High Court Lifts Stay of Execution for Condemned Arizona Murderer

The U.S. Supreme Court on Saturday lifted a stay that had blocked the scheduled execution of a triple murderer, which would be Arizona’s first execution in 29 years.

The Arizona Board of Pardons and Paroles will hold a clemency hearing today for Donald Eugene Harding. It is the last step before he could be executed Monday, said Assistant Atty. Gen. Jack Roberts.

After the hearing, required by state law, the board could recommend a reprieve or that his sentence be commuted to life in prison, or it could do nothing. Gov. Fife Symington would not be bound by the board’s recommendation, but he cannot intervene unless the board recommends that he do so.

Symington has said he supports the death penalty, but he has not commented on Harding’s case.

The state attorney general’s office on Friday asked the nation’s high court to lift the stay issued Thursday night by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco.

The high court lifted the stay on a 7-2 vote, with Justices John Paul Stevens and Harry A. Blackmun dissenting.

Harding’s execution is scheduled for early Monday. He was convicted in 1982 of killing two businessmen during a 1980 robbery in a Tucson hotel. They were tied, beaten and shot.

Harding, 43, also was sentenced to death for killing a third man in a similar manner in a Phoenix motel room the day before the Tucson murders. That sentence is in the earlier stages of appeal.

Prosecutors say evidence and Harding’s own admissions link him to at least two other slayings, both in California.