19 December 2024 :
December 19, 2024 - Oklahoma. Kevin Ray Underwood, 45, White, was executed.
Underwood was sentenced to death in Cleveland County in 2008 (see HoC 7 March and 3 April 2008) after he confessed to luring a 10-year-old girl into his flat, killing her and then mutilating her. Defence counsel did not deny that Underwood killed Jamie Rose Bolin, (white) on 12 April 2006, but asked for mitigation for severe mental and sexual disorders of the defendant, who in a videotaped confession had admitted to fantasizing about torturing a person, killing them, and then eating their body. The child's body was found in Underwood's home.
Underwood was pronounced dead at 10:14 a.m. at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
It was Oklahoma’s fourth execution of the year, and it took place on Underwood’s 45th birthday.
Underwood was also given Xanax on Wednesday night and again Thursday morning before he was injected with a three-drug cocktail of midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
Strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber, Underwood apologized to Jamie’s family and to his own family “for all the terrible things I did.”
“The decision to execute me on my birthday and six days before Christmas was a needlessly cruel thing to do to my family,” Underwood said, “but I’m very sorry for what I did and I wish I could take it back.”
Underwood looked over to members of his legal team and his family, including his mother, as the execution began at 10:04 a.m.. His breathing hitched slightly and his eyes closed a few minutes later. A doctor entered the execution chamber at 10:09 a.m., shook him a few times and declared him unconscious. He was pronounced dead five minutes later.
Underwood’s attorneys had argued that he deserved to be spared the death penalty because of his long history of abuse and serious mental health issues that included autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder, bipolar and panic disorders, post-traumatic stress disorder, schizotypal personality disorder and various deviant sexual paraphilias.
Prosecutors argued that many people suffer from mental illness, but that doesn’t justify harming children.
Underwood becomes the 4th inmate executed this year in Oklahoma, the 127th overall since Oklahoma resumed executions in 1990, the 25th this year in the US, and the n° 1607 since US resumed executions in 1977.
This is the last execution scheduled in 2024 in the US.
