(Washington) A 44-year-old American man sentenced to death for the murder and rape of a student in 1996 was executed Thursday by lethal injection in Oklahoma, announced the prosecutor and the prison administration of this state in the center of the country.
The rape and murder of Juli Busken, 21, a dance student at the University of Oklahoma, remained unsolved until DNA testing of Anthony Sanchez following his incarceration in Oklahoma in 2002 for burglary .
State police later matched his DNA with that found on the victim, leading to Anthony Sanchez’s death sentence in 2006.
The latter has continued to proclaim his innocence and had recently blamed the crime on his father, who committed suicide in 2022 and would have confessed to having committed it, according to him. But DNA tests carried out on the deceased invalidated this theory and Anthony Sanchez’s appeals to obtain a stay of execution were rejected.
He was executed Thursday morning at the state penitentiary in the town of McAlester.
Oklahoma resumed capital executions in 2021 after a six-year moratorium due to botched executions in 2014 and 2015. That of Anthony Sanchez is the third since the start of the year.
This is the 18e execution in the United States in 2023. They were all carried out by lethal injection.