03-08-2012, 12:37 PM
in the next hour or so...
about the victim, a good man who put over 60 people through college:
http://www.azcentral.com/video/1494749966001
AZCentral
n Arizona death-row inmate is set to be executed at the state prison in Florence on Thursday in what would be the second execution in the state in eight days.
Robert Charles Towery, 47, is set to be given a lethal injection at 10 a.m., after spending nearly 20 years on death row for killing Mark Jones of Paradise Valley.
Towery's attorneys have made several last-minute arguments in an effort to spare him from the death penalty, including a Wednesday request with the Arizona Supreme Court to reduce his sentence to 25 years to life in prison because Towery's partner in crime spent less than 10 years in prison.
Towery spent the first half of his life not thinking and the last half of his life thinking about the thoughtless act that put him on death row.
During the 1991 armed robbery, he was 27 that year, an ex-con with a raging methamphetamine addiction, a man -- he told his attorneys -- who just reacted to stimuli without reflecting on what he was doing.
"I can't make sense of it," he said at his clemency hearing last week. "It was just one mistake after another. It ended with taking a man's life. I wish I could change it, but I can't."
He did time for running a chop shop. He robbed a restaurant at gunpoint and then planned to rob Mark Jones, an acquaintance who had been kind enough to lend him money.
He knew he didn't have to kill Jones, he told the state clemency board. He just did. He put a plastic zip tie around Jones' neck and pulled it tight until he thought Jones was dead. And when he realized Jones was still breathing, he did it again.
At his trial, prosecutors claimed Towery tried to inject Jones with acid taken from a car battery with a syringe. That's what Towery's accomplice told investigators, though the theory was not proved at trial and has since been questioned.
![[Image: PHP4F4ECA4BB1CB7.jpg]](http://i.azcentral.com/i/sized/7/B/C/e298/j350/PHP4F4ECA4BB1CB7.jpg)
about the victim, a good man who put over 60 people through college:
http://www.azcentral.com/video/1494749966001
AZCentral
n Arizona death-row inmate is set to be executed at the state prison in Florence on Thursday in what would be the second execution in the state in eight days.
Robert Charles Towery, 47, is set to be given a lethal injection at 10 a.m., after spending nearly 20 years on death row for killing Mark Jones of Paradise Valley.
Towery's attorneys have made several last-minute arguments in an effort to spare him from the death penalty, including a Wednesday request with the Arizona Supreme Court to reduce his sentence to 25 years to life in prison because Towery's partner in crime spent less than 10 years in prison.
Towery spent the first half of his life not thinking and the last half of his life thinking about the thoughtless act that put him on death row.
During the 1991 armed robbery, he was 27 that year, an ex-con with a raging methamphetamine addiction, a man -- he told his attorneys -- who just reacted to stimuli without reflecting on what he was doing.
"I can't make sense of it," he said at his clemency hearing last week. "It was just one mistake after another. It ended with taking a man's life. I wish I could change it, but I can't."
He did time for running a chop shop. He robbed a restaurant at gunpoint and then planned to rob Mark Jones, an acquaintance who had been kind enough to lend him money.
He knew he didn't have to kill Jones, he told the state clemency board. He just did. He put a plastic zip tie around Jones' neck and pulled it tight until he thought Jones was dead. And when he realized Jones was still breathing, he did it again.
At his trial, prosecutors claimed Towery tried to inject Jones with acid taken from a car battery with a syringe. That's what Towery's accomplice told investigators, though the theory was not proved at trial and has since been questioned.