John David Duty

John David Duty (April 25, 1952 – December 16, 2010) was an American who was executed in Oklahoma for first-degree murder. According to the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, he was the first person in the United States to have been put to death with pentobarbital. A nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental led the state to incorporate the substitution into its protocol for lethal injections. Duty said that he had been raised in a broken home, his mother having remarried twice. His family included two brothers, a sister, a half-brother and a half-sister. For some time, Duty went by the name of John David Hall; there had been some confusion over the identity of his biological father as his mother had married O.H. Hall at Atoka, Oklahoma, in 1950, but his birth certificate listed Duty as his surname. According to Duty, he lost an eye due to an accident in the third grade and suffered a head injury from a collapsed brick wall; the latter incident led him to be hospitalized for scarlet fever. The two men drove off to Frederick, then Electra, and proceeded to Fort Worth. Upon hearing a radio report about her on the next day, Duty said, "I was surprised that she was still alive."

Prison murder On December 13, 2001, officials at the penitentiary placed 22-year-old Curtis J. Wise Jr. in the same cell with Duty. Wise had been convicted in October 1999 of burglary, larceny and contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

On December 19, Duty offered Wise some cigarettes in exchange for allowing himself to be tied up to make the guards think that he had been taken hostage, with the goal of having Duty transferred into administrative security. The prosecutor's report stated that after tying Wise's hands and feet behind his back, Duty strangled him to death with a shoelace. Duty then wrote a letter to Wise's mother, Mary, in which he wrote, "Well by the time you get this letter you will already know that your son is dead. I know now because I just killed him an hour ago. Gee you'd think I'd be feeling some remorse but I'm not."

Appeals In 2004, Duty filed an appeal with the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals. He cited the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Ring v. Arizona, arguing against the constitutionality of his "continuing threat" being used as an aggravating circumstance for his death sentence. However, the court noted that the issue was not raised by Duty during trial and upheld his judgement on April 23, 2004.

Death penalty debate

The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty used Duty's case to argue that capital punishment had actually set a dangerous precedent of encouraging a murder, rather than deterring it. Though the group never questioned Duty's guilt, they cited his premeditation in killing Wise, followed by his guilty plea and request for the death penalty, as an example of exploiting the system to effectively turn the state into "an agent of suicide".