Revision 1455386 of "James Allen Red Dog" on enwikiquote

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The Delaware prisoner was James Allen Red Dog, 39, a Sioux Indian of the Lakota tribe who had refused to appeal his sentence because he contended that doing so would violate his warrior's code.

Mr. Red Dog, who was visited in his final hours by a tribal medicine man from Montana, was executed by injection at the State Correctional Center in Smyrna, 15 miles north of Dover. Just before the lethal mixture of drugs was administered to him, he turned to his weeping wife, who was among the witnesses, and said, "I'm going home, babe."

Mr. Red Dog, a confessed three-time killer, had been relocated to Delaware as a federally protected witness in investigations of the militant American Indian Movement and of prison gangs when, in 1991, he committed the crime for which he was condemned to death. In a drunken rage, he killed a 30-year-old acquaintance, Hugh Pennington, by slitting Mr. Pennington's throat so severely that the victim was virtually decapitated. Immediately afterward he kidnapped and raped a woman.

He later pleaded no contest, saying he had been so drunk at the time that he could not remember anything about his rampage. Mother Sought to Save Him

Shortly before the Delaware execution, John George Brewer, 27, was put to death, also by injection, at the state prison in Florence, Ariz., 50 miles southeast of Phoenix.

Mr. Brewer had admitted beating and strangling his 23-year-old fiancee, Rita Brier, who was 22 weeks pregnant, at their apartment in Flagstaff in 1987. Although he contended that he deserved to be put to death, his mother, Elsie Brewer, struggled in the Federal courts and before a state pardon board to have the sentence commuted.

"I've been trying to prevent him from committing suicide ever since he was a small child," Mrs. Brewer told the Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles at a hearing on Tuesday. "Today I was trying to prevent him from committing suicide again."

But her son told the board, "I committed this crime and I feel it is an appropriate penalty for the crime."

The board agreed with the condemned prisoner, who was executed an hour and a half after the United States Supreme Court, on a vote of 7 to 2, lifted a stay that his mother's lawyers had obtained from a Federal appeals court.

Unlike Mr. Brewer's family, Mr. Red Dog's family supported his decision not to fight his sentence. Mr. Red Dog's relatives said in a statement that he was going to his death with dignity and that he was "proud that he's giving in return for what he took: a life."

The two executions brought to 193 the number of prisoners put to death around the nation since the Supreme Court in 1976 allowed the states to resume capital punishment.

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