Terminally Ill Man Executed

June 27, 2007 — -- A terminally ill death row inmate who had less than a year to live was executed Tuesday evening in Oklahoma, sparking a new debate over whether sick inmates should be put to death or allowed to die of natural causes.

Jimmy Dale Bland, 49, was killed by lethal injection shortly after 6 p.m. Tuesday in the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, soon after the Supreme Court rejected his last, 11th-hour appeal. Bland had a fatal case of lung cancer that had spread to his brain, and had undergone radiation treatment and chemotherapy, his lawyer, David Autry, told ABC News. Bland would have died in six months, Autry said.

"It's pointless to execute this guy," Autry said. "He was going to be dead in a few short months anyway."

Though there are no reliable statistics on how many terminally ill inmates are currently on death row in the nation's prisons, Bland appears to be one of the few inmates this close to dying of natural causes to be executed in the United States, death penalty advocates say.

His case has outraged death penalty opponents, who argue that the justice system should show mercy to death row inmates who are already dying — an usual issue that is likely to appear before courts and clemency boards more frequently as the death-row population ages.

"We will certainly see more of these cases," said Richard Dieter, the director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. "This is going to be happening more and more."

'He Didn't Deserve to Go That Way'

In 1996, Bland was sentenced to death for shooting Doyle Windle Rains, formerly the popular mayor of tiny Manitou, Okla., in the back of the head with a .22-caliber rifle. When he was captured, Bland told police he thought Rains, who'd often hired him as a handyman, had cheated him out of some money.

Bland had killed before. In 1975, he was convicted of manslaughter for killing a soldier and kidnapping the soldier's family. He served 20 years of a 60-year sentence.

Bland had been out of prison for less than a year when he killed Rains.

Rains "was always jovial and always laughing," Barbara Tucker, a childhood friend, told ABC News. "He didn't deserve to go that way. He was too good to people."