Ricky Ray Rector (January 12, 1950 – January 24, 1992), was executed for the 1981 murder of police officer Robert Martin in Conway, Arkansas. In 1981, Rector decided to rob a convenience store. During a stand-off, he shot and killed a civilian, and officer Martin. Rector shot himself in the head, but did not die. Later, partly as a result of what essentially amounted to self-lobotomy, his IQ would be measured at around 70. By 1992, Bill Clinton was insisting that Democrats "should no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent" and took a position strongly supporting capital punishment. To make his point, he flew home to Arkansas mid-campaign to watch the execution of Rector. Some considered it a turning point in that race, hardening a soft public image. Others tend to cite the execution as an example of what they perceive to be Clinton's opportunism, directly influenced by Michael Dukakis and his response to CNN's Bernard Shaw when asked during a campaign debate on October 13, 1988 if he would be supportive of the death penalty were his wife to be raped and murdered. The courts decided Rector was mentally competent to be put to death by lethal injection. Rector's prison guards called him "the Chickman" because he thought the guards were throwing alligators and chickens into his cell. He would grip the bars and jump up and down like an ape. On the night of his execution, Rector saved the slice of pecan pie to be eaten before bedtime, not realizing his death would come first. He also told his attorney that he would like to vote for Clinton in the fall. Rector was subject to a unique overlap of controversies in 1992 during his execution in Arkansas. A question of the morality of killing someone who was functionally retarded. An oft-cited example of his mental insufficiency is his decision to save the dessert of his last meal for after his execution.[1] In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of people with mental retardation in Atkins v. Virginia, ruling that the practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Rector was African-American, adding to racial questions relating to the death penalty. Rector was executed by lethal injection. It took medical staff, with Rector’s help, more than fifty minutes to find a suitable vein. The curtain remained closed between Rector and the witnesses, but some reported they could hear Rector moaning. The administrator of the State Department of Corrections Medical Program said “the moans did come as a team of two medical people that had grown to five worked on both sides of his body to find a vein. That may have contributed to his occasional outbursts.” The state later attributed the difficulty in finding a suitable vein to Rector’s heavy weight and to his use of an antipsychotic medication. Rector was the third person executed by the state of Arkansas since Furman v. Georgia, , after new capital punishment laws were passed in Arkansas and that came into force on March 23, 1973. Bill Clinton's critics from the anti-capital punishment left have seen the case of Rector as an unpleasant example of what they view as Clinton's cynical careerism. The writer Christopher Hitchens, in particular, devotes much of a chapter of his polemical attack on Clinton, No One Left to Lie To to what he regards as the immorality of the then Democratic candidate's decision to condone, and take political advantage of, Rector's execution.[2]
