news - crime
Governor pardons executed man
Posted: Jan 7, 2011 8:27 PM by Stefanie Boe
Updated: Jan 7, 2011 8:28 PM
Outgoing Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter pardoned 19 people Friday including a mentally disabled man executed more than 70 years ago.
Twenty-three-year-old Joe Arridy was executed in 1939 after he was convicted of killing a Pueblo girl with a hatchet.
He confessed to the killing of 15-year-old Dorothy Drain after he was picked up for vagrancy in Cheyenne, Wyoming.
After the Wyoming sheriff learned Arridy was from Pueblo, the sheriff got Arridy to confess.
Ritter says an overwhelming amount of evidence now suggests
Arridy, who had an IQ of 46, didn't commit the crime.
The hatchet that killed Drain was later discovered in the home of a man Arridy had never met. That man denied the killing.
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