Daryl Keith Holton - electric chair volunteer.
Daryl Holton killed his four children, Stephen, 12, Eric, 6, Brent, 10, and their half-sister, Kayla, 4, in a premeditated manner, making it a capital crime.
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He methodically blindfolded them and told them not to peek, as he shot one after the other through the heart in Shelbyville Tennessee on November 30, 1997. He felt it was the correct moral choice: to save them from being brought up with a mother having a history of alcoholism and abuse. He turned himself in an hour after the murders.
In 1992, Holton left the military, where he had served largely in the Gulf War, to return to the United States. He wanted to take custody of his three boys and a girl. However, his wife, Crystle won custody.
Then in early 1997, she disappeared for several months, without contacting him until November.
Holton got to spend an afternoon with the children on November 30, 1997 and took them to an amusement park, and a McDonalds before taking them home, where he shot them with an assault rifle. He then turned himself in at the nearest police station.
At his June 1999 trial, Holton declined to testify on his own behalf, although his attorney sought to convince the jury that Holton was mentally incompetent at the time of the killings. Holton was found guilty and sentenced to death.
During his time on death row, Holton became something of a legal expert, and took steps to avoid the automatic and voluntary appeals process afforded to all condemned prisoners under state and U.S. law. He also declined to cooperate with federally and state appointed capital defenders who sought to offer him legal assistance and counsel. qp
Daryl Holton, 45, chose the electric chair over a lethal injection. "You have a lot of argument nowadays that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment, by a number of my neighbors in here on death row -- at least by their attorneys," Holton told the New York Times.
"To be honest with you, they are both probably effective and painless methods of execution." "I'm using the word 'probably' because any evidence regarding that is going to be hearsay," he said. "It's rare that someone lives to tell about how an execution felt."
By now 45 years old, Holton was put to death in Tennessee’s electric chair at the Riverbend Maximum Security Institution on Wednesday September 12, 2007.
After a microphone check, Warden Ricky Bell asked, "Do you have any last words?" And Holton replied, "Yes. Two words. I do."
Holton appeared disoriented as he entered the execution chamber, and there was speculation that he'd been medicated, but Corrections Department spokeswoman Dorinda Carter said Holton had hyperventilated and the warden gave him time to catch his breath. As he did so, the condemned man also settled himself into the chair as best he could while strapped like a parachutist with buckles about his abdomen and straps holding his wrists to the arms of the chair.
He had breathed deeply and then yawned. He shook his legs and Bell pointed to Holton's ankles and an officer made an adjustment there for electrical connections.
After his statement, a large, brown sponge was withdrawn from a bucket of saline solution and placed under the leather helmet on Holton's head. Liquid dribbled across his face and to his shirt. He reacted as if the liquid was cold and when guards blotted his chest with towels he told them not to worry about it, that it wouldn't matter anyway.
A dark charcoal gray cloth was snapped to the helmet to cover his face.
At 1:15 a.m. a cable was screwed into the base of the electric chair.
A minute later a 20-second-long current of electricity was sent through Holton's body. Muscles stiffened to straighten legs and spine in one line as much as possible given the restraints and, as a result, he rose up from the seat. It was 1:16 a.m. A second jolt of 15 seconds was administered after a 2-second pause.
Holton's body was pale throughout his time in the death chamber except for his fingers that were pink, seemingly from tension, but he'd not fully grasped the arms of the chair.
He was pronounced dead at 1.25 am and the warden announced "This concludes the legal execution of Daryl Holton."
In front of the prison, attorney David Raybin said his client "is free of the demons that haunted him. He had made a conscious choice to abandon appeals, but not the legal system.
"In the end he wanted to be represented by an attorney," Raybin said.
"He walked to the chair with dignity," Holton's lawyer said.
A statement from Holton's ex-wife, Crystle Holton, mother of the four children killed by Holton nearly 10 years ago, was read to the media: "Today, all the anger, hatred, and a long time of nightmares, can finally leave me." She thanked close friends, relatives, and the Attorney General's Office for their support. She also expressed sorrow for Holton's mother who "now is dealing with the death of her own son" after having lost
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