It happening in the United States during the controversial 2000 execution of convicted murderer Gary Graham by the state of Texas. This occurred while George W. Bush was still Governor of Texas, and running for President in a closely-contested electoral campaign, in which he narrowly defeated Al Gore that November.
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Graham had been convicted of the murder of a 53-year-old man based on the eyewitness account of one person, and the account of this witness was called into question by others. However, he had unquestionably been on a crime spree at the time, in which he had committed 20 armed robberies, three kidnappings, a rape, and had fired his gun toward at least three other people. He may or may not have committed the murder—but he was clearly a dangerous person, and this may have kept him from getting a fair re-hearing on whether or not he was the one who committed the murder. Many people were arguing that he deserved to die just for all of the other crimes he had committed.
The execution was also controversial because Graham was only 17 at the time when he went on his crime spree; had it happened a few years later, he could not have been sentenced to death. The Supreme Court disallowed the execution of minors in a 2005 court ruling.
In any case, Graham always maintained his innocence in the murder. He received a few stays of execution, but eventually his appeals ran out, and then-Governor Bush refused to intervene. When it came time for him to be executed, Graham (by then calling himself Shaka Sankofa) resisted the efforts of the guards to remove him from his cell, and it took five men to subdue him and strap him to the gurney.
There are no doubt other cases where a person has attempted to violently resist their execution, but Graham’s case is still memorable 17 years later, because it was such a cause célèbre during the election campaign that year.
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