Last-Minute Appeals Denied in Montana Execution of Killer

A man who raped and murdered a schoolteacher awaited lethal injection early today in the first execution in 52 years in a state that was legendary for dispensing swift frontier justice.

Duncan McKenzie Jr., 43, was to be put to death shortly after midnight, barring intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Gov. Marc Racicot, a former state attorney general, refused Tuesday to grant clemency. Ninety minutes later, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request for a stay of execution, leaving the U.S. Supreme Court as McKenzie’s last hope.

McKenzie was convicted of the 1974 kidnaping and murder of 23-year-old Lana Harding, a teacher in a one-room rural school near the town of Conrad in Montana’s wheat country. He denied killing her.

The last person put to death in Montana was Philip Coleman, hanged on Sept. 10, 1943, for murdering a railroad foreman who had hired him days earlier.

In 20 years of fighting his death sentence, McKenzie avoided eight scheduled executions.

Pleading for mercy in a meeting Monday with the governor, McKenzie said he felt sorry for the Harding family. But he added: “I can’t come to you and beg forgiveness for something that I didn’t do.”

In refusing to stay the execution, the 9th Circuit cited a 1990 decision rejecting an Arizona prisoner’s claim that a lengthy death row stay amounted to cruel and unusual punishment.