United States: Joseph Corcoran of Indiana was executed on Wednesday for the 1997 murders of four people which sadly included his brother and his sister’s fiancé. He was almost 49 years old and was put to death in the Indiana State Prison already in Michigan City, Indiana.
This was Indiana’s first execution since 1983 and the twenty-fourth in the United States this year. Corcoran was pronounced dead at almost 12:44 a.m. CST. He was planned also to be put to death with a strong chemical known as pentobarbital, though this point was not stated by authorities.
The shooting suspect, Corcoran, was under stress earlier as his sister will soon get married, meaning she would move out of the home in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where Corcoran lives with his brother and sister, court records show.
In an interview with authorities while in jail charged for those killings, he claimed to have killed his parents in Steuben County, northern Indiana in 1992, charges that were dropped.
The execution on Wednesday comes after the Republican Governor, Eric Holcomb, who came to power in January announced in June that he plans to carry out state executions after they were put on hold for 15 years due to problems accessing a lethal injection drug.
The state offered little information as to the mechanics of the execution and no member of the fourth estate was allowed to watch the process under the existing state laws. Still, Corcoran selected a reporter for the Indiana Capital Chronicle as one of his witnesses.
Two states, Indiana and Wyoming, do not permit journalists to observe the state’s executions of its death penalty, based on a list compiled by Death Penalty Information Center.
For years, Corcoran’s attorneys had appealed for his death penalty sentence on the grounds that he was severely mentally ill and hence could not make rational decisions. In the state Supreme Court this month, his lawyers also failed to persuade it to stay his execution.