German Citizen Is Executed, Despite Pleas From Abroad

Despite pleas from the German government, a German citizen was executed Wednesday in a cloud of cyanide fumes--a week after his brother was put to death for the same crime.

Walter LaGrand, 37, died in the gas chamber for his role in the 1982 murder of a bank manager. His brother, Karl, 35, was executed Feb. 24 by lethal injection.

“To all my loved ones, I hope they find peace,” Walter LaGrand said. “To all of you here today, I forgive you and I hope I can be forgiven in my next life.”

LaGrand was pronounced dead 18 minutes after cynanide pellets were dropped into a pan of distilled water and sulfuric acid below his seat in the chamber.

As mist rose, he began coughing, shook his head and gagged several times. Minutes later, his head slumped forward. He coughed again, raised his head and slumped forward.

Both brothers chose the gas chamber in hopes that courts would rule that the method is cruel and unusual punishment and therefore unconstitutional.

In both cases, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted a federal appeals court’s restraining order barring Arizona from the execution.

Karl LaGrand accepted the state’s last-minute offer of lethal injection. Walter LaGrand rejected such an offer and said he would prefer a more painful execution in the gas chamber to protest the death penalty.

The case drew widespread attention in Germany, which has no death penalty, prompting repeated diplomatic protests.

Walter LaGrand’s case also was heard Wednesday in the International Court of Justice in The Hague, Netherlands. Germany asked the World Court to intervene after Arizona Gov. Jane Dee Hull rejected appeals from German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder and Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer to stop the execution.

The World Court has no enforcement powers, but in a special half-hour hearing, Judge Christopher Weeramantry of Sri Lanka urged the U.S. government to use “all the measures at its disposal” to prevent the execution.

The court also said the United States should pay unspecified damages for the death of Karl LaGrand, who was the first German citizen executed in the United States since World War II.

The brothers were born in Augsburg, Germany, and moved to southern Arizona as children after their mother married an American serviceman.

The last time Arizona executed an inmate in the gas chamber, in 1992, his death took 11 minutes and was considered so gruesome that the law was changed to require lethal injection. Killers sentenced to death before 1992, like the LaGrands, are given a choice.