This week in 2009

“I just hope God’s will be done and everybody finds the peace they need. I’m good.”

— Jimmy Lee Dill, convicted of murder, lethal injection, Alabama.
Executed April 16, 2009

Dill killed Leon Shaw during a robbery of money and cocaine in 1988. The victim’s son, Leon Shaw Jr., attended Dill’s execution with his mother and two of Dill’s nieces.

“I told him I forgave him,” Leon Shaw Jr. said afterward. “I see him as a victim, a victim of his raising, a victim of the circumstances. I see my dad as a victim, too, and it’s continuing.”