Oklahoma executed an inmate Thursday for the 1996 killing of a University of Oklahoma dance scholar, in a case that went unsolved for years till DNA from the crime scene was matched to a person serving jail time for housebreaking.

Anthony Sanchez, 44, was pronounced useless at 10:19 a.m. following a three-drug injection on the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. Even although he maintained that he had nothing to do with the killing of 21-year-old Juli Busken, he took the weird step of opting to not current a clemency utility to the state’s Pardon and Parole Board, which many considered because the final likelihood to spare his life.

“I’m innocent,” Sanchez stated as he was strapped to a gurney contained in the demise chamber. “I didn’t kill nobody.”

Sanchez criticized his former attorneys and thanked his supporters, together with his non secular adviser who was within the chamber with him and the anti-death penalty group Death Penalty Action.

The deadly medication, starting with the sedative midazolam, have been administered beginning at round 10:08 a.m.

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At one level through the execution, a member of the execution group entered the chamber and reattached an oxygen monitor that jail officers stated had malfunctioned through the process.

Shortly earlier than he was put to demise, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a request for a keep of execution submitted by his new lawyer, Eric Allen, of Columbus, Ohio. Allen had stated he wanted extra time to undergo the case proof.

Sanchez was convicted of raping and murdering 21-year-old Juli Busken, a Benton, Arkansas, native who had simply accomplished her final semester on the college when she was kidnapped on Dec. 20, 1996, from the parking zone of her Norman residence advanced. Her physique was discovered that night close to Lake Stanley Draper in far southeastern Oklahoma City. She had been certain, raped and shot within the head.

Busken had carried out as a ballerina in a number of dance performances throughout her tenure at OU and was memorialized on the campus with a dance scholarship in her title on the College of Fine Arts.

Years later, Sanchez was serving time for a housebreaking conviction when DNA from sperm on Busken’s clothes on the crime scene was matched to him. He was convicted and sentenced to die in 2006.

None of Busken’s household attended Thursday’s execution, however state Attorney General Gentner Drummond stated he had spoken to them a number of instances in current months.

“Juli was murdered 26 years, nine months and one day ago. The family has found closure and peace,” Drummond stated.

Sanchez has lengthy maintained his innocence and did so once more in a cellphone name to The Associated Press earlier this 12 months from demise row. “That is fabricated DNA,” Sanchez stated. “That is false DNA. That is not my DNA. I’ve been saying that since day one.”

He instructed the AP that he declined to ask for clemency as a result of even when the five-member Pardon and Parole Board takes the uncommon step of recommending it, Gov. Kevin Stitt has been unlikely to grant it. “I’ve sat in my cell and I’ve watched inmate after inmate after inmate get clemency and get denied clemency,” Sanchez stated. “Either way, it doesn’t go well for the inmates.”

Drummond maintained that the DNA proof unequivocally linked Sanchez to Busken’s killing.

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A pattern of Anthony Sanchez’s DNA “was identical to the profiles developed from sperm on Ms. Busken’s panties and leotard,” Drummond wrote final month in a letter to a state consultant who had inquired about Sanchez’s conviction. Drummond added there was no indication both profile was blended with DNA from some other particular person and that the chances of randomly deciding on a person with the identical genetic profile have been 1 in 94 trillion amongst Southwest Hispanics.

“There is no conceivable doubt that Anthony Sanchez is a brutal rapist and murderer who is deserving of the state’s harshest punishment,” Drummond said in a recent statement.

A private investigator hired by an anti-death penalty group contended that the DNA evidence may have been contaminated and that an inexperienced lab technician miscommunicated the strength of the evidence to a jury.

Former Cleveland County District Attorney Tim Kuykendall, who was the county’s top prosecutor when Sanchez was tried, has said that while the DNA evidence was the most compelling at trial, there was other evidence linking Sanchez to the killing, including ballistic evidence and a shoe print found at the crime scene.

“I know from spending a lot of time on that case, there is not one piece of evidence that pointed to anyone other than Anthony Sanchez,” Kuykendall stated lately. “I don’t care if a hundred people or a thousand people confess to killing Juli Busken.”

Sanchez is the third inmate put to death in Oklahoma this year and the 10th since the state resumed carrying out the death penalty in 2021, ending a six-year moratorium brought on by concerns about its execution methods. The state had one of the nation’s busiest death chambers until problems arose in 2014 and 2015. Richard Glossip was hours away from being executed in September 2015 when prison officials realized they received the wrong lethal drug. It was later learned the same wrong drug had been used to execute an inmate in January 2015.

Oklahoma’s next scheduled execution is Nov. 30, when Phillip Hancock is set to receive a lethal injection for killing two men in Oklahoma City in 2001.