Herman Ashworth was executed by the State of Ohio for the murder of Daniel Baker
According to court documents Herman Ashworth met Daniel Baker at a bar and the two would leave together. Ashworth would beat Baker to death soon after before robbing him. Ashworth would tell police that Baker made a pass at him and he freaked however Herman would tell his girlfriend he killed him so Baker could not identify him in the robbery
Herman Ashworth would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Herman Ashworth would be executed by lethal injection on September 27 2005
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When Was Herman Ashworth Executed
Herman Ashworth was executed on September 27 2005
Herman Ashworth Case
A condemned inmate stayed true to his words all the way to his execution Tuesday, saying he deserved to die for luring a man into an alley where he beat him to death in 1996 for $40. “A life for a life, let it be done and justice will be served,” Herman Dale Ashworth, 32, said in his final statement before being executed by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility for the killing of Daniel Baker.
Ashworth became the fourth death row inmate in Ohio since 1999 to drop his appeals to speed his death sentence. He refused to try any appeals so his adoptive parents could make the trip from his native state, hurricane-ravaged Louisiana, to visit him before his execution.
The 6-foot-4 Ashworth breathed calmly as the execution started, then shook before his breaths became more shallow and rapid. Soon he was motionless, his white Adidas hightops hanging off the gurney’s edge. He was pronounced dead at 10:19 a.m.
Three witnesses for the state, including Samuel Overly, the husband of Baker’s niece, Tangee Overly, sat largely motionless in one room. Ashworth had no witnesses on his behalf. “I can’t lie and say that I’m sorry that this conclusion happened because I’m not,” said Tangee Overly, who waited in the prison during the execution. “Dan was very brutally murdered.”
Carol Wright, a lawyer who served as Ashworth’s standby attorney after he had her and another attorney removed as his legal counsel, described Ashworth as having been at peace in the hours preceding the execution with his choice not to appeal. “He was very resolute. I think he felt good. I think he was very certain of his decision and pleased that it was finally happening,” she said.
Baker, 40, of Newark, about 30 miles east of Columbus, was beaten so badly a deputy coroner said his injuries were consistent with a high-speed traffic accident or plane crash.
Ashworth and Baker, who had never met before, had a few drinks and were walking to a bar in Newark when Ashworth called Baker over to an alley and beat him with his fists and a 6-foot board and kicked him, according to court documents and Ashworth’s interview with police. After beating Baker, Ashworth took about $40 from him and went back to a bar. Ashworth told police that Baker, a divorced father of a then-12-year-old girl, came onto him and he freaked out. His girlfriend at the time, Tanna Brett, testified that Ashworth told her about the beating and said he had to go back to the alley to kill him to prevent Baker from identifying him.
Brett said she thought she persuaded Ashworth to leave Baker alone. However, when she went looking for him later she heard a metal sound coming from the alley and found Baker in a different position near a metal loading dock door. “No mother can sleep at night knowing that her son was murdered in the fashion that my uncle was murdered in,” Overly said after the execution. “My grandparents live with this every day, for the last nine years. And this has brought closure to my family.”
Ohio has now put 17 men to death, two this year, since it resumed executions in 1999 with another volunteer, Wilford Berry.
Before he walked into the death chamber, prison medical technicians in a neighboring room had trouble inserting the shunt into Ashworth’s right arm where the lethal drugs were administered. Workers ran their hands up his right arm looking for another location for the second shunt after the one in his left arm went in easily. Within 10 minutes, they had inserted the shunt. Ashworth stayed calm throughout, talking with workers in the room.
The execution attracted about 120 protesters, mostly Roman Catholic high school and college students from the Cleveland area who paid $25 apiece to charter three buses. They set up sandwich boards outside the prison fence with lists of those executed in Ohio and their pictures. Ashworth’s adoptive parents, James Ashworth and Anna Mae Dalton, were unable to visit with their son before the execution because of Hurricane Rita, which kept them from reaching their flight in Baton Rouge, La., Wright said Monday.
Ashworth stayed up Monday night in an unsuccessful attempt to reach them in Louisiana before the execution, a prisons spokeswoman said. Ashworth told Wright during visits late Monday and early Tuesday that he thought his parents’ absence was for the best, she said.
Wright said she spoke with Ashworth’s parents after the execution. “The one thing Anna said was, ‘I just wish I could’ve been there for him,'” she said.
