Supreme Court sets timeline on Ritchie death penalty filings
INDIANAPOLIS (WISH) — Following a request last week from the attorney general, the Indiana Supreme Court issued a timeline Thursday in the death penalty case of the murderer of a Beech Grove police officer.
Benjamin Ritchie, 44, fatally shot Officer William Tony of Beech Grove Police Department with a 9mm handgun during a foot chase on Sept. 29, 2000. Ritchie was sentenced on Oct. 15, 2002, to the death penalty.
Tony was shot in the throat, just above his bulletproof vest, a day before his 32nd birthday.
Before an execution date is set, the court asked Ritchie’s new public defender to file a response to the attorney general’s request by Nov. 1. The attorney general would then have a chance to respond to the public defender’s response by Nov. 18; a response to that response would be due from the public defender by Dec. 1.
Indiana’s first execution since 2009 has been set for Dec. 18 at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City for murderer Joseph Corcoran, 49. A jury in 1999 had found Corcoran guilty of the July 26, 1997, shooting deaths of four men in Fort Wayne. The men were his brother, James Corcoran, 30; his sister’s fiancé, Robert Turner, 32; and two friends of James, Timothy Bricker, 30, and Doug Stillwell. Joseph Corcoran used a Ruger Mini-14 semi-automatic rifle in the shooting inside the home he lived in with his sister, Murderpedia reports.
Indiana’s last state execution was in 2009, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, when Matthew Wrinkles was executed for the murdering his wife, her brother and sister-in-law.
The yearslong pause in executions has been attributed to the unavailability of drugs used in lethal injections, The Associated Press has reported. Gov. Eric Holcomb said in June that the state Department of Correction had acquired the sedative pentobarbital, a drug multiple states use in lethal injections, and asked the Supreme Court to set a date for Corcoran’s execution.
