Parchman, Mississippi
AP
—
A Mississippi man convicted of kidnapping, raping and killing a 20-year-old community college student in 1993 was executed Wednesday.
Charles Crawford, 59, was pronounced dead at 6:15 p.m. following a lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman.
Crawford had spent more than 30 years on death row. His execution comes several months after the execution of Mississippi’s longest-serving death row inmate in a year of increasing executions nationwide.
Crawford was convicted of abducting Kristy Ray from her parents’ home in northern Mississippi’s Tippah County on Jan. 29, 1993. According to court records, when Ray’s mother came home, her daughter’s car was gone and a handwritten ransom note had been left on the table.
On the same day, a different ransom note, made from magazine cutouts and concerning a woman named Jennifer, was found in the attic of Crawford’s former father-in-law. The note was turned over to law enforcement, who began searching for Crawford. He was arrested a day later and said he was returning from a hunting trip.
He later told authorities he blacked out and did not recall killing Ray.
At the time of that arrest, Crawford was days away from going to trial on a separate assault charge. The trial stemmed from an attack in 1991 in which Crawford was accused of raping a 17-year-old girl and hitting her friend with a hammer.
Despite his assertions that he had experienced blackouts and did not remember committing either the rape or the hammer attack, Crawford was found guilty of both charges in two separate trials.
His prior rape conviction was considered an “aggravating circumstance” by jurors in Crawford’s capital murder trial, paving the way for his death sentence.
Over the past three decades, Crawford tried unsuccessfully to overturn his death sentence.
Crawford’s execution came shortly after the US Supreme Court turned away a last-minute emergency appeal over a strongly worded dissent from the court’s three liberal justices. Justice Sonia Sotomayor suggested that Crawford’s appeal likely would have been successful under different procedural circumstances.
In a 2018 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that lawyers cannot override a defendant’s explicit decision not to concede guilt at trial. But, Sotomayor wrote, that’s exactly what happened in Crawford’s case. His attorneys conceded to the jury that Crawford had killed Ray and then pursued an insanity defense.
“Crawford’s lawyers did not listen,” Sotomayor wrote. “Not because they misunderstood Crawford, but because they chose not to.”
But Crawford had a procedural problem: It’s not clear whether the 2018 decision applied retroactively and to people like Crawford who are pursuing their cases post-conviction.
“The right to direct the goals of one’s criminal defense plainly includes the right to decide whether to pursue freedom rather than confinement,” Sotomayor wrote.
“Crawford’s lawyers, however, deprived him of that basic right. And because the court declines to act, Crawford will be sent to his death without ever having had a real opportunity to hold the state to its burden of proving his guilt,” she added.
The dissent was joined by liberal Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. As is often the case in emergency appeals, the majority of the court did not explain its reasoning.
The Mississippi Supreme Court dismissed the argument in September, writing that Crawford should have brought the appeal sooner and did not present adequate reasoning why the 2018 Supreme Court ruling should be retroactive.
“It’s almost like he didn’t even get the chance to have innocent or guilty matter because his attorney just overrode his wishes from the outset,” said Krissy Nobile, the director of the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Relief, who represented Crawford.
After the Mississippi Supreme Court set his execution date in September, Nobile said Crawford expressed both disappointment and resolution.
Nobile characterized Crawford as a respected, uplifting presence on death row. She said he worked inside the prison and advocated for other inmates.
Marc McClure, the chief superintendent of operations for the Mississippi Department of Corrections, said during a press conference that Crawford visited with his family and a preacher Wednesday afternoon.
The Associated Press made multiple attempts to contact Ray’s relatives, but did not receive a response. Crawford also did not return requests for comment.
The lethal injection was the third in two days in the US after executions Tuesday in Florida and Missouri. A total of 38 men have died by court-ordered execution so far this year in the United States.
In Florida, Samuel Lee Smithers, 72, was put to death for the 1996 killings of two women whose bodies were found in a rural pond. In Missouri, Lance Shockley was executed for fatally shooting a state trooper in 2005.
There are six more executions scheduled to take place in 2025, the next being that of Richard Djerf, who was convicted of killing four members of a family in Arizona over 30 years ago.
CNN’s John Fritze contributed to this report.
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