A Mississippi man who pleaded guilty to raping and killing a 16-year-old girl is scheduled to be sentenced to death Wednesday night. He will become the second inmate executed in Mississippi in 10 years.
Thomas Edwin Loden, 58, has been on death row at Mississippi’s Parchman prison since 2001, receiving lethal injections after he was convicted of murder, rape and four counts of sexual assault. Lisa Marie Gray.
In a late-night decision on Dec. 7, a federal judge refused to block Loden and four other Mississippi death row inmates from carrying out executions in Mississippi while trials continue over the state’s lethal injection protocol. The most recent execution in Mississippi was in November 2021.
The summer of Gray’s senior year of high school, he worked as a waitress at his uncle’s restaurant in northeast Mississippi. On June 22, 2000, he left work after dark and got a flat tire on a country road.
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FILE – In this May 25, 2022 photo released by the Mississippi Department of Corrections, Thomas Edwin Loden Jr. is shown receiving a lethal injection Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022, at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, Mississippi. He has been on death row since he was convicted in 2001 of murder, rape and four counts of sexual assault on 16-year-old Lisa Marie Gray.
(Mississippi Department of Corrections via AP, File)
A Marine Corps recruiter named Loden, along with his loved ones, encountered Gray on the road around 10:45 p.m. “Don’t worry. I’m a Marine. We do things like this,” he said.
Loden told investigators he became angry after Gray told him he never wanted to be a Marine, and ordered him into his van. He sexually assaulted her for four hours before strangling her, according to an interview with investigators.
Court records show that on the afternoon of June 23, 2000, “Loden was found lying on the side of the road with the words ‘I’m sorry’ carved into his chest and with obvious injuries to his wrists.”
After pleading guilty in September 2001, Lowden told Gray’s friends and family at his sentencing: “I hope that when you leave here today you will have some sense of justice.”
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FILE – The front gate of the jail in Parchman, Mississippi is shown on Nov. 17, 2021. Thomas Edwin Loden Jr., 58, receives a lethal injection Wednesday, Dec. 14, 2022, at a correctional facility. .
(AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis, File)
Gray’s mother, Wanda Farris, described her daughter as a “happy, always smiling” teenager who aspired to become an elementary school teacher.
“He wasn’t perfect, come to think of it,” Farris said. “But he tried to do the right thing.”
Farris plans to attend Wednesday’s execution.
In 2015, attorneys at the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center sued Mississippi’s prison system on behalf of two death row inmates, saying the state’s lethal injection protocol was inhumane. Loden and two other Mississippi death row inmates later joined as plaintiffs.
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Staff walked out of the front gate of a prison in Parchman, Mississippi, on Monday, as Gov. Tate Reeves said he would take steps to close part of the prison after a series of deaths and unsanitary conditions.
(AP)
The Mississippi Department of Corrections revealed in court documents in July 2021 that it purchased three drugs for its lethal injection protocol: midazolam, a sedative; vecuronium bromide, which paralyzes muscles; and potassium chloride, a cardiac arrester.
MacArthur Center attorney Jim Craig said at a November hearing that since 2019, Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Tennessee alone have had three executions using drug protocols.
According to the Death Penalty Information Center, 27 states have the death penalty. According to Craig, most death penalty states and the federal government used a three-drug protocol in 2008, but the federal government and most of those states have since switched to a single-drug protocol.
In November, Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey moved to halt executions and ordered a “top-to-bottom” overhaul of the state’s death penalty system after a series of botched lethal injections.
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A week before Loden was scheduled to be executed, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate ruled that the execution could be carried out pending trial. He wrote that the US Supreme Court upheld the three-drug lethal injection protocol in a case in Oklahoma seven years ago.
Lawyers for Loden did not respond to requests for comment.
36 prisoners were sentenced to death in Mississippi. The death penalty movement, which opposes the death penalty, held a news conference outside the state Capitol in Jackson on Tuesday to voice its opposition to Loden’s execution.
“Obviously, something drove him to commit such a heinous crime,” said Mitzi Magleby, the Mississippi chapter of Ignite Justice, a criminal justice reform group. “Mr. Loden was immediately remorseful. Shouldn’t there be room for grace and mercy in a situation like this?”
Farris told The Associated Press on Friday that he forgave Loden years ago, but didn’t believe he would apologize.
“I don’t particularly want anybody to die,” Farris said. “But I believe in the death penalty…I believe in justice.”