Lawyers For AZ Man To Be Executed Say He's Not Mentally Competent

PHOENIX, AZ — The first execution of a death row inmate scheduled in Arizona since 2014 has been challenged in Pinal County Superior Court, as the death row inmate's lawyers say he's not mentally competent to be executed.

Clarence Dixon, 66, is set to be executed May 11 for the 1977 rape and murder of 21-year-old Arizona State University student Deana Bowdoin in her apartment in Tempe.

The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday issued its first execution warrant in eight years for Dixon.

Dixon's lawyers on Friday filed a motion claiming that his execution would violate Arizona law, along with the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

"Mr. Dixon has a well-documented history of paranoid schizophrenia, a severe mental illness expressed in delusional thinking and auditory and visual hallucinations, and these delusions prevent him from reaching a rational understanding of the reason for his execution," Dixon's lawyers wrote in a statement.

The Arizona Attorney General's Office did not immediately respond to Patch's request for a comment on the challenge to the execution Friday afternoon.

"I made a promise to Arizona voters that people who commit the ultimate crime get the ultimate punishment," Attorney General Mark Brnovich said in a previous statement. "I will continue to fight every day for justice for victims, their families, and our communities."

Dixon's lawyers claim that his execution would violate Arizona law that prohibits the state from putting to death someone who is mentally incompetent. His lawyers also said that it would violate the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which prohibits the execution of someone who is insane.

Dixon's attorneys also opined in the motion that, "His concept of reality is so impaired that he cannot form a rational understanding of 'the retributive message society intends to convey with a death sentence.'"

In 1977, after he was implicated in an assault unrelated to the Bowdoin murder, Dixon was diagnosed with schizophrenia and found to be incompetent, according to his lawyers. Then-Maricopa County Superior Court Judge (and later Supreme Court Justice) Sandra Day O'Connor found Dixon not guilty of that assault by reason of insanity. O'Connor then directed the Maricopa County Attorney's Office to have Dixon committed, but the office did not do so, his attorneys said.

The murder for which he is set to be executed happened just two days after his release, his attorneys said.

The case of Bowdoin's murder, initially went cold, but around 20 years later it was reopened and Dixon was identified as a suspect through DNA evidence. By that time, Dixon was already serving a life sentence for a 1986 sexual assault. Dixon has since exhausted his appeals in the Bowdoin case.

Joseph Wood, the last death row inmate to be executed in Arizona, in 2014, was given 15 doses of a two-drug combination over two hours in an execution that his lawyers described as botched. Over the length of the execution, Wood repeatedly gasped for air. After Wood's execution, Arizona announced that it would temporarily suspend capital punishment as it reviewed what happened to Wood. Arizona has not executed anyone since then, at least in part because it — like many other states — struggled to acquire drugs to use in lethal injections after pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of their products in executions.

Brnovich began lobbying for the state to resume executions last year.

More than 100 inmates are on death row in Arizona, and around 20 of them have exhausted their appeals. Many of the crimes for which they were convicted date to the 1970s and early 1980s, according to the attorney general's office.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.