BILLY MIZE, ROT IN HELL!

Even if you don’t agree with the death penalty, you have to smile a little when a white supremacist gets executed. You might want to consider rolling on the floor laughing when you learn what got William Mark Mize the needle in Georgia. We got a two for one deal because Mize, the leader of something called the National Vastilian Aryan Party, ordered wannabe member Eddie Tucker and others to burn down a crack house in Athens, Ga, and when he didn’t do it, one of those others told Mize they didn’t need anyone around who wasn’t going to follow orders. To that end Mize made Eddie Tucker go away, courtesy of a few shotgun blasts to the back, chest and head. Now he’s gone to join Tucker, and considering not too many people ever heard of the National Vastilian Aryan Party, and we never spoke of them until now, it is safe to assume that killing each other is pretty much about as good as it gets for this crew.

Athens Banner-Herald

JACKSON – William Mark Mize said he was ready to die Wednesday evening, moments before the state executed the 52-year-old white supremacist for a 1994 murder in Oconee County.

His last appeals denied Wednesday by state and federal courts, Mize was put to death by lethal injection at the maximum security prison where he has been on death row for more than a decade.

Mize died at 7:28 p.m., about 13 minutes after prison officials began injecting him, through the left arm, with a deadly dose of drugs.

It was the second time the state has executed a prisoner this year.

Strapped to a gurney inside the death chamber, Mize gave his final words in front of prison officials and 18 witnesses, including representatives of Mize and his victim, Eddie Tucker, reporters and local officials from Oconee County.

“I’m ready,” a gray-haired Mize said before a final prayer was read and the injection began. He did not struggle during the execution, keeping his eyes mostly to the ceiling, his breathing eventually quickening and then stopping. One of his attorneys trembled and cried softly at one point as the other leaned forward and lowered his head.

While Mize’s final moments were not turbulent, the former Ku Klux Klansman in his final statement maintained his innocence, called the victim his friend and lashed out at the officials who put him in prison.

“Eddie Tucker was a friend of mine,” he said. “I pray for his soul. I saw him killed by another friend of mine.”

Mize called his execution – 13 years after he asked the Oconee County jury that convicted him for the death penalty – a “travesty of justice” and said a court had never properly heard his case.

The Oconee County sheriff “set this up as a tirade” against him by planting and falsifying evidence, he said.

Mize then said he had made peace with God and thanked his legal team.

Relatives of Mize and his victim attended the execution, but declined to be interviewed Wednesday evening.

About a dozen protesters from Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty gathered at the prison’s entrance shortly before his scheduled 7 p.m. execution time.

Though, as a former Klansman, Mize is not the most sympathetic subject for anti-death penalty protesters, members of Georgians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty still needed to be there, said Sara Totonchi, the group’s chairwoman.

“We strongly believe that a person’s life is worth more than the worst thing he ever did,” Totonchi said. “The state of Georgia taking a life in our name brings no healing, brings no justice and is simply vengeance.”

Mize, an Atlanta native, was convicted in 1995 of murdering Tucker, of Hull, in October 1994.

At the time of the murder, Mize lived in Madison County, where prosecutors said he and some electrician coworkers were trying to start a Klan-like group called the National Vastilian Aryan Party.

On Oct. 15, 1994, a few members of the group – and Tucker, who had applied to join – went into the woods in Northwestern Oconee County, supposedly to camp, after Tucker and another group member failed to follow Mize’s orders to burn down a purported crack house in Athens.

Mize killed Tucker with a shotgun blast, prosecutors said.

Mize was the first of four NVAP members originally charged with Tucker’s murder to go on trial. Prosecutors pegged him as the leader of the group and the person who ordered Tucker’s death.

Two other members, Chris Hattrup and Terry Mark Allen, pleaded guilty to the crime and now are serving life sentences in prison. Charges were dropped against the fourth, Mize’s then-girlfriend, in exchange for her testimony against Mize.

At the end of his December 1995 trial, Mize told the jurors he wanted no sentence other than death.

Because of that plea, his attorney at the time of the trial has called his execution “state-sanctioned suicide.”

For years afterward, however, Mize appealed his conviction to state and federal courts, maintaining his innocence and claiming Hattrup shot Tucker by himself. His unsuccessful string of appeals ended Wednesday when the Georgia Supreme Court and the U.S. Supreme Court denied his final motion for a stay of execution.

Mize’s execution originally was scheduled for Tuesday, but he received a brief reprieve just hours before it was to take place.

The Georgia Supreme Court granted a 24-hour stay because of a technical issue with his last-minute motion for a new trial in Oconee County Superior Court. After the issue was cleared up late Tuesday, the state Department of Corrections quickly rescheduled the execution.