Arizona ready to set execution dates for 2, including Atwood in murder of Tucson child

Attorney General Mark Brnovich filed paperwork Tuesday with the Arizona Supreme Court to have the state put to death Frank Atwood Jr. and Clarence Dixon.

Atwood was convicted of murdering 8-year-old Vicki Lynne Hoskinson in Tucson in 1984.

Dixon was found guilty of murdering Deana Bowdoin, an Arizona State University student, in 1978.

There are still a few steps the court has to take, and dates to set for the executions, said the attorney general’s aide Ryan Anderson.

But Anderson said there is no reason why Atwood and Dixon cannot be executed before the end of the year.

Both inmates may choose method

The manner of death still needs to be decided.

Arizona now uses lethal chemicals to execute inmates. Voters, following reports of it taking 11 minutes for Donald Eugene Harding to die by asphyxiation, voted in 1992 to replace that method with lethal injection.

But that law allows any inmate whose crime was committed before Nov. 23, 1992, to choose. Walter LeGrand was executed in the Arizona gas chamber in 1999 at his request and is believed to be the last person in this country put to death by that method.

A representative of the state Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry said Tuesday that the gas chamber is “fully operational.”

There are complicating factors if either Atwood or Dixon choose lethal injection.

One is that the pentobarbital, the barbiturate the state plans to use, has to be compounded. And once that happens it has a shelf life of 90 days.

That requires the dates to line up so the executions, once set, can be completed in that time period, Brnovich said.

Appeals finished for About 20 on death row

Brnovich on Tuesday asked the Arizona Supreme Court, which has the last word, to set up a briefing schedule to review the request for death warrants to be issued. The justices need to determine if all of the appeals and post-conviction proceedings have concluded. But in his legal filings, the attorney general said there’s really nothing left to discuss.

If these two executions go forward, it would break a logjam.

Brnovich said there are 115 inmates on Arizona’s “death row,” with about 20 of them, including Atwood and Dixon, having exhausted their appeals.

“Capital punishment is the law in Arizona and the appropriate response to those who commit the most shocking and vile murders,” Brnovich said in a prepared statement.

In Arizona, the death penalty is not an option simply because someone murdered another person. Instead, it requires a jury to conclude there were sufficient “aggravating circumstances” like whether the crime was done for money, whether the person was out on parole, and whether it was committed “in an especially heinous, cruel or depraved manner.”

“This is about the administration of justice and ensuring the last word still belongs to the innocent victims who can no longer speak for themselves,” Brnovich said.

Vicki’s mother describes agonizing wait for justice

Vicki Lynne Hoskinson disappeared in 1984 while riding her pink bicycle near her Tucson home.

Authorities eventually tracked Atwood, a previously convicted pedophile, to Texas where he was arrested on charges of kidnapping, with murder charges added after the child’s skull and some bones were found in the desert northwest of Tucson the following year.

At trial, witnesses for the state testified that pink paint on the front bumper of Atwood’s car had come “from the victim’s bike or from another source exactly like the bike” and that Vicki Lynne’s bicycle had nickel particles on it that were consistent with metal from the bumper.

In seeking to overturn his conviction, Atwood argued that his trial counsel was ineffective. But Judge Sandra Ikuta, writing for the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, said there were legitimate reasons for decisions made by attorney Stanton Bloom in how to conduct the defense.

And the judges said, in essence, Atwood’s theory that police and prosecutors planted evidence was so far-fetched as to have no credibility.

Vicki Lynne’s mother, Debbie Carlson of Tucson, wrote in an Arizona Republic opinion piece in 2019 that her family had already waited 35 agonizing years for justice.

“Our family has endured years of appeals, which finally ended in 2018. Then we had to endure additional delays as political activists claimed lethal injections were ‘inhumane’ and tied up the issue in federal court,” Carlson wrote.

“The only thing that is inhumane is the way our daughter died. Vicki was knocked off her bike with his car, forcefully taken, driven to a remote area, raped and murdered. I will spare you the darkest details of how she pleaded for her life as she was brutally assaulted by the lice-infected, filthy sociopath and previously convicted child predator. I won’t repeat her last words here. I will just say the horror she went through was torturous and inhumane, far worse than putting a needle in someone’s arm for a heinous crime that was willfully committed,” she wrote.

Carlson declined, through a family friend, to comment Tuesday.

Victim lived across street from Dixon

Deana Bowdoin was found slain in her bed in 1978 with a macramé belt around her neck and blood on her chest. While police found DNA, they were unable to match it to anyone.

The break came in 2001 when Tempe police matched it to Dixon, who by that time was serving a life sentence in prison for a 1986 rape. Dixon had lived across the street from Bowdoin at the time of the killing.

Dale Baich, a federal defender who represented Dixon in post-conviction proceedings, said corrections officials have yet to respond to questions about the execution process, including COVID-19 safety measures .

A lawyer for Atwood, Joseph Perkovich, said Tuesday that Atwood “is now wheelchair-bound and suffering from severe spinal deterioration among other medical problems that would make the process of executing him excruciatingly painful.”

Bid to get execution drugs

It has taken years to determine when Arizona would again start executing inmates.

First, there were questions of whether the state could — or would — get the necessary drugs for executions. And it took a court ruling to conclude the public has no right to know where the state obtains the chemicals.

The state then tried to obtain sodium thiopental, a muscle relaxant. When the manufacturer would not sell the drug to Arizona to put someone to death, the state then ordered from suppliers in India despite warnings by the FDA that such a move was illegal. The drugs were seized in Phoenix and never released.

In the interim, the federal government managed to get its hands on pentobarbital and last year carried out its first executions in years.