Recently, Mississippi State Attorney General Jim Hood has filed a petition to execute Michelle Byrom on Thursday by lethal injection. MSNBC said that Byrom was convicted of hiring someone to murder her husband in 1999.
The case was intriguing on two reasons. One is that two of the 50 people on death row in the state are women, and that the state has executed 19 women in the past two centuries despite putting 794 people to death. Another is that Byrom was not the true murderer of her husband.
MSNBC said Edward Byrom Jr, Michelle's son, confessed to killing his biological father four times. The was documented proof that Byrom Jr killed his father, one in letters to his mother and a confession to a court-appointed psychologist. However, the evidence were not reportedly entered in the trial of the Byrom matriarch. In what seemed to be the most extraordinary twist, Byrom Jr took a plea deal for him to testify against his own mother, and was only given a reduced sentence. MSNBC said he was released later that year.
Byrom's attempts to uphold the evidence in court to earn her a dismissal had fallen on deaf ears when she lost an appeal to the state Supreme Court back in 2006. CNN said that her legal team argued that the judge who has presided over her trial failed to consider her son's confessions and had concealed evidence in the process.
Should the petition follows through, Byrom will be facing death by lethal injection. MSNBC said that the method was considered controversial by critics as the European manufacturer who supply the drugs for the executions has publicly denounced the use of its drugs by the state and vowed to not selling their drugs for that purpose. Although some of the states have used alternative drugs, it has been reported that one of them resulted to an excruciating death of a death row convict, MSNBC said.
