Benjamin Berry was executed by the State of Louisiana for the murder of a bank guard
According to court documents Benjamin Berry would fatally shoot Robert Cochran, an off-duty Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy working as a bank guard
Benjamin Berry would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Benjamin Berry would be executed by way of the electric chair on June 7 1987
Benjamin Berry FAQ
When was Benjamin Berry executed
Benjamin Berry was executed on June 7 1987
How was Benjamin Berry executed
Benjamin Berry was executed by way of the electric chair
Benjamin Berry Case
A man described by his mother as lacking a solid family life was executed in Louisiana’s electric chair early Sunday for the killing of a guard during a 1978 bank robbery.
Benjamin Berry, 31, shrugged off help from a minister and declined to make a last statement. Asked if he wanted to pray, he replied, ″I’ve already done that,″ according to Warden Hilton Butler.
Four other death row inmates at the Louisiana State Penitentiary are scheduled to die in the next two weeks.
At 12:05 a.m., prison guards escorted Berry into the small room housing the oak chair and buckled him in with eight heavy leather straps.
He watched the process nervously and took two deep breaths when electrodes were attached to his head and his left leg. Before a hood was put over his face, he looked up and then closed his eyes.
The guards left, and Butler nodded to an electrician hidden behind a partition. Beginning at 12:09, four jolts of electricity shot through Berry’s body in alternating surges of 2,400 and 500 volts. He was pronounced dead at 12:16 a.m.
He was the 76th person executed in the United States and the eighth in Louisiana since the Supreme Court allowed states to reinstate the death penalty in 1977.
Berry’s appeals ran out late Friday when the U.S. Supreme Court refused to stop the execution and Gov. Edwin Edwards said he would not step in.
Nine members of Berry’s family, including his mother, sisters and brothers, came to visit him Saturday, and Butler said he let them spend the day together in a room without bars.
Berry’s nine years on death row wore down his mother, Jane Berry.
″It just eats away at me … I don’t believe it will ever go away,″ she said recently. ″If we had had a solid family life with the whole family, I believe Ben would have … had a better chance.″
The Fort Dix, N.J., native’s father was in the military, and the family moved from state to state. Berry dropped out of school in Baton Rouge at age 17 and joined the Army, but received a dishonorable discharge.
While Berry waited in the death house, about 30 opponents of capital punishment held a candlelight vigil in front of the Governor’s Mansion in Baton Rouge. About a dozen people held a similar protest in New Orleans.
″There’s no point in killing people to prove killing people is wrong,″ said Tom Abel, one of those who took part in the prayer vigil. ″We need to find some other way of coping with crime.″
Several death penalty supporters gathered outside the prison’s front gate wearing shirts lettered with the message ″Justice For All – Even The Victims.″
″We can’t forget the victim,″ said Elizabeth Harvey of Covington, whose daughter Faith Hathaway was killed in 1980. Her daughter’s killer, Robert Lee Willie, was electrocuted in 1984.
Berry was convicted of killing Robert Cochran, a Jefferson Parish sheriff’s deputy who was moonlighting as a bank guard when Berry and a friend, David Pennington, held up the bank in the New Orleans suburb of Metairie on Jan. 30, 1978.
Berry testified he came up with the idea of robbing the bank as a way for Pennington to get quick money for his business, and didn’t expect any violence.
He said he carried a gun for self-defense and only shot back after Cochran shot him, breaking ribs and tearing his spleen.
But witnesses testified Berry fired when he spotted the guard and that when Cochran fell wounded, Berry walked over to him and fired a bullet point blank into his head.