Clemency Denied For AZ Man Set To Be Executed May 11

PHOENIX, AZ — The Arizona Board of Executive Clemency Thursday afternoon voted unanimously to deny death row inmate Clarence Dixon's request for clemency or reprieve, ahead of his May 11 execution date.

The decision followed a day of passionate arguments from attorneys representing both Dixon and the state, along with emotional testimony from the victim's sister.

Dixon was convicted and sentenced to death in 2008 for the 1978 rape and murder of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin in her Tempe apartment.

"There is not one legal, social or moral imperative for recommending reprieve or commutation of execution," said Bowdoin' sister, Leslie Bowdoin James, during the hearing.

James also spoke of how much was taken from her family when her sister was murdered. James cried during the hearing as she spoke about the violence that her sister endured during the last moments of her life.

During the clemency hearing that spanned much of the day Thursday, Dixon's attorneys argued that his schizophrenia made him incapable of fully understanding his execution and the reasons for it. They also argued that it was a miscarriage of justice that he was allowed to represent himself during his 2008 trial, despite what they said was a serious mental illness. Dixon's attorneys did not dispute his guilt, but asked for his sentence to be commuted to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

During the hearing, Garrett Simpson, one of the lawyers from the Maricopa County Office of the Public Defender who represented Dixon beginning in 2005, before he decided to represent himself, admitted that he'd made mistakes during that time. At the time Simpson did not question Dixon's sanity and did not ask the court to have Dixon's competency evaluated by an expert.

“I made a huge error,” Simpson said. “I screwed up.”

It didn’t occur to Simpson that Dixon might be incompetent, Simpson said, because Dixon was so clear and articulate in voicing his delusions. Dixon was especially adamant that he could get the whole Bowdoin case thrown out based on the belief that the Northern Arizona University Police Department didn't have jurisdiction to investigate a 1985 kidnapping and assault case for which Dixon had already been convicted. In reality, NAU police department's involvement in the 1985 case had nothing to do with Bowdoin's murder.

“I guess I mistook his irrationality for vehemence,” Simpson said.

Representatives from the Maricopa County Attorney's office, along with Bowdoin's sister, argued that Dixon had been given plenty of time and exhausted all his appeals and that it was time to conclude this case.

Representatives for the state also argued that Dixon seemed to be lucid enough to understand the upcoming execution in numerous requests he's filed within the past six months with the Department of Corrections, and during his representation of himself during the 2008 trial.

The clemency board's chair Mina Mendez seemed to agree with the Maricopa County Attorney's Office during discussion Thursday prior to the board's vote to deny clemency.

"In my opinion, Mr. Dixon represented himself very well in the 2008 trial," Mendez said. She added that he proposed lucid theories about the evidence, including a suggestion that Bowdoin's boyfriend may have committed the murder, instead of himself.

She added that based on the requests Dixon has filed with the Department of Corrections, she believes that he does understand his upcoming execution and the reasons for it.

“He’s able to advocate very effectively on his own behalf,” Mendez said.

Dixon was diagnosed with schizophrenia by two professionals in 1978 and again by John Toma, a psychologist who spoke during the hearing and who began working with Dixon in 2012. But the county attorney's office said that when Dixon represented himself during his trial, no matter his diagnosis, he was expressing his constitutional right to do so. Attorneys from the office pointed out that the judge at the time ruled that he was competent to represent himself.

Dixon's lawyers told the clemency board that he might have received a more lenient sentence if the jury at his trial was given evidence of his mental disorder and childhood abuse. But the jury never heard that evidence because Dixon represented himself and Dixon does not believe he has schizophrenia.

During Thursday's hearing, Toma described schizophrenia as a psychotic disorder in which the person suffers from disturbances in their thoughts, including delusions, hallucinations and obsessions. There is no cure for schizophrenia, so once Dixon was diagnosed with it in 1978, he continued to have it for the rest of his life, whether he sometimes interacted with people normally or not, Toma said.

Dixon was already serving out seven consecutive life sentences for the 1985 kidnapping and sexual assault of a Northern Arizona University student when he was convicted of Bowdoin's murder. He was not a suspect in Bowdoin's murder until he was implicated through DNA evidence in 2000.

Both James and Colleen Clase, a representative from Arizona Voice for Crime Victims spoke of the pain Bowdoin's family was put through not only because of her untimely death, but also through the trial and lengthy appeals process involved in a capital murder case.

"Today we haven’t heard from any of the other women that this defendant has brutalized, terrorized," James said.

In summer 1977 Dixon was accused of hitting a teenage girl over the head with a pipe. He was then committed to the Arizona State Hospital for six weeks in late 1977 and was released when doctors there said that he had become competent to stand trial for the assault.

On Jan. 5, 1978, then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Sandra Day O'Connor (and later U.S. Supreme Court Justice) found Dixon not guilty of the assault by reason of insanity. O'Connor then ordered that Dixon be committed to a civil institution. Instead, Dixon he was released with no treatment, supervision or mental health services, his lawyers said. Bowdoin was murdered on Jan. 7, 1978.

Representatives from the county attorney's office said during the hearing that Dixon's lawyers were revising history and cherry picking the evidence they presented, saying that O'Connor must not have thought Dixon was that dangerous since he was released from the state hospital, and into the public, more than a month before the assault trial. The prosecutors also mentioned that when he was released from the state hospital in November 1977, he was showing no signs of any mental disorder, according to one of his doctors. Dixon was treated with antipsychotic medication during his time in the hospital.

The county attorney's office also argued that Dixon has never been treated for schizophrenia during his time in prison and seemed to function fairly normally there.

“This is not a man that deserve this board’s mercy,” Clase, the victim advocate, told the board on Thursday.

The clemency board ultimately agreed.