Few Protest Planned Nevada Execution

The Far West’s first execution in more than six years is set to take place here Friday morning, but the event has generated scant emotion in this frontier state, where even the condemned man has argued that it would be pointless to postpone his scheduled death by lethal injection.

No last-minute appeals for mercy are expected in the case of killer Carroll Edward Cole.

Given Cole’s determination to die, not even the American Civil Liberties Union, which routinely and heatedly challenges executions elsewhere, plans to intervene in his behalf, either with the courts or the Nevada Board of Pardon.

“This case looks like it’s going to be our exception,” said ACLU national board member Richard Siegel. “Mr. Cole seems convincing and sober; there is really no way we can effectively argue that he doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

A former California resident, Cole, 47, was convicted in Texas of strangling three Dallas women in 1980 and sentenced to life in prison. He was later extradited to Nevada and ordered to die for murdering two Las Vegas women in the late 1970s.

With the exception of Texas, where six accused murderers were put to death this year alone, the last execution in the West took place here on Oct. 22, 1979. On that day, Jesse Walter Bishop, an avowed professional robber from Garden Grove, Calif., went to the gas chamber for murdering a honeymooning Baltimore, Md., man during a Las Vegas casino holdup.

Like Cole, Bishop steadfastly opposed last-minute appeal motions brought in his behalf by court-appointed public defenders, insisting he would rather die than be imprisoned once more after having spent nearly half of his 46 years behind bars.

Bishop’s execution produced large demonstrations and considerable outcry in Nevada from those opposed to the death penalty.

In contrast, Cole’s impending death has attracted comparatively little attention. A handful of local religious leaders and civil libertarians comprising a hastily formed group, “Nevadans Against the Death Penalty,” plan a one-hour vigil outside the gates of the state’s maximum-security prison, where Cole is to die at 2 a.m. Friday.

“The reason you don’t see a whole lot of outrage or attention here is because there’s been a change in the mood of the country,” said Jerry Fairchild, a Republican assemblyman from Las Vegas who once proposed that Nevada convicts wear bull’s-eyes stitched on their prison clothes to dissuade them from escape attempts. “Death is a deterrent to crime. In this particular case, it’s a very appropriate sentence.”

Cole has confessed to 13 murders and once told a psychiatrist that he killed 35 people, all but one of them women, whom he usually picked up in cocktail lounges.

Cole, who was born in Iowa but moved to California as a boy, told the Associated Press in an interview that he committed his first murder at age 8 when he drowned a playmate in Richmond, Calif., because the boy had made fun of him. The death, he said, was ruled an accident.

He was arrested several times as a teen-ager, joined the Navy in the late 1950s and was given a bad conduct discharge in 1958. He was committed to Napa State Hospital in 1960 after telling authorities that he had an overwhelming urge to kill women. Cole spent 90 days in therapy groups at the hospital before being released.

Cole said three of his victims were from San Diego, including his estranged wife, Diana Cole. However, San Diego authorities ruled out murder in each of the three cases, saying that the deaths were related to overdoses of alcohol.

A small man (5-foot-6) with tattooed arms and a face that one prison official likened to Clark Gable, Cole told a reporter last week, “I just messed up my life so bad that I just don’t care to go on.” Cole explained that he killed women seeking revenge against his mother, who he said abused him as a child and forced him not to tell his father about her affairs with other men.

Letter to Newspaper

In a letter this year to the Reno Gazette-Journal, Cole berated those who urged him to appeal his murder convictions.

“Does the public want to waste money by prolonging the life of a person who, eventually will be put to death anyway,?!” Cole wrote. “Why prolong a despicable person’s life who acted as judge, jury and executioner to the people he murdered without regard to the victims?”

Cole’s execution will be the 50th in the United States since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 after a hiatus of four years. All but three of the previous 49 executions have been in the South.

Sometime today, Cole is expected to leave for the last time his cell on Death Row, where 29 other men await similar fates. His wrists and ankles chained, he will walk outside about 100 yards and climb 32 steel steps to the prison’s “last night cell,” a 7-by-7-foot cubicle that holds a cot, a toilet and a wash basin.

There, he will spend his final hours looking at television while guards watch him to prevent any suicide attempts. The cell is less than 20 paces from the old but freshly painted gas chamber where Bishop and 31 others died.

Lethal Injection Instead

Gone is the chair that Bishop and the others were lashed to so that cyanide pellets could be dropped into buckets of acid below them. The state Assembly did away with gassing last year, voting that death by lethal injection is more humane.

Accordingly, Cole will be strapped to a padded wooden table.

Three volunteers from the prison staff will then inject him with a lethal mixture of undisclosed drugs intended to kill painlessly and in less than a minute.

Prison warden Harol L. Whitley said Wednesday that Cole has begun giving away his personal possessions to other Death Row inmates. Whitley noted that Cole had not indicated what he would like for the condemned man’s traditional last meal.

“We’ll give him whatever he wants within reason,” Whitley said.

Cole has agreed to let doctors examine his brain after his execution to see whether there is a physical cause for his murderous rages.