After more than 30 years on death row in a prison in the ohio statethe Keith LaMar executionscheduled for November 16, was postponed until January 2027 due to a lack of lethal injections, the authorities announced Thursday.
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“The new date for the execution has been scheduled for January 13, 2027,” said a statement from the Ohio Governor Mike DeWinewhich bases its decision on “issues of pharmaceutical suppliers’ willingness to provide drugs to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction“.
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Last April, DeWine had already postponed until 2026, for the same reasons, the executions scheduled for August, September and October of this year. No executions have been carried out in the state since 2018.
A growing number of pharmaceutical companies refuse to manufacture the lethal injection given to death row inmates.
LaMar, 54, was sentenced to death for the murder of five of the 9 companions and a guard who died in a riot in April 1993 in the jail where he was already serving a sentence, in a trial, which according to him, it was peppered with irregularities such as the destruction of evidence and the concealment of exculpatory information.
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This African American who has always denied his guilt in the death of any of the inmates, he has spent the better part of his three decades awaiting execution in solitary confinement in a maximum-security Ohio state prison.
Three years can go by in the blink of an eye, so let’s redouble our efforts, energy to resolve this madness to the end once and for all.
“Three years can go by in the blink of an eye, so let’s redouble our efforts, energy to finally resolve this madness once and for all,” LaMar said in a message, thanking those who have supported him and that they instilled in him “faith and belief that the best things are still possible.”
In jail since he was 19 years old for the 1980s murder of an old friend over a drug dispute, LaMar says that after the riot, prison authorities asked him to rat out those responsible, in exchange for a reduction in prison terms. sentence, which he refused.
With the support of lawyers and jazz musicians
LaMar, who wrote a book telling her story and claiming her innocence, He has fought for his case to be reopened and for him to have a fair trial.
“When you’re poor, black in a racist country, we’re damned poor”, he said in an interview last year from death row.
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In the past two years, his cause has turned upside down. In addition to a team of lawyers trying to reopen the case, a group of jazz musicians– the music that saved him in the confines of his solitude – wage a campaign to demand “Justice for Keith LaMar”.
From the telephone on death row, LaMar has recorded an album with the Spanish band Albert Marqués, and has participated in the numerous concerts they have given in countries such as Spain, France, Chile and in various cities in the United States, such as one more of the group.
“Let’s keep asking for justice, we are almost there”, says LaMar in his message of hope.
AFP
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