INDIANA STATE PRISON, Michigan City — Joseph Edward Corcoran is dead. The 49-year-old convicted killer, the first inmate executed in Indiana in 15 years, was pronounced dead at 12:44 a. m.
Central Time Wednesday after receiving a single dose of pentobarbital. His final words, delivered in a flat, detached tone as he lay strapped to the gurney, were chillingly brief: “Not really. Let’s get this over with.”
The execution, which began shortly after midnight, brought a definitive end to one of Indiana’s most legally tortured and morally complex capital cases. Corcoran, who had been on death row since 1999 for the shotgun murders of his brother and three other men, had long been the subject of fierce debate over the execution of the mentally ill. In the end, the state’s push to resume capital punishment after a decade and a half took precedence over the medical and psychiatric questions that had haunted his case for decades.
The scene outside the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City was tense in the hours leading up to the lethal injection. A small contingent of anti-death penalty advocates held a candlelight
