For subscribers: Jim Klein participated in 17 executions for the state of Arizona. With executions scheduled to resume, Klein is ready to share his story.
I knew what needed to be done. And I did it. They knew that mentally, I could handle the stress of taking a human life and that I wouldn’t dwell on it.In all three incidents — the gas station altercation, the initial interview and the use of force on a prisoner as a Tactical Support Unit officer — Klein says he thinks he displayed behaviors that the prison administrators were seeking.
Jim Klein participated in 17 executions at the Arizona State Prison Complex in Florence, two by gas chamber and 15 by lethal injection.At the time Klein joined the department’s execution team, the gas chamber had not been used in 30 years, due to a nationwide moratorium on the death penalty brought about by the Supreme Court case Furman v. Georgia.
In 1992 when Arizona resumed executions after the Legislature revised Arizona’s death penalty statute, he ran the controls on the gas chamber for the execution of Don Harding. Harding was convicted for theDuring a gas chamber execution, Klein said the prisoner is placed in a chair in the gas chamber and restrained with straps on their arms and legs and across their chest.
He said Harding’s arms were twitching and spasming and his body continued to react violently to the process for 12 to 13 minutes.Klein said it looked painful. “I thought to myself, 'If it was up to me, I wouldn't be choosing that. I definitely don't want to be suffocated. I don’t want to go out like that.'”
Two such prisoners, Clarence Dixon and Frank Atwood, were recently scheduled for executions, causing the Department of Corrections to make sure its gas chamber was again in working order. Dixon was sentenced to death in 2008 for the 1978 killing of Deana Bowdoin, a 21-year-old senior at Arizona State University. Atwood was sentenced to death in Pima County in 1987 for the murder of an 8-year-old girl, Vicki Lynne Hoskinson.
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