This week in 1995

“I am the happiest man in the world. I’m not afraid to die. I’m not crazy. Jesus, your baby is coming home. I love you. I love you, Lord.”

— Sylvester Adams, convicted of murder, lethal injection, South Carolina.
Executed August 18, 1995

Despite numerous appeals and a plea by his mother and death penalty opponents to commute his sentence, thirty-nine-year-old Adams was executed for the 1979 strangling death of his sixteen-year-old mildly retarded neighbor Bryan Chambers. Upon breaking into the neighbor’s home and finding no money there, he took Chambers into the woods to kill him. Adams’s jury never learned that IQ screenings indicated that he himself was mildly mentally retarded, nor did they hear that his mental condition involved sudden and unpredictable bursts of rage.