Ohio prepares to execute man who says he deserves death

[The Straight Story]

Ohio prepares to execute man who says he deserves death

By MATT LEINGANG
Associated Press Writer

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- A man who says he deserves to die for murdering his wife spent the day before his scheduled execution reading a Bible and watching television, a prisons spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Rocky Barton, 49, gave up his appeals that could have delayed his execution for years. He is set to die by injection Wednesday in the first execution since the prisons department changed some execution procedures. Problems that staff had finding a vein in a man's arm during the last execution prompted the changes, including making every effort to find two injection sites and using a new method to make sure the veins stay open once entryways are inserted.

Barton and his wife, 44-year-old Kimbirli Jo, had a stormy 1 1/2-year marriage, and Barton killed her in 2003 after she told him she was leaving him.

He was driven Tuesday about 140 miles from a prison in Mansfield to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which houses Ohio's death chamber, prisons spokeswoman Andrea Dean said.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/O/OH_DEATH_PENALTY_BARTON_OHOL-?SITE=WBNSTV&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT

[Swamp Rat]

1. barbaric

what a sick society we live in.

[MadHound]

2. So now we are sanctioning state assisted suicide

The mind boggles:banghead:

[anarch]

3. I'm surprised the state doesn't step in to stop this

on the grounds that executing a man who seems to want to die would defeat the purpose. Kind of like, if there was a shortage of food, implementing a policy of only feeding people who aren't hungry...so's to save food.