Mississippi wants execution date for 1993 murder, but lawyers say case could go to Supreme Court

JACKSON, Miss. — Mississippi’s attorney general is requesting an execution date for a man who has been on death row for 30 years, but his lawyer says the request is premature because the inmate still intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Charles Ray Crawford, now 58, was sentenced to death in the 1993 kidnapping and murder of 20-year-old Kristy Ray, a community college student. At his 1994 trial, jurors cited a past rape conviction as an aggravating factor when sentencing Crawford; But his lawyers said Monday they would appeal that conviction to the U.S. Supreme Court after losing a lower court ruling last week.

Crawford was arrested the day after Ray was abducted from his family’s home and stabbed to death in northern Mississippi’s Tippah County. Crawford told cops he lost consciousness and didn’t remember killing her.

At the time of the arrest, Crawford was days away from a scheduled trial on charges of assaulting another woman by hitting her in the head with a hammer.

The assault trial was postponed for several months and he was found guilty. In a separate trial, Crawford was found guilty of raping a 17-year-old girl who was a friend of the victim of the hammer attack. The two victims were in the same location at the time of the attack. Crawford said she also blacked out and did not remember committing the rape or hammer attack.

During the sentencing portion of Crawford’s capital murder trial, jurors found that the rape conviction was an “aggravating circumstance” and sentenced him to death, according to court records.

In his latest federal appeal in the rape case, Ray said his previous attorneys provided unconstitutionally ineffective assistance in his insanity defense. Crawford underwent a mental evaluation at a state hospital, according to court records, but the trial judge repeatedly refused to provide a psychiatrist or other mental health professional other than the state expert to assist in Crawford’s defense.

In a split decision Friday, a majority of the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected Crawford’s appeal. The dissenting justices wrote that Crawford received a “poorly prepared and presented insanity defense” and that “it took years for a qualified physician to conduct a full evaluation of Crawford.”

The dissenting justices criticized the neurologist who examined Crawford, Dr. He quoted Siddhartha Nadkarni.

“Charles was in such a state of mental error due to his seizure disorder that he was unable to understand the nature and nature of his actions at the time of the crime,” Nadkarni wrote. history and neurological examination) were essentially unavailable in any useful sense due to epileptic seizures at the time of the crime.”

Multiple appeals are common in death penalty cases, and Crawford’s case was challenged multiple times using different arguments.

Hours after the federal appeals court rejected Crawford’s appeal, Mississippi Attorney General Lynn Fitch filed papers asking the state Supreme Court to set a date for Crawford’s execution by lethal injection, writing that she had “exhausted all state and federal remedies.”

On Monday, attorneys representing Crawford at the Mississippi Post-Conviction Law Firm filed documents saying they plan to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn the appeals court’s decision.