup.
Hooper’s arguments have already been rejected twice this week by state courts, with the Arizona Supreme Court concluding Monday that the claim focusing on a photo lineup “has no evidentiary support and no basis in fact.” Hooper’s attorneys keep pressing the matter. “The prosecutor’s belated admission flatly contradicts the state's pretrial and trial assertions that no such (photo) lineup had ever been administered,” Hooper’s lawyers told the US Supreme Court. Hooper asked the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals to postpone his execution as he appeals a ruling that rejected his bid to allow fingerprint and DNA testing on evidence from the killings. On Tuesday evening, the appeals court concluded a lower-court judge lacked jurisdiction over Hooper's lawsuit seeking testing and ordered that the case be dismissed.
story continues below
His lawyers said Hooper is innocent, that no physical evidence ties him to the killings and that testing could lead to identifying those responsible. They say Hooper was convicted before computerized fingerprint systems and DNA testing were available in criminal cases. They also say Marilyn Redmond’s description of the assailants changed several times before she identified their client, who said he was not in Arizona at the time. They also raised questions about the benefits received by witnesses who testified against Hooper, including favorable treatment in other criminal cases. Hooper would be the state’s third prisoner put to death this year after Arizona resumed carrying out executions in May, following a nearly eight-year hiatus attributed to both the difficulty of obtaining lethal injection drugs and criticism that a 2014 execution was botched.
(More
Arizona stories.)
,
uBlock 
,
and
Ghostery 
)
