Christopher Newton was executed by the State of Ohio for a prison murder
According to court documents Christopher Newton would get into an argument with his cellmate Jason Brewer which would end with Newton beating him and then strangling him with a sheet
Christopher Newton would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Christopher Newton would be executed by lethal injection on May 24 2007
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When Was Christopher Newton Executed
Christopher Newton was executed on May 24 2007
Christopher Newton Case
It took so long to hook up Christopher J. Newton’s lethal injection IV that the condemned man had to ask for a bathroom break. For 90 minutes yesterday, from about 10 to 11:30 a.m., paramedics working in cramped quarters in the Death House at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility struggled to tap veins with intravenous lines so that Newton could be put to death.
Finally, the lines were secured and the deadly chemicals did their job. Newton, 37, was declared dead at 11:53 a.m. Prison officials said the lengthy delay, the longest since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999, was attributable to Newton’s size. At 6 feet tall and 265 pounds, Newton was obese and had deeply buried veins.
At one point, Newton asked and was permitted to use the restroom for two minutes before paramedics went back to work. Eventually, they secured sites in both arms. The previous longest delay, one hour, came during the execution of Joseph Clark on May 2 last year. Paramedics attached a single IV to Clark’s arm, but when the vein collapsed, Clark tried to rise off the table and said several times, “It don’t work.”
Through it all yesterday, Newton smiled, joked with prison personnel and did what a witness described as “belly laughs” on the lethal injection table.
A high-school dropout from Huron, Ohio, who began his life of crime by stealing candy bars as a boy, Newton was executed for killing his cellmate, Jason Brewer, 27. Newton beat and strangled Brewer, whom he outweighed by 100 pounds, on Nov. 15, 2001, after they argued over a chess game.
Newton, who had a history of mental-health problems, said he was mad because Brewer kept giving up before the chess game was over.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio released a statement yesterday urging a swift halt to capital punishment in Ohio because of problems with the Newton and Clark cases. “Having one botched execution is too many; that Ohio has now had two botched executions in one year is intolerable,” the ACLU said.
Likewise, Ohioans to Stop Executions called it “inhumane treatment” and urged Gov. Ted Strickland to stop all executions. In an interview, Strickland told The Dispatch that he was “personally satisfied that everything that was done during that process” showed consideration for the inmate. He said the event “is not a justification for a change of position regarding the death penalty in Ohio.” Strickland, who monitored the execution from his Statehouse office, added, “It’s a sad and tragic thing when any human life is lost.”
Terry Collins, director of the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the IV problems were handled in line with procedural changes he made after Clark’s execution. “We told them, ‘Take your time, be comfortable, and do your job,’ ” Collins said.
Dr. Jonathan Groner, trauma medical director at Children’s Hospital and a longtime critic of execution procedures, said the lengthy process equated to “torturing someone to death with needles.” “From a human-rights perspective, it’s not acceptable.”
Newton’s last words, “Boy, I could sure go for some beef stew and a chicken bone,” were apparently a message to friends on Death Row, officials said. Robert K. Lowe, Newton’s public-defender attorney, later read a statement from his client in which Newton apologized to Brewer’s family and said, “If I could take it back, I would.”
