Nashville, (Tennessee, US): A blind prisoner convicted of killing his estranged girlfriend by setting her on fire in her car was put to death Thursday here in an electric chair. The person thus became only the second inmate without sight to be executed in the US since the reinstatement of the nation’s death penalty in 1976. Lee Hall, 53, was pronounced dead at 7.26pm at a maximum-security prison here, officials said.
Hall chose the electric chair over Tennessee’s preferred execution method of lethal injection — an option allowed inmates in the state who were convicted of crimes before January 1999.
Hall was asked if he had final words Thursday night. He asked for water so he could speak but was told there wasn’t any. “People need to learn forgiveness and love and make this world a better place,” Hall said shortly before being put to death.
Hall had his vision when he entered death row decades ago, but his attorneys say he later became functionally blind from improperly treated glaucoma.
The only one other known blind inmate has been executed in the US since the Supreme Court allowed executions to resume in 1976 was Clarence Ray Allen, 76. He received a lethal injection in California in 2006.
Court documents state that Hall killed 22-year-old Traci Crozier, April 17, 1991 by setting her car ablaze with a container of gasoline that he lit and tossed in her vehicle while she was inside and trying to leave him.
The container exploded and Crozier suffered burns across more than 90 per cent of her body, dying the next day in the hospital.
Crozier’s sister, Staci Wooten, and her father, Gene Crozier, had said earlier they planned to watch Hall’s execution. However, they were not present when the execution took place.
AP