Source: The Atlantic
“Strapped to a gurney, two body lengths from where I sat behind thick glass and a curtain, Ricky Ray Rector groaned each time his executioner jabbed a lethal needle into his beefy arm. Once. Twice. Again and again and again—for 20 minutes, the cop-killer whimpered before I watched him die.
Earlier that day, January 24, 1992, then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton had left the presidential campaign trail to be home for Rector’s execution. State law did not require the governor’s presence, but politics did: Clinton wanted to raise his national profile and reverse the Democratic Party’s soft-on-crime image.”
