Wesley Purkey was sentenced to death in Missouri federal court in for the kidnapping, rape, and murder of a Kansas City, Missouri, teenager. He experienced sexual, physical, and emotional abuse beginning at age 5, and began using alcohol and drugs as a child.
He has been diagnosed with numerous mental illnesses, including Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder PTSD , bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and depression, and has multiple documented suicide attempts. Dustin Lee Honken, white male, executed on July 17, Dustin Lee Honken was sentenced to death for the murder of two girls in Iowa in Although the State of Iowa does not have the death penalty, Honken was convicted and sentenced to death in federal court.
Honken challenged constitutional errors in his trial and sentencing. During his trial, a number of jailhouse informants provided testimony, which Honken later challenged based on evidence that the informants had coordinated their testimony and that the government withheld evidence that could have been used to impeach their credibility.
He also argued that his attorneys failed to adequately investigate his dysfunctional family background and present evidence of how his upbringing led to mental health problems. Tyler J. Lezmond Mitchell, Native American male, executed on August 26, Mitchell and his co-defendants including a juvenile allegedly got a ride from a woman and her 9 year old granddaughter in Arizona.
They killed both victims and stole the car supposedly for use in an armed robbery. Each victim was stabbed at a separate location.
Attorney General Ashcroft directed that the case be tried capitally without consulting the tribal government. Mitchell was found guilty on May 20, and sentenced to death on September 15, Keith Nelson, White male, executed on August 28, Nelson was convicted of kidnapping a girl from her Kansas home and murdering her in Missouri.
On November 28, a jury recommended the death penalty for Nelson, and on March 11, , a federal judge imposed the death penalty. William LeCroy, Jr. The carjacking was the sole basis for federal jurisdiction in the case. Emergency crews raced to Oklahoma from across the country, and when the rescue effort finally ended two weeks later, the death toll stood at people. More than other people were injured in the bombing, which damaged or destroyed over buildings in the immediate area.
A massive hunt for the bombing suspects ensued, and on April 21 an eyewitness description led authorities to charge Timothy McVeigh , a former U. Army soldier, in the case. As it turned out, McVeigh was already in jail, having been stopped a little more than an hour after the bombing for a traffic violation and then arrested for unlawfully carrying a handgun. Shortly before he was scheduled to be released from jail, he was identified as a prime suspect in the bombing and charged.
Both men were found to be members of a radical right-wing survivalist group based in Michigan. Two days later, McVeigh and Nichols were indicted on charges of murder and unlawful use of explosives. While still in his teens, McVeigh, who was raised in western New York , acquired a penchant for guns and began honing survivalist skills he believed would be necessary in the event of a Cold War showdown with the Soviet Union.
He graduated from high school in and in enlisted in the Army, where he proved to be a disciplined and meticulous soldier. While in the military, McVeigh befriended fellow soldier Nichols, who was more than a dozen years his senior and shared his survivalist interests. At the time, the American military was downsizing after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Another result of the end of the Cold War was that McVeigh shifted his ideology from a hatred of foreign communist governments to a suspicion of the U.
McVeigh, Nichols and their associates were deeply radicalized by such events as the August shoot-out at Ruby Ridge , Idaho , between federal agents and survivalist Randy Weaver at his rural cabin, and the Waco siege of April, , in which 75 members of a Branch Davidian religious sect died near Waco, Texas. McVeigh planned an attack on the Murrah Building, which housed regional offices of such federal agencies as the Drug Enforcement Administration , the Secret Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives , the agency that had launched the initial raid on the Branch Davidian compound.
He "wrote letters, ate mint chocolate chip ice cream and was in 'good spirits' before the scheduled execution," the newspaper reported. The execution itself, the first federal death penalty in the U. Another Indianapolis Star front page story called the legal case a "collision of good and evil," "right and wrong" and "all or nothing" for many people. Terre Haute was consumed by the controversy. Nearly protesters marched to the prison to oppose the execution.
East of the penitentiary, where the execution took place, a field became known as "Camp McVeigh" for the media tents and satellite trucks to cover the execution. Some spent time praying for the Oklahoma City bombing victims and their families — and McVeigh himself.
One priest said he believed the convicted bomber would go to heaven, saying he didn't deserve to be demonized. In early , Nichols and McVeigh planned an attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, which housed, among other federal agencies, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms ATF —the agency that had launched the initial raid on the Branch Davidian compound in On April 19, , the two-year anniversary of the disastrous end to the Waco standoff, McVeigh parked a Ryder rental truck loaded with a diesel-fuel-fertilizer bomb outside the Alfred P.
Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City and fled. Minutes later, the massive bomb exploded, killing people. On June 2, , McVeigh was convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy, and on August 14, under the unanimous recommendation of the jury, he was sentenced to die by lethal injection.
In December , McVeigh asked a federal judge to stop all appeals of his convictions and to set a date for his execution by lethal injection at the U. Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana. In a federal trial, Terry Nichols was found guilty on one count of conspiracy and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter and was sentenced to life in prison. In a later Oklahoma state trial, he was charged with counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree manslaughter for the death of an unborn child, and one count of aiding in the placement of a bomb near a public building.
On May 26, , he was convicted of all charges and sentenced to consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! His resignation came amid rumors that he would soon be under investigation by the United States and Sweden Before the Civil War, citizenship was often limited to Native Americans of one-half or less
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