Tuan Nguyen was executed by the State of Oklahoma for a triple murder
According to court documents Tuan Nguyen would fatally stab his wife Donna Nguyen, and her young relatives, 3-year-old Amanda White and 6-year-old Joseph White.
Tuan Nguyen would be arrested four years later, convicted and sentenced to death
Tuan Nguyen would be executed by lethal injection on December 10 1998
Tuan Nguyen Photos
Tuan Nguyen Case
A Vietnamese immigrant convicted of killing two children and his wife was executed early today, his 39th birthday and International Human Rights Day.
Tuan Anh Nguyen died by injection at 12:18 a.m. at Oklahoma State Penitentiary. The U.S. Supreme Court hours earlier had denied two appeals on his behalf.
“I, I, I… There’s nothing to say,” Nguyen said when asked if he had any last words. He was silent and still with only a few cheek and jaw movements during the execution process, which took six minutes from the time the drugs were administered.
Nguyen, the 12th condemned killer put to death in Oklahoma since 1977, came to America as a teen-age refugee during the fall of Saigon. His defense attorney had disputed his sanity and fitness for execution
He was convicted of killing his estranged wife, Donna Nguyen, 20, and her young relatives, Amanda White, 3, and Joseph White, 6. The Nguyens’ infant son was found unharmed in his crib at the Tulsa duplex where the three others were fatally stabbed in 1982.
“Justice will finally be served even though it has been slow,” said Joseph and Myra White of Freetown, Ind., and Susie Barthlow of Columbus, Ind. “For 16 years we have waited for this day to come.” Donna Nguyen was Barthlow’s daughter.
The Whites, parents of the children, and Barthlow witnessed the execution.
Nguyen received the death sentence for the slayings of the two children. He saw no visitors Wednesday and did not request a special last meal.
About 25 protesters gathered outside the gate in a slow evening rain, holding candles and singing hymns and Christmas carols
San Nguyen, a chaplain for the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Department, said the children’s deaths made it a particularly horrid crime, but he thinks death was too harsh a punishment for Nguyen, who is not a relative.
“I think he should be forgiven,” he said.
Defense attorney Pete Silva, who represented Nguyen at trial in 1986, said the execution would compound the tragedy of the crime. “It serves no purpose,” Silva said. “It does not bring back the deceased, and it does not serve as a deterrent
In Oklahoma City, a small group of protesters held a quiet vigil outside the Governor’s Mansion.
Kevin Acers, head of the Oklahoma City chapter of Amnesty International, said what Nguyen did was awful. But, he said, “When our state officials, in a very calm and calculating manner, plan and carry out a homicide like this, it’s deplorable.”
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said Nguyen should have received some leniency because of his unpolished English skills and lack of knowledge about the U.S. legal system.
Robert Whittaker, assistant attorney general for Oklahoma, said the claims of incompetency were years late in the appellate process and were unsubstantiated by the prison warden
