James Hutchins was executed by the State of North Carolina for the murders of 3 police officers. According to court documents James Hutchins would have an argument with his daughters that turned violent and the police were called. The first two responding officers Captain Roy Huskey, 42, and Deputy Owen Messersmith, 58 would be shot and killed. James Hutchins would take off and be later pulled over by a North Carolina State Trooper who did not know that he was wanted for the two murders. State Trooper Robert L. “Pete” Peterson, 37, would be shot and killed. James Hutchins would later be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. James Hutchins would be executed on March 16, 1984 by lethal injection
James Hutchins More News
James W. Hutchins was executed by lethal injection early this morning for the slayings of three law officers almost five years ago.
Gov. James B. Hunt Jr. had refused on Thursday to halt the execution. Mr. Hutchins, who had asked his lawyers to drop all appeals, was the 15th convict put to death since the United States Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976, and the third to die by lethal injection. The latest occurred Wednesday when James David Autry was executed in Texas.
Mr. Hutchins, 54 years old, visited with his wife, Geneva, on Thursday at Central Prison in Raleigh. He also met with a minister from his native Rutherford County, where the slayings occurred after Mr. Hutchins and his daughter, Charlotte, argued over the amount of alcohol in a bowl of punch for a high school graduation party.
A Department of Correction spokesman, Patty McQuillan, said the condemned man twice refused to order a last meal, but ate a steak sandwich and drank a soft drink about 1 P.M. He spent the evening reading a newspaper and 14 letters he had received, including one from his son, Jamie, she said. He also visited with his wife again and called Jamie and spoke to him for about two minutes.
The last execution in North Carolina was on Oct. 27, 1961, when Theodore Boykin went to the gas chamber for the rape and murder of a Duplin County housewife.
Mr. Hutchins selected as his method of execution a lethal injection of drugs, sodium thiopental, to induce a deep sleep and the paralytic drug procuronium bromide to cause death.
He was sentenced to die in September 1979 fort the shooting deaths of Sheriff’s Deputy Owen Messersmith and Highway Patrol Trooper Robert L. Peterson. He also received a life sentence for the death of another deputy, Roy Huskey. The deputies were killed answering a call for help from Mr. Hutchins’s daughter. The trooper was killed as he pursued James Hutchins as he fled in a car after the killings.