That's the title of Andrew Cohen's latest post at the Atlantic. It's subtitled, "An inmate committed suicide three days before his scheduled execution — and 36 hours after prosecutors discovered shocking new information that might have saved him."
Here's the beginning:
Before he took his own tortured life last month, Billy Slagle had answered to just about everyone he could think of for the crime he had committed a quarter of a century ago. He had explained as best he could the circumstances of it. He had repeatedly apologized and taken responsibility for it. And he had begged forgiveness for it. Now that he is gone, the question at the heart of his tragic life and death is whether the people responsible for his fate, in positions of power and authority, will ever have the courage and integrity to accept their own measure of responsibility for what happened to him and why.
Slagle hanged himself with a belt in his prison cell early on Sunday morning, August 4th, three days before he was scheduled to be executed for the 1987 home-invasion murder of a young woman named Mari Anne Pope. Slagle's death came just weeks after Ohio parole board officials narrowly rejected his final request for clemency — over the earnest objections of Cuyahoga County prosecutors, who argued for leniency and a life sentence. It came weeks after Gov. John Kasich rejected the profound and numerous mitigating factors of Slagle's case.
Even more dramatically, Slagle's suicide also occurred approximately 36 hours after prosecutors in his case discovered shocking new information that might have precluded his execution. On the Friday before Slagle died, one of the prosecutors involved in his long-ago murder trial disclosed to current prosecutors that a plea deal had been discussed among lawyers before Slagle's trial — but that Slagle had never been told of a possible deal. Such a revelation, coming from a former prosecutor, almost certainly would have stayed Slagle's execution and likely would have pushed Ohio into granting him clemency.
Earlier coverage of Billy Slagle's case begins at the link.
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