Convicted Murderer Executed in South Carolina
January 10, 1999 - 0:0
COLUMBIA, S.C. A career criminal was executed by lethal injection on Friday for killing a Vietnamese refugee while stealing her car in 1985, a state prison spokesman said. Ronnie Howard, 40, who with an accomplice strangled Chinh Thi Nguyen Le, a 34-year-old mother of three, was the fifth death row inmate executed in South Carolina in the past five weeks and the first of two scheduled to die in January. As witnesses filed into a room adjoining the death chamber at the Broad River State Prison in Columbia to witness the execution, they heard Howard's minister tell him: We'll see you on the other side.
I'm on my way, Howard said, then began quietly singing to himself before he was injected with a dose of lethal chemicals. He died at 6:28 p.m. EST (1128 GMT). The execution drew protests from the NAACP, which argued that Howard, who was black, did not get a fair trial because blacks were excluded by prosecutors from serving on a jury that convicted Howard in 1988.
In an appeal rejected on Tuesday by the state Supreme Court, defense attorneys and the NAACP said that prosecutors dismissed six of seven potential black jurors in the trial, while only four of 35 potential white jurors were dismissed. Prosecutors said Howard and his accomplice, Dana Weldon, who was 39 at the time, bumped Le's car after she stopped at an intersection on her way home from work.
The men held her at gunpoint while Howard slipped a plastic bag over her head, and Weldon pun Howard, on parole for bank robbery at the time of Le's murder, confessed to the killing. He also admitted to another, similar murder, for which he received a life sentence. Howard also confessed to being involved in 72 armed robberies, primarily of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants in the Carolinas. Weldon's death sentence was overturned on appeal in 1988, and he has been awaiting a new sentencing hearing on death row.
(Reuter)
I'm on my way, Howard said, then began quietly singing to himself before he was injected with a dose of lethal chemicals. He died at 6:28 p.m. EST (1128 GMT). The execution drew protests from the NAACP, which argued that Howard, who was black, did not get a fair trial because blacks were excluded by prosecutors from serving on a jury that convicted Howard in 1988.
In an appeal rejected on Tuesday by the state Supreme Court, defense attorneys and the NAACP said that prosecutors dismissed six of seven potential black jurors in the trial, while only four of 35 potential white jurors were dismissed. Prosecutors said Howard and his accomplice, Dana Weldon, who was 39 at the time, bumped Le's car after she stopped at an intersection on her way home from work.
The men held her at gunpoint while Howard slipped a plastic bag over her head, and Weldon pun Howard, on parole for bank robbery at the time of Le's murder, confessed to the killing. He also admitted to another, similar murder, for which he received a life sentence. Howard also confessed to being involved in 72 armed robberies, primarily of Pizza Hut and Taco Bell restaurants in the Carolinas. Weldon's death sentence was overturned on appeal in 1988, and he has been awaiting a new sentencing hearing on death row.
(Reuter)