The United States on Thursday carried out its second federal execution this week following a hiatus of nearly two decades, killing by lethal injection a Kansas man whose lawyers contended he had dementia and was unfit to be executed. | AP
He also expressed remorse for his own adult daughter’s suffering his actions caused. “I deeply regret the pain I caused to my daughter, who I love so very much,” he said.As the lethal chemical was injected, Purkey took several deep breaths and blinked repeatedly, laying his head back down on the gurney. His time of death was 8:19 a.m. EDT.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that “proceeding with Purkey’s execution now, despite the grave questions and factual findings regarding his mental competency, casts a shroud of constitutional doubt over the most irrevocable of injuries.” She was joined by Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan.
“We took of today what we needed to take care of,” Long said. “It has been a long time coming. He needed to take his last breath; he took my daughter’s last breath. And there’s some resolve. There is no closure, and there never will be because I won’t get my daughter back.” The issue of Purkey’s mental health arose in the run-up to his 2003 trial and when, after the verdict, jurors had to decide whether he should be put to death in the killing of Jennifer in Kansas City, Missouri. Prosecutors said he raped and stabbed her, dismembered her with a chainsaw, burned her, and dumped her ashes 200 miles away in a septic pond in Kansas. Purkey was separately convicted and sentenced to life in the beating death of 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales, of Kansas City, Kansas.
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