Jackie Willingham was executed by the State of Oklahoma for the murder of Jayne Van Wey
According to court documents Jackie Willingham was selling perfume door to door and was upset that Jayne Van Wey would not buy anything. Later Willingham would see Jayne Van Wey walking through the apartment complex and would drag the woman into a restroom and beat her to death
Jackie Willingham would be arrested, convicted and sentenced to death
Jackie Willingham would be executed by lethal injection on July 24 2003
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When Was Jackie Willingham Executed
Jackie Willingham was executed on July 24 2003
Jackie Willingham Case
Unless the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes, the execution must go on. That’s the decision of Gov. Brad Henry, who announced Friday that he was denying clemency for Comanche County killer Jackie Lee Willingham. The 33-year-old ex-Marine is scheduled to die Thursday for the 1994 beating death of a Lawton woman.
Attorneys for Willingham have filed a request with the U.S. Supreme Court to stop his execution. If clemency had been granted, Willingham’s sentence would have been commuted to life without parole.
The three attorneys on the Oklahoma Pardon and Parole Board had voted on June 25 to recommend clemency. The other two members of the board, a teacher and a former Department of Corrections employee, voted against clemency. In Oklahoma, the governor has the final say on whether clemency should be granted. The Pardon and Parole Board can recommend clemency, after which the governor decides whether or not to grant it. The governor cannot grant clemency if it is not recommended by the board.
In a letter to Patrick Morgan, chairman of the Pardon and Parole Board, Henry said he had met with the state attorney general and his staff as well as with Willingham’s attorney. “After having listened to the presentations and thoroughly reviewing the record in this matter, as well as information presented at the clemency hearing, I have determined that clemency should be denied in this case,” Henry wrote.
Oklahoma City attorney Fred Staggs said jurors should have been given the option to convict Willingham of second-degree murder for what he described as a “depraved mind murder.”
Willingham confessed to killing Jayne Ellen Van Wey, 62, in her Lawton office building Dec. 20, 1994. According to Staggs, three psychologists found that Willingham was symbolically destroying his abusive mother when he attacked Van Wey. According to court documents, Willingham attacked Van Wey inside a restroom of a Lawton office building, hitting and kicking her so severely she choked to death on her own blood.
Willingham is scheduled to be the 13th Oklahoma inmate executed this year. The 12th, Bryan Anthony Toles, is scheduled to die Tuesday for the killings of 39-year-old Juan Franceschi and 15-year-old son Lonnie Franceschi, also in Lawton. Another death row inmate, Harold Loyd McElmurry III, is to be executed July 29 for the murders of 75-year-old Rosa Vivien Pendley and her 80-year-old paraplegic husband, Robert Pendley, in Lenna.
http://www.mcalesternews.com/articles/2003/07/19/news/local_news/news03.txt
