April 26 execution set for Nevada death row inmate

Thursday, April 6, 2006 | 1:32 a.m.

CARSON CITY, Nev. - Daryl Mack, who has refused to file an available appeal even though he claims he didn't commit the murder that put him on death row, is scheduled to be executed April 26 at Nevada State Prison.

State Corrections Director Glen Whorton on Wednesday set the date for Mack's lethal injection, following an order issued last week by a judge in Reno to proceed. The execution had been scheduled for late last year but was stayed by the state Supreme Court.

The stay of the scheduled Dec. 1 execution was lifted in February when the high court dismissed a petition filed by Viola Mack, the condemned inmate's mother, who claimed that her son didn't get a fair competency hearing.

The mother argued that Mack, 47, held "a delusional belief in his innocence" and the U.S. Constitution bars the execution of someone who isn't aware of how or why he's to be executed, justices said.

Mack says he'd rather be executed than spend the rest of his life locked up on death row. He also claims he's innocent of the crime that resulted in his death sentence, the 1988 sexual assault and strangling of Betty Jane May, 55, in a southwest Reno boarding house.

He was serving a no-parole life term in prison for murdering Kim Parks in 1994 in a Reno motel when he was linked through DNA evidence to May's murder and convicted. A three-judge panel sentenced him to death in 2002.

The execution would be the first of a black convict in this state since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty. Mack also would be the first to be executed in this state based solely on DNA evidence, and he'd be the 11th "volunteer," out of a dozen men executed here since 1976, to give up available appeals that would stop his lethal injection.

The last execution in Nevada was that of Terry Jess Dennis, who died in August 2004 for strangling a woman in a Reno motel in 1999.

Even if Mack is convinced he didn't kill May, the state Supreme Court said in its Feb. 3 ruling that it doesn't mean "he is unable to understand that he is to be executed and why he will be executed."

Justices also rejected the mother's argument that Mack is being involuntarily injected with a powerful psychotropic drug to make him appear competent. Also rejected were the mother's argument that a lower court failed to conduct an adequate evidentiary hearing, and that he didn't undergo psychological testing despite his history of mental illness.