Alabama Executes Ax-Murderer in Electric Chair

ATMORE, Ala. (AP) _ A man who broke into the home of a crippled acquaintance and killed him with an ax during a robbery was executed in the electric chair early today.

As Willie Clisby’s 12:01 execution time approached, inmates in the cells above the execution chamber at Holman Prison started banging on the walls and floor. Clisby, 47, sat impassively in the bright-yellow wooden chair.

After indicating he had no last words, his face was covered with a black cloth. As the first jolt of the two-minute electrical surge hit his body, his fists clenched and his body went rigid.

After about 20 seconds, his body relaxed and a small spiral of smoke curled from the electrode attached to his bare left leg.

Clisby was convicted of killing 58-year-old Fletcher Handley, with two chops to the head during a 1979 break-in at his Birmingham home. He stole six old silver-certificate bills, collectors’ items with a face value of $80.

Handley had to use crutches because of a foot injury suffered in a car accident. He had worked with Clisby at a cemetery.

``I just want justice,″ Handley’s son, Fletcher Jr., told The Birmingham News. ``My father was hacked to death while he slept in his bed. He was executed for no reason at all.″

Clisby also was convicted of stabbing his landlady to death earlier in 1979, and was sentenced to a 27-year prison term.

In their final appeals, Clisby’s attorneys argued that the electric chair is illegally cruel. In rejecting a request for a stay, Judge A.L. Edmondson of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said there is no evidence that the disfigurement and burning of a corpse is cruel and unusual punishment.

``It may be unsightly, it might bother other people, but I don’t know that it’s cruel and unusual to the person who’s being executed,″ the judge said.

The U.S. Supreme Court denied a stay in a 7-2 ruling, with justices John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissenting.

Clisby was the 17th person executed in the United States this year and the 274th since the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing states to resume using the death penalty. Clisby was the 11th person executed in Alabama since that decision.