ATMORE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama executed a man Thursday who admitted to killing five people with an ax and gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and dropped his appeals to allow his lethal injection to go forward. Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.
m. Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama. He pleaded guilty in a rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge.
Dearman had dropped his appeals this year. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it’s not fair to the victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly deserve.” “I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for all the terrible things I’ve done,” Dearman said in an audio recording sent this week to The Associated Press.
“From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.” Dearman’s execution was one of two planned Thursday in the U.S.
Robert Roberson was scheduled to be the nation’s first person put to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, but a judge granted a request from Texas lawmakers to delay Robert Roberson’s execution. The judge’s order was expected to be quickly appealed by the Texas Attorney General’s Office. Dearman’s was Alabama�.
