Mississippi executes the murder of a convicted felon, the first since 2012 by Reuters

(Reuters) – An Mississippi man shot dead his wife and sexually assaulted his stepdaughter in an eight-hour clash with police on Wednesday, 2010, local media reported.

David Cox, who was removed from office by his lawyer in 2018 and dismissed appeals in the case, saying he deserved the death penalty, was the first prisoner to be executed in Mississippi in nine years.

He died at 6:12 p.m. (0012 GMT Thursday) at the Mississippi State Prison in Parchman, the Clarion-Ledger newspaper reported.

The convicted man, in his final words, said, “I want to tell my children that I love them very, very much and that I was a good man at one time,” Burl Cain, the Mississippi Department of Corrections Commissioner, said in the paper.

Cox was the first prisoner to be executed in Mississippi since 2012 and the ninth to be executed in the United States in 2021. Mississippi is among the U.S. states that have been struggling lately with pharmaceutical companies that don’t want to supply them for executions to buy lethal injection drugs.

Cox asked the Mississippi Supreme Court to remove all lawyers from the case and dismiss all appeals on his behalf. In 2018, Cox wrote a letter to the chief justice of the court saying he was “a guilty man deserving of death.”

On May 14, 2010, Cox bought a gun and moved to his brother-in-law’s Sherman in Mississippi, where his wife Kim, their two children, and their stepdaughter lived. Cox shot home and took his wife and two children hostage for more than eight hours, the prosecutor said.

Competing with police, Cox shot his wife in the stomach and arm. While he was dying for several hours, he sexually assaulted his stepdaughter three times in front of her.

He also refused medical treatment to his wife and forced her to kidnap the negotiator who was forced to beg for her life, court documents have shown.

Police entered the home early the next morning and arrested Cox. He was sentenced by a jury to death in 2012 on eight counts, including capital murder, after pleading guilty.