SUB-HEADING: "Anthony Sanchez maintained his innocence as was executed today saying 'I didn't kill anyone' in his final statement. He was sentenced to death for a 1996 crime."
SUB-HEADING: "Anthony Sanchez killed Juli Busken - and has been executed today/"
GIST: "A death row inmate who was executed today hauntingly continued to protest his innocence in his last words before dying by lethal injection, crying: "I didn't kill nobody."
Anthony Sanchez, aged 44, was executed today for the 1996 murder of University of Oklahoma dance student Juli Busken.
The case remained unsolved for years until DNA evidence from the crime scene was matched to Sanchez, who was already serving time for burglary.
Sanchez has always insisted he is innocent and activist groups supported his claim, challenging DNA evidence and citing alleged confessions by his father.
Despite maintaining his innocence, Sanchez chose not to seek clemency, which many saw as his last chance to avoid execution.
He criticised his former attorneys, thanked supporters, and declared his innocence as he was executed by lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
Sanchez was pronounced dead at 10.19am following a three-drug injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. "I'm innocent," Sanchez said as he was strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber today. "I didn't kill nobody."
Sanchez was convicted of raping and killing Juli Busken, who was abducted in 1996 and found bound, raped, and shot in the head near Lake Stanley Draper in Oklahoma City. DNA evidence linked Sanchez to the crime, leading to his conviction and death sentence in 2006.
None of Juli Busken's family attended Thursday's execution, but state Attorney General Gentner Drummond said he had spoken to them several times in recent months.
"Juli was murdered 26 years, nine months and one day ago. The family has found closure and peace," Drummond said.
Sanchez has long maintained his innocence and did so again in a phone call earlier this year from death row. "That is fabricated DNA," Sanchez said. "That is false DNA. That is not my DNA. I've been saying that since day one."
He said he declined to ask for clemency because even when the five-member Pardon and Parole Board takes the rare step of recommending it, Governor Kevin Stitt has been unlikely to grant it.
"I've sat in my cell and I've watched inmate after inmate after inmate get clemency and get denied clemency," Sanchez said. "Either way, it doesn't go well for the inmates."
Drummond maintained that the DNA evidence unequivocally linked Sanchez to Juli Busken's killing.
A sample of Anthony Sanchez's DNA "was identical to the profiles developed from sperm on Ms Busken's panties and leotard," Drummond wrote last month in a letter to a state representative who had inquired about Sanchez's conviction.
Drummond added there was no indication either profile was mixed with DNA from any other individual and that the odds of randomly selecting an individual with the same genetic profile were 1 in 94 trillion among Southwest Hispanics.
"There is no conceivable doubt that Anthony Sanchez is a brutal rapist and murderer who is deserving of the state's harshest punishment," Drummond said in a recent statement.
Charlotte Beattie, Sanchez's father's former girlfriend, said Thomas Glen Sanchez, who has since died, told her "a few times" about how "he had to hogtie [Basken] 'cause she squealed."
She added that after he "finished the job with her, he just shot her in the head."
She told the authorities that she had been worried about coming forward beforehand, as she feared she would suffer the same fate if she did.
Sanchez has also disputed the viability of the DNA evidence against him, saying it was "fabricated" and "false" and not his DNA. "I've been saying that since day one," he said during a phone call.
"I know from spending a lot of time on that case, there is not one piece of evidence that pointed to anyone other than Anthony Sanchez," Kuykendall said recently. "I don't care if a hundred people or a thousand people confess to killing Juli Busken."
Oklahoma resumed carrying out the death penalty in 2021, ending a six-year moratorium brought on by concerns about its execution methods.
The state had one of the nation's busiest death chambers until problems arose in 2014 and 2015.
Richard Glossip was hours away from being executed in September 2015 when prison officials realised they received the wrong lethal drug.
It was later learned the same wrong drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015."
The entire story can be read at:
SEE BREAKDOWN OF SOME OF THE ON-GOING INTERNATIONAL CASES (OUTSIDE OF THE CONTINENTAL USA) THAT I AM FOLLOWING ON THIS BLOG, AT THE LINK BELOW: HL
https://www.blogger.com/blog/post/edit/120008354894645705/47049136857587929
FINAL WORD: (Applicable to all of our wrongful conviction cases): "Whenever there is a wrongful conviction, it exposes errors in our criminal legal system, and we hope that this case — and lessons from it — can prevent future injustices.
Lawyer Radha Natarajan;
Executive Director: New England Innocence Project;
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FINAL, FINAL WORD: "Since its inception, the Innocence Project has pushed the criminal legal system to confront and correct the laws and policies that cause and contribute to wrongful convictions. They never shied away from the hard cases — the ones involving eyewitness identifications, confessions, and bite marks. Instead, in the course of presenting scientific evidence of innocence, they've exposed the unreliability of evidence that was, for centuries, deemed untouchable." So true!
Christina Swarns: Executive Director: The Innocence Project;
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YET ANOTHER FINAL WORD:
David Hammond, one of Broadwater’s attorneys who sought his exoneration, told the Syracuse Post-Standard, “Sprinkle some junk science onto a faulty identification, and it’s the perfect recipe for a wrongful conviction.”
https://deadline.com/2021/11/alice-sebold-lucky-rape-conviction-overturned-anthony-broadwater-1234880143/
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