Barring last-minute intervention, the state of Mississippi is set to execute Charles Ray Crawford Wednesday evening.
For decades, the 59-year-old has pursued appeals across state and federal courts challenging his death sentence as well as a separate aggravated assault and rape case. As of midday Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court had not announced whether it would hear Crawford’s case and stay the execution.
Crawford was convicted of capital murder in 1994 for taking 20-year-old Kristie Ray from her family’s Tippah County home to a wooden cabin where he handcuffed and raped her and stabbed her in the chest.
As of this year, 37 executions have been carried out around the country, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. Crawford’s planned execution will be the third in the U.S. this week, following Tuesday executions in Florida and Missouri. Six more are scheduled through the end of the year.
Ray’s mother, Mary Ray, told the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal after years of waiting, she is glad that Crawford’s execution will happen.
“We are not vengeful people; we just want justice for our daughter,” she said.
Over the years and the days leading up to the execution, her mother, family and friends shared pictures of Kristie on social media and set them as their Facebook profile pictures.
On Monday, Republican Gov. Tate Reeves denied Crawford clemency because of the nature of the crime and because he had never claimed innocence. This execution will be the fourth Reeves has declined to block since he’s been in office: one in 2021, another in 2022 and the last in June of this year.
“Mississippi is praying for Ms. Ray and her family,” Reeves said in a Monday statement. “Justice must be served on behalf of victims. In Mississippi, it will be.”
At the time of the killing, Crawford was out on bond and days away from another trial for the rape of a teenage girl and assault of another one in the same county. Members of his family and a former attorney testified how they contacted law enforcement because they feared Crawford was committing another crime, which led to his arrest in Ray’s death.
Charles Crawford Credit: Mississippi Department of CorrectionsCrawford has said he didn’t remember the killing and that he experienced blackouts. But after his arrest, he showed law enforcement where to find Ray’s body. He said he experienced similar blackouts for the earlier assault and rape.
In a petition to the U.S. Supreme Court, Crawford’s attorneys argued his trial attorney conceded his guilt to the jury and told jurors during the closing arguments that he was “legally responsible” for the crimes and “still dangerous to the community.”
They argued it was a Sixth Amendment violation of the accused’s right to defense because the attorneys made the concessions against Crawford’s repeated objections, according to court records.
After the nation’s high court declined to take up his case in 2014, the Mississippi attorney general’s office asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution. But the justices did not set one because Crawford was appealing his rape conviction, which prosecutors considered an aggravating factor when pursuing the death penalty.
In post-conviction motions, he argued that reversing the conviction would invalidate his death sentence and require him to be resentenced.
Crawford has been part of a few lawsuits challenging the use of certain drugs in executions. The most recent and ongoing lawsuit filed in July of this year is a federal class action with four other death row inmates challenging the Mississippi Department of Correction’s three-drug lethal injection protocol.
In a separate federal lawsuit challenging the drugs used in Mississippi, U.S. District Judge Henry Wingate allowed the executions of two of the plaintiffs to proceed: that of Richard Jordan and Thomas Loden.
Starting Wednesday afternoon in the hour before the execution, death penalty opponents plan to stand in front of the Governor’s Mansion in Jackson and some will demonstrate outside the main gate of Parchman.
Anti-death penalty organizations circulated petitions against Crawford’s execution that together have received over 1,000 signatures. Death Penalty Action’s petition was delivered to the governor’s office Tuesday.
Last week, Mississippi prison reform advocate Mitzi Magleby and the Rev. Jeff Hood, a spiritual adviser to death row prisoners, spoke out in front of the Mississippi Supreme Court to call on Gov. Reeves and the state to stop pursuing executions, which they said are part of a system built on vengeance.
They said Crawford should be held accountable for Ray’s death, but that can be done by having him serve life without parole. Both have spoken with Crawford and said they have found a changed man who works a prison job and has stayed out of trouble during his incarceration.
“We are not God,” Magleby said about carrying out death sentences. “Mississippi is not God. We are humans who are not supposed to kill other human beings … The death of Charles Crawford will do nothing to heal anyone. It will do nothing to make the state of Missisisppi any safer than it is now.”
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