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Frank Coppola Virginia Execution

Frank Coppola was executed by the State of Virginia for the murder of a woman committed during a robbery. According to court documents Frank Coppola, who was a police officer, would murder a woman during a robbery. The woman would be beaten to death. Frank Coppola would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Frank Coppola would be executed by way of the electric chair which did not go well as his head and leg would catch on fire however he would be pronounced dead on August 11, 1982

Frank Coppola More News

Convicted murderer Frank Coppola, a former policeman who preferred death to Death Row, went calmly to his execution Tuesday night in Virginia’s electric chair saying, ‘take care of my family, my children.’

Coppola, who maintained his innocence but said he wanted to be executed to spare his family further embarrassment, died at 11:27 p.m. EDT, state corrections director Ray Procunier said.

Coppola became the fifth convict executed in the United States since 1976 when the Supreme Court lifted the ban on capital punishment and the first to die in Virginia’s electric chair in 20 years.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-2 ruling announced 30 minutes before Coppola’s scheduled 11 p.m. EDT execution, cleared the way for Coppola, 38, to die as he requested in a letter he sent Tuesday to Chief Justice Warren Burger. The high court’s ruling overturned a mid-afternoon stay by a federal appeals court judge.

‘I, Frank J. Coppola, do hereby … seek relief through the U.S. Supreme Court so as to bring about my execution this date,’ Coppola said in the letter.

Through the evening, about 40 curiousity seekers and some people who said they came to pray for Coppola’s soul stood against a wall across from the state Penitentiary.

On a hot, muggy night, many of the onlookers simply stood and talked quietly among themselves.

‘I just came out because it’s something I feel strongly about,’ said James Fralin, 34, a construction worker. ‘This sign says all you can say about it,’ he continued, pointing to a hand-lettered placard bearing the words ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill. There are no exceptions.’

Procunier, who witnessed the execution, said, ‘Pursuant to an order by the Circuit Court of Newport News, Frank J. Coppola was executed at 11:27 p.m. in the manner prescribed by law. Out of respect for the deceased’s family, I will make no further comment on the procedure.’

Procunier was asked if Coppola had any final words and what he had for his last meal, but the corrections chief did not comment.

ABC’s ‘Nightline’ reported that Joe Engle, of the Southern Coalition on Jails and Prisons, walked With Coppola to the death ward. The prison activist told ABC that Coppola was calm, saying to him, ‘I love you. Please take care of my family, my children.’

Coppola was convicted of beating a Newport News woman to death in 1978 during a robbery in an attempt to make her tell where money was hidden in her home.

Gov. Charles Robb said, ‘The decision not to interfere with the order of the circuit court of Newport News was the most difficult and emotionally draining decision I have had to make as governor of Virginia.

‘While I respect the beliefs and convictions of those who oppose capital punishment under any and all circumstances, the law of the Commonwealth provides for that penalty under certain, very limited circumstances, and I support the law.’

High-intensity lights from television cameras cast eerie shadows on the white-walled Penitentiary building about 2 miles from the State Capitol.

Warden James Mitchell read the execution order to Coppola, whose head was shaved a shaved head and who wore a Fu Manchu moustache, and then escorted him to the death chamber 30 paces from his cell.

Mitchell inserted a key in a slot in the death chamber, which opened the current and at the same time activated a signal to the executioner to push a button, sending two 55-second bursts of 2,400 volts through Coppola’s body.

At about 11:50 p.m., a single-siren wail pierced the air at the Penitentiary. It was an ambulance taking Coppola’s body to the state medical examiner’s office, said corrections spokesman Gil Miller.

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1982/08/11/Convicted-murderer-Frank-Coppola-a-former-policeman-who-preferred/5929397886400/

Charlie Brooks Texas Execution

Charlie Brooks was executed by the State of Texas for kidnapping, robbery and murder. According to court documents Charlie Brooks would test drive a vehicle at a car lot, the employee who went with him on the ride would be kidnapped, brought to a hotel where he was shot and killed. Charlie Brooks would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Charlie Brooks would be the first inmate who would be executed by lethal injection on December 7, 1982

Charlie Brooks More News

When Charles Brooks Jr. lay down on a gurney in the execution chamber, there was no way to know exactly what would happen next.

On this day in 1982, Brooks was the first person to be executed by injecting a cocktail of drugs intended to numb his body and mind, paralyze him and stop his heart. His death, the first by lethal injection, sparked an ethics debate among the public and physicians about whether the procedure is humane, one that continues today

Charlie Brooks was convicted of murdering David Gregory, an auto mechanic, wrote Dick Reavis for Texas Monthly in early 1983. Gregory rode with Brooks during a test drive at the used-car lot where he worked. That night, he was found tied up in a motel room. He had been shot in the head. In separate trials, both Brooks and partner in crime Woodie Loudres were sentenced to die for the crime. Loudres was able to reduce his sentence, but Brooks was not, although no weapon was ever found and officials never determined who shot Gregory.

Lethal injection was seen to be more humane than other execution methods, like gas, electrocution or hanging, according to an article on History.com. Because one of the drugs used was supposed to put the condemned in a state of deep sedation, it was also perceived to be painless. In spite of physician protests that lethal injection was a violation of medical ethics, wrote Robert Reinhold of The New York Times, it was seen as acceptable. But conflicting witness reports at Brooks’s death led Reinhold to report that “the procedure did not seem to settle the question of whether such a death was painless.”

The conviction that landed Charlie Brooks on death row wasn’t his first. What was different this time: he knew that if the state didn’t intervene in his case, he could become the first man on death row to be killed by a cocktail of drugs designed to numb his mind and stop his heart. “In his best mood,” Reavis wrote: “Charlie thought that there was nothing to fear in death by injection. He believed that he could set it up to be like the surgery after the first of his bullet woundings.”

Brooks and Reavis made an agreement: if the condemned man felt pain during his execution, he would shake his head, like he was saying “no,” and Reavis would understand. They repeated the agreement at each meeting

In the end, the state didn’t grant Charlie Brooks a stay of execution. “For the first time in American penal history,” Reavis wrote, “men who were neither physicians nor sorcerers got ready to execute a prisoner with the forbidden tools of medicine and pharmacology,”

“According to four reporters who witnessed the execution in a tiny room at the edge of the prison’s Walls unit, Mr. Brooks appeared to have suffered some pain,” Reinhold wrote.

Today, those killed by lethal injection are almost as likely to be guinea pigs for the procedure as Brooks was. Supplies of known lethal-injection cocktails are running out across the United States, reports Tess Owen for Vice. Injections nationwide are at a 25-year low, she writes, partially because it’s increasingly hard for corrections departments to get the drugs they need to perform them. This deficit has led to correctional departments trying untested mixes of drugs to replace the old standards they aren’t able to get anymore, with grim results. Only Texas, Georgia and Missouri are using the death penalty “with any regularity,” writes Mike Brantley for AL.com. But the death penalty remains legal, and those who face the prospect of death at state hands may potentially be killed using untried cocktails of drugs.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/thirty-four-years-ago-first-person-died-lethal-injection-it-was-controversial-then-too-180961343/

Steven Judy Indiana Execution

Steven Judy was executed by the State of Indiana for the murders of a mother and her children. According to court documents Steven Judy would murder Terry Lee Chasteen and her three children, Misty Ann, Steve and Mark, on April 28, 1979. Steven Judy would confess to his foster mother while he was on Indiana death row that he was responsible for a number of other murders of women across the USA. Steven Judy would be executed by electric chair on March 9, 1981.

Steven Judy More News

Terry Lee Chasteen started her work day April 28, 1979, with her normal routine of taking her three young children to their baby sitter’s house. Along the way, Chasteen had car trouble. The single mom pulled to the side of the road and readily accepted help from a man who she thought was simply being a Good Samaritan.

Steven Judy was anything but a Good Samaritan.

After fixing her tire but disabling her car, Judy offered Chasteen and her children a ride.

Within an hour, Terry and her children were dead. Judy savagely raped and strangled Chasteen and threw her three children into White Lick Creek near Mooresville. The children — Misty Ann, 5; Steve, 4; and Mark, 2 — drowned.

Judy was tried in Martinsville in January 1980 and initially maintained his innocence. He later confessed and was sentenced to the electric chair.

Steven T. Judy was executed March 9, 1981. He ordered prime rib and lobster for his last meal. His final words before execution were, “I don’t hold no grudges. This is my doing. Sorry it happened.”

State death penalty laws were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972. Many states, including Indiana, passed new laws that met the criteria outlined by the high court. Indiana’s death penalty was reinstated in 1977, and Judy was the first to go to the electric chair after that.

https://www.indystar.com/story/news/history/retroindy/2015/03/09/steven-judy-4-killed-in-chilling-case/24654597/

Jesse Bishop Nevada Execution

Jesse Bishop was executed by the State of Nevada for the murder of a man during a robbery. According to court documents Jesse Bishop would shoot and kill a man during a robbery at a Las Vegas casino. Jesse Bishop would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. Jesse Bishop would be executed in the gas chamber on October 22, 1979. Jesse Bishop would brag that he was responsible for 18 murders.

Jesse Bishop More News

He had three wishes: to be with a woman, to have a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and to be executed with dispatch. A few minutes after midnight today, the people of Nevada granted Jesse Walter Bishop only the last one.

Bishop, condemned to death on a murder conviction, went as calmly and as boldly as he said he would. He gestured to and smiled at the 14 official witnesses. He pointed at the floor to indicate that the deadly cyanide pellets had reached a waiting vessel of acid.

He wrinkled his nose, witnesses said, at the first fumes. Then came deep, desperate gulps for air. His face turned up to the ceiling of the Nevada state gas chamber. He convulsed, saliva ran from his mouth, his face turned red. His eyes closed and his chin fell to his chest.

At 12:21 a.m. today, Bishop, 46, was pronounced dead, the last scene of a criminal life that began with an armed robbery at age 15 and proceeded seemingly inexorably to today’s conclusion.

Bishop saw it as unavoidable. Prison director Charles L. Wolff Jr. reported Bishop’s last words as these:

“This is just one more step down the road of life that I’ve been headin’ for all my life.”

It was a step that satisfied some, saddened others. As Bishop’s corpse waited in the six-sided gas chamber while the deadly air was cleared, Dan Seaton, a Clark County prosecutor who worked on Bishop’s case, told assembled reporters he advocates the death penalty as a deterrent to those who might otherwise follow the footsteps of people like Jesse Bishop.

Across from the prison, however, about 50 candle-carrying protesters assembled to silently express rage at the official killing of Bishop, which two U.S. Supreme Court justices had called “state-assisted suicide” because of Bishop’s attitude.

On blue cloth, lit from behind by a lantern, they had painted: “Why do we kill people who kill people to show that killing is wrong?”

There was no answer from the prison, only light from the two windows high on the northeast corner of the stone block building, where Bishop was executed.

The execution could have been stopped or delayed, but only by Bishop. He firmly refused to appeal, refused to plead for his own life, refused to put off what he called the inevitable occupational hazard — execution — of his chosen profession.

He just wanted to get it over with.

Then it was over. A telephone rang in the guardhouse by the gate and Howard Pyle of the prison staff emerged to say, “Jesse Walter Bishop was pronounced dead at 12:21 a.m.”

Seven minutes later, Wolff arrived to read various legal instruments, including what was to be done by and for Clark County (Las Vegas), and to report that he, Wolff, had “obeyed said warrant” by and for Clark County, Nev.

He repeated Bishop’s last words and retreated.

Moments later, when a handful of the witnesses appeared, Ann Salisbury, a Los Angeles Herald Examiner reporter who has covered Bishop’s story and talked with him many times, cleared her throat and asked the questions.

They described the raising of a windowshade, disclosing Bishop strapped in one of two white metal chairs, the one on their left. The other was empty. They described how he gestured, how he raised a strapped hand and nodded.

The cyanide pellets were dropped at 12:11 a.m. Bishop’s gasps and spasms took six minutes. He twitched for two more. He was pronounced dead two minutes later.

Bishop was executed for the first-degree murder of David Ballard, a Baltimore man visiting Las Vegas Dec. 20, 1977. Ballard went there to be married and to honeymoon, but only two hours separated Katherine Ballard from becoming a bride and the events that would make her a widow on Dec. 30 when Ballard died

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/10/23/bishop-granted-his-wish-death-without-a-delay/e2a66f52-8c47-464b-a6e5-b0b93e5a1f4b/

John Spenkelink Florida Execution

John Spenkelink was executed by the State of Florida for a murder committed during a robbery. According to court documents John Spenkelink had escaped from a prison in California when he made his way to Florida. John Spenkelink would get into an argument with the victim. left and came back with a gun which he used to shoot the victim in the back killing him. John Spenkelink would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death. John Spenkelink would be executed by electric chair on May 25, 1979

John Spenkelink More News

The state of Florida trussed. John Arthur Spenkelink immobile in the electric chair this Morning, dropped a black leather mask over his face and electrocuted him.

“He simply looked at us and he looked terrified,” said Kris Rebillot, a reporter who wag one of 32 persons who watched through a window from an adjoining room. “It was just a wide, wide, wide stare.”

The execution was carried out a few hours after the last plea in an extended legal battle. It was the first execution in the United States since Gary Mark Gilmore faced a Utah firing squad voluntarily on Jan. 16, 1977, and the first since 1967 in which the condemned person was put to death against his will.

John Spenkelink made no final statement. The prison authorities said that had been his wish.

The prisoner was given three surges of electricity, The first, 2,500 volts, was administered at 10:12 A.M. Mr. Spenkelink jerked in the chair and one hand clenched into a fist. •

Then came the second, and the third, by two executioners in black hoods. A doctor stepped forward after the third surge, pulled up the prisoner’s T‐shirt and applied a stethoscope to Mr. Spenke1 ink’s chest..

He then checked for a pulse. Then he stepped back. He returned to the prisoner and examined him once more, and backed away again. A third time, at 10:18, he checked the prisoner for a pulse, examined Mr. Spenkelink’s eyes with pocket pen‐flashlight, and nodded to the warden that the prisoner was dead.

John Spenkelink, who was 30 years old, was convicted in 1973 of the killing of fellow drifter, Joseph Syzmankiewicz, 95.

Reporters here today were told by the Rev. Tom Feamster, an Episcopal priest who was the last to speak with Mr. Spenkelink, that the condemned man had told him, “Man is what he chooses to be; he chooses that for himself.”

“But the last thing that he said to me was that he loved me,” the burly, 6‐foot‐6 minister said, “and the last thing I said to him was that I loved him.”

He also quoted Mr. Spenkelink as saying, “If this comes down, I hope that some good will come of it.” Between 6 and 6:30 A.M. Mr. Spenkelink spoke with his mother, Lois, who had ‘made several attempts personally to gain a stay or clemency for her son.

The 1 A.M. execution hour was set early today after the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans dissolved a stay granted earlier 1 by a Federal district judge.

That stay, along with another granted separately by Justice Thurgood Marshall 1 of the Supreme Court, and subsequently dissolved by the full Court, reprieved Mr. Spenkelink from his original execution date, 7 A.M. Monday. Today attorneys for Mr. Spenkelink tried again to gain another stay.

Ramsey Clark, the former Attorney General, had taken a role in the case. According to Henry Schwartzschild, project director of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the organizations that had fought to save Mr. Spenkelink, Mr. Clark went by car from New York to Washington after he was unable to charter an airplane to deliver by hand a‐petition to the Supreme Court for a renewed stay.

Mr. Clark i arriving shortly before A.M., handed the petition to the clerk of the court, but a hurried poll of eight of the nine Justices rejected a new stay by vote of 6 to 2, with Justice Harry A. Blackmun not participating. Justices Marshall and William J. Brennan Jr. reportedly favored a new stay.

The execution was, by custom, delayed a few mimites past the scheduled hour, lest word of a reprieve come too late. It did not come at all.

Outside the prison, opponents of the death penalty, some of whom had been here since Monday, grew restive, some hysterical, as the time of execution came and passed. Some prayed; some wept; others screamed epithets and obscenities as a hearse left the prison just before 11 A.M. with the body. Earlier, they had chanted, “Government murder! Government murder!”

State Representative Andy Johnson of Jacksonville was among those who witnessed the execution today. Yesterday he introduced a bill to end executions in Florida.

Mr. Johnson termed the execution “barbaric” and “sickening,” telling reporters assembled under a blazing sun in

a cow pasture in front of the prison corn. plex: “We saw a man Sizzle today, and if you watched close, you could see him sizzle again, and sizzle again.” Minutes later, he was confronted by an unidentified man who shouted that his son had been murdered and death was the only appropriate penalty. .

Proponents of the death penalty had also encamped at the prison, some in a mobile home with a silver coffin mounted on its top and a placard urging, “Go, Sparky” — the three‐legged electric chairhere.

Those who witnessed the execution included a‐pool of nine ‘persons representing news‐gathering organizations. None spoke as graphically as Mr. Johnson had of what they had seen. “It was quicker than I expected, and it was less grvesome,” said Kris Kebillot, the 28‐year‐old television reporter. Unlike other such cases, the question of televising the Spenkelink execution was never raised.

H.G. Davis, an editorial writer for The Gainesville Sun, said he was not prepared for the sudden sight of Mr. Spinkelink behind the ‘glass window that gave on the death chamber.

https://www.nytimes.com/1979/05/26/archives/florida-executes-killer-as-plea-fails-spenkelink-electrocuted-is.html