June 8
OKLAHOMA---impending execution
Federal court turns down death row inmate's final appeal
2 families waited and counted down the hours until Robert Leroy Bryan's
scheduled execution Tuesday night.
In Mustang, Bryan's sister, Wilma Wyckoff, considered whether her
63-year-old brother understood death by lethal injection.
In Benton, Ark., Linda Daley remembered with pain the murder of her
mother, Mildred Inabell Bryan of Sweetwater, and hoped Leroy Bryan would
get the death sentence a jury handed him nine and a half years ago.
Leroy Bryan's last attempt to get out of the death penalty failed Tuesday.
The U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City denied Bryan's civil rights
complaint that claimed he was not competent to be executed.
Bryan was convicted of shooting his aunt in the forehead and killing her
in September 1993.
Wyckoff had hoped a last-minute appeal will give her brother another
chance at life, or possibly to persuade a court to rehear his case.
"I've gotten to the point where I'm (thinking), 'God, your will be done,'"
said Wyckoff, who could also see the benefits of execution for a man who
is suffering serious medical problems, including adult-onset diabetes.
Her brother wouldn't have to continue to live without one leg, without
urinary or bowel control or with somewhat numb arms.
"He said, 'Maybe this (execution) would be a blessing. I was just hoping I
could get my name cleared,'" Wyckoff said after spending about three hours
with her brother Monday afternoon.
If Bryan had gotten life in prison, Wyckoff thought he would have stayed
in a mental ward. If he had gotten out of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary,
she thought he would have stayed in a nursing home. Wyckoff doesn't think
Bryan would have liked either option.
Daley hopes the execution goes on as planned, although she said it will
give her little closure.
"There will never really be true closure because of the premeditation and
brutality," Daley said.
Inabell Bryan, 69, disappeared Sept. 10, 1993, and was found Sept. 16,
1993, near a combine on the property of Leroy Bryan's parents near Elk
City.
"We've always wondered what she was put through: if she was tortured, if
she was fed or if she was just left out in the field," Daley said. "We
think she was taken to a field and held hostage for the entire time before
she was murdered."
Inabell Bryan and Leroy Bryan did not know each other well, witnesses said
at his 1995 trial in Beckham County District Court in western Oklahoma.
Witnesses testified that shortly before the murder, Leroy Bryan wrote
agreements and promissory notes and filled out checks to withdraw money
from Inabell Bryan's checking account. She signed some of the checks, and
he forged her signature at least once on a promissory note for $1,800.
Leroy Bryan "tried to force her to sign over everything she and Daddy had
worked so hard for," Daley wrote in a letter to the Pardon and Parole
Board on May 10.
Daley and about a dozen of Inabell Bryan's relatives planned to attend the
scheduled execution. Wyckoff and other relatives of Leroy Bryan also
planned to go.
(source: Associated Press)
