A death row inmate requested a fancy final meal after asking to be put to death by lethal injection for killing five people including a pregnant woman.
Derrick Dearman, 36, wrote multiple letters to Alabama authorities including the attorney general welcoming his execution.
‘It is not fair to the victims or their families to continue to delay the justice they so rightly deserve,’ Dearman wrote to Attorney General Steve Marshall in April.
‘I am guilty and was fairly sentenced to death.’
Dearman asked for a seafood platter for his last meal.
While attached to a gurney in the execution chamber at William C Holman Correctional Facility in Atmore, he told family members of the victims: ‘Forgive me.
‘This is not for me. This is for you. I’ve taken so much.’
Dearman then told his family: ‘Y’all already know I love y’all.’
After two ‘sticks’ to reach his veins, the deadly cocktail entered Dearman’s system and he seemed to lose consciousness within minutes.
He was pronounced dead at 6.14pm on Thursday.
On the day of the killings in 2016, Dearman had not slept for six days and ingested methamphetamine. He had severe mental illness and said he heard voices and thought people were chasing him, according to the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative.
He brutally murdered five members of his girlfriend’s family in the middle of the night using an axe and a gun.
Dearman in 2018 pleaded guilty to capital murder charges in the deaths of Chelsea Marie Reed, 22, who was five months pregnant; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Shannon Melissa Randall, 35.
A jury chose the death sentence for him.
He dropped his appeals in April.
Dearman was the only inmate to be put to death in the US on Thursday, after the Texas Supreme Court halted the execution of Robert Roberson, who would have been the first person in the nation to be executed based on the ‘shaken baby syndrome’.
Roberson was convicted of killing his two-year-old daughter in 2002. Hospital staff who assessed the girl’s wounds said they were consistent with shaken baby syndrome, which involves shaking a baby and causing their brain to hit their skull. But Robeson’s attorneys said his daughter died of pneumonia complications instead of abuse.
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