A man on death row spent his final breaths continuing to insist that he was innocent before becoming Florida’s 12th execution of the year on Wednesday afternoon.
David Pittman, 63, was killed by lethal injection without any complications at the Florida state prison near Starke after spending a staggering 34 years waiting on death row.
Pittman spent the hours leading up to his demise with a single unidentified visitor. His final meal consisted of southern comfort classics, including fried chicken, steak and biscuits, according to Florida’s death penalty tracker.
In his final statement to the gallery, Pittman stood by his story that he was wrongly convicted.
“I know you all came to watch an innocent man be murdered by the state of Florida. I am innocent. I didn’t kill anybody. That’s it,” he said.
Just one day before his execution, his appeal to the US Supreme Court requesting a stay was denied.
Pittman was originally convicted in 1991 for slaughtering his wife’s immediate family amid a contentious divorce battle in May 1990. He stabbed her parents to death before turning on their 21-year-old daughter.
He then set the home on fire and absconded in the slain daughter’s car, which he later ditched and set ablaze.
Pittman was positively identified by a witness during his 1991 trial as a person seen sprinting away from the burning car. To seal the deal, a jailhouse informant also testified that Pittman had admitted to the slaughter.
The jury found Pittman guilty on three counts of first-degree murder on top of one count for arson and grand theft, respectively. He was later handed down the death penalty in a swift 9-3 vote.
His appeals centered around apparent errors surrounding his original trial, including disregard for his own intellectual disabilities, spurred by his low 70s IQ.
Pittman’s lawyers asserted that executing him would violate the Constitution’s protection against putting a person with severe mental problems to death.
Still, state attorneys disagreed and decided it was too late for Pittman to claim incompetence years after his trial concluded.
“Pittman’s underlying intellectual disability claim is meritless. He was not intellectually disabled when he murdered the three victims in 1990 or when he went to trial in 1991,” the state attorneys told the US supreme court.
Executions by lethal injection are carried out using a combination of a sedative, paralytic and a drug that stops the heart, according to the state Department of Corrections.
Due to increasingly limited supplies of the necessary drugs, some states have started to consider permitting a new form of execution: death by nitrogen hypoxia.
The highly controversial method consists of pumping the convicts with pure nitrogen gas and forcing them to suffocate.
It hasn’t been approved in Florida, the state with the most executions this year, but it is allowed in Alabama, Louisiana and Mississippi.
Curtis Windom, 59, was put to death in late August in Florida for a grisly triple homicide committed in 1992.
Victor Jones, 64, is scheduled to be executed in Florida on Sept. 30 for killing a married couple during an armed robbery in 1990.
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