The state of Florida today executed Patrick Hannon, 53, who was sentenced to death for beheading one person and shooting six times in another in an apartment in Tampa in 1991.
Hannon was pronounced dead at 2050 local time (01.50 GMT Thursday), according to the Governor’s Office, after receiving a lethal injection at the Florida State Prison in the north of the state, for the murder of Brandon Snider, 27 years old, and his roommate Robert Carter, 28.
P0.oco before, in a brief writing in which he did not state reasons, the Supreme Court of the United States denied this condemned who spent 26 years in the corridor of death a request for suspension of execution, as he had previously done the supreme court of Florida.
Prior to its execution, Michelle Glady, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections, reported today that Hannon slept just 3 hours and that his last dinner consisted of beef ribs, French fries, bacon, bread, vanilla ice cream and tea.
His last hours were spent with his wife and “in good spirits,” according to the spokeswoman.
Hannon was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of Snider, who was beheaded until he was nearly beheaded, according to court documents, and of Carter, the first housemate and who after hiding under a bed received six shots on the part of the executed.
Hannon went to this apartment in the company of two other people, including James Acker, who before the attack of Hannon stabbed several times to Snider, a crime for which he is serving life in prison in Florida.
According to the court documents, the bloody incident, in which Ronald Ivan Richardson also participated, was in response to the destruction by Snider of the apartment of Acker’s sister, who at the time was ex-girlfriend of the victim.
The prisoner became today the third, after the execution last October of Michael Ray Lambrix and in August of Mark James Asay, also for murder, in receiving the lethal injection after the legal limbo in which he remained in Florida this sentence.
In January 2016, the US Supreme Court He described as “unconstitutional” the way Florida decided the capital penalties, a decision that forced the state to change the process and now the penalty is decided by “unanimity” of the jury, not by simple majority.
With the execution of today, 95 death row inmates in Florida have been executed since 1976. Currently, some 400 people, four of them women, await execution on death row by lethal injection.
With Hannon, a total of 1,464 people have been executed in the USA. since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty four decades ago throughout the country.
Hannon’s death comes on the same day that Texas plans to execute the Mexican Rubén Ramírez Cárdenas, sentenced to death in 1998 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of his 16-year-old cousin Mayra Laguna on February 22, 1997. McAllen, South Texas city bordering the Mexican Reynosa.
The case has merited attention in view of the inter-American and human rights institutions, which criticize that there was no “fair trial”, as well as the Mexican Government itself, which has requested the commutation of the execution because it was not followed “due process of law”.
