James French | |
|---|---|
&sq=&lang=&file=File:James_French.png) French's 1965 mugshot photo. | |
| Born | James Donald French June 16, 1936 |
| Died | August 10, 1966 (aged 30) Oklahoma State Penitentiary, McAlester, Oklahoma, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Execution by electrocution |
| Criminal status | Executed |
| Conviction(s) | First degree murder (2 counts) |
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James Donald French (June 16, 1936[a] – August 10, 1966) was an American double murderer who was the last person executed under Oklahoma's death penalty laws prior to Furman v. Georgia, which suspended capital punishment in the United States from 1972 until 1976.
French was convicted of the 1961 murder of Eddie Lee Shelton, his cellmate, while he was serving a sentence of life imprisonment for a separate 1958 murder of a motorist named Frank Boone. French ultimately faced trial three times for Shelton's murder, with his sentence being overturned twice; French requested a death sentence and waived his appeals, fighting multiple efforts from attorneys hired by third parties to spare his life despite application of the death penalty otherwise being at a near standstill in Oklahoma and the United States as a whole.
Aside from being the final person executed in Oklahoma before the Furman v. Georgia ruling, French was the third-to-last person executed in the United States prior to the ruling, surpassed only by Aaron Mitchell in California and Luis Monge in Colorado, who were respectively executed in April 1967 and June 1967. French was the only person executed in the United States in 1966.[1]
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- ^ White, Welsh S. (15 July 1991). The Death Penalty in the Nineties: An Examination of the Modern System of Capital Punishment. University of Michigan Press. pp. 178–179. ISBN 978-0472064618. Archived from the original on 18 March 2015. Retrieved 25 July 2019.