Inmate on death row for 40 years executed

A septuagenarian was executed in the US state of Arizona nearly 40 years after he was sentenced to death for a double murder.

Murray Hooper, a 76-year-old African American, was given a lethal injection in the Florence penitentiary on Wednesday, the state’s attorney general, Mark Brnovich, announced in a statement.

For “those who commit heinous crimes,” Brnovich said, “we must never forget the victims or cease to pursue what justice demands.”

US death row cases often are filled with aged convicts who have spent decades seeing their cases wind through the justice system. At the end of 2020, nearly a quarter of those on death row were over 60 years old, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre (DPIC).

According to prosecutors, on New Year’s Eve 1980, Murray Hooper and two accomplices broke into a house in Phoenix to rob it, tied up the three occupants and shot each of them in the head.

One man and his mother-in-law died, but his wife survived and later identified all the three assailants. The three were sentenced to death in 1983, but the other two died in custody before being executed.

Murray Hooper had maintained his innocence but never obtained an acquittal.