This week in 1996

“I bear witness that there is no God but Allah and I bear witness that the prophet Mohammed is the messenger of God.”

— John Mills JR., convicted of murder, electric chair, Florida.
Executed December 6, 1996

Mills and another man robbed Lester Lawhon, then took him to an abandoned airstrip and beat him with a tire iron. When Lawhon tried to escape, Mills shot him twice. While in prison, Mills converted to Islam and asked that the name Yuhanna Abdullah Muhammed be added to his file. Lawhon’s mother did not attend the execution, saying, “Another family is suffering.” Mills’s accomplice, Michael Frederick, pleaded no contest to second-degree murder and received 347 years in prison.