US: Inmate could become 1,000th executed since 1976

The fate of a convicted killer from North Carolina, set to become the 1,000th person executed in the US since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, rests today with federal appeals courts and the state’s governor.

Unless they intervene, 57-year-old Kenneth Lee Boyd will be put to death by lethal injection at 2am (7am Irish time) tomorrow, earning a man who shot and killed his estranged wife and her father an infamous place in American history.

“I’d hate to be remembered as that,” Boyd said in prison yesterday. “I don’t like the idea of being picked as a number.”

Boyd’s lawyers have filed appeals with the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals and the US Supreme Court, as well a clemency application with Governor Mike Easley.

A spokeswoman for Easley, who typically does not announce his clemency decisions until after all pending appeals have been exhausted, said the governor would treat Boyd’s case like others he has considered.

Larger than normal crowds of protesters were expected in Raleigh, including at least one busload of anti-death penalty activists diverted from Virginia and the now-cancelled execution of Robin Lovitt, who was to be the 1000th prisoner executed.

Vigils were planned at sites across the state, including outside the state’s Central Prison, where Boyd would be executed.

Stephen Dear, executive director of the People of Faith Against the Death Penalty, said he hoped the international attention focused on North Carolina would lead Easley to commute Boyd’s sentence.

“We pray he will have a transformation in his heart and his conscience and listen to the voices of his own people, and the thoughtful people of the country and the world,” he said.

But Boyd’s hopes for a last-minute reprieve appeared slim. There is no doubt about his guilt and his case does not include the kind of legal concerns that led Virginia Governor Mark Warner to spare the life on Tuesday of Lovitt, who was convicted of stabbing a man to death with a pair of scissors during a pool-hall robbery.

In that case, Warner said key evidence – the bloody scissors – had been improperly destroyed, preventing the defence from subjecting it to the latest in DNA testing.

A similar incident involving lost evidence led Easley to grant clemency to a death row inmate in 2002, and he did it one other time, in 2001, when defence attorneys argued the jury was racially biased against their client, a black man convicted of killing the husband of a white woman with whom he had been having an affair.

In all, 22 killers have been put to death during Easley’s nearly five years as governor.

Speaking yesterday, Boyd did not deny shooting Julie Curry Boyd and her father, Thomas Dillard Curry, in 1988. The Boyds were separated at the time, and Julie Boyd was living with her father. Boyd suspected his wife was having an affair.

Boyd said he was drinking on the night of the murders.

“I remember sitting in my house, nobody there,” he said. “I blinked my eyes and I’d done shot my father-in-law. When they told me how many times I shot her, I couldn’t believe it.” He added: “It’s just a thing that happened, just snapped.”

In his clemency petition, Boyd’s lawyers argued his experiences in the Vietnam War – where as a bulldozer operator he was shot at by snipers daily - contributed to his crimes. He began drinking while overseas.

Boyd called the death penalty “nothing but revenge”.

“I feel like I should be in prison for the rest of my life,” he said. “I never expect to get paroled out if I got off.”