Capital punishments are given to convicts who have committed heinous crimes and for the first time in 15 years, the Indiana Supreme Court has released the date for its first state execution.
Wednesday, the court ordered Joseph Corcoran to be executed on December 18 before sunrise.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, the last time Indiana had a state execution was in 2009 and it was Mathew Wrinkles who was executed for killing his wife, her wife’s brother and sister-in-law.
The long-awaited pause was due to unavailability of drugs for lethal injections.
Eric Holcomb, the governor of Indiana stated in June that the State Department of correction had received the sedative pentobarbital, a drug which many states use in lethal injections. After the acquisition of the drug, a date had to be set for the execution of Joseph Corcoran.
In July 1997, Joseph was convicted for the murder of his brother James Corcoran and other three individuals namely, Douglas A. Stillwell, Robert Scott Turner and Timothy Bricker.
Joseph has been on death roll since 1999 and he exhausted his appeals in 2016.
Joseph Corcoran in his defense, argued the execution will be unconstitutional because he suffers from a mental illness and that the state had failed to disclose its execution protocol.
