Our Daily Dead

LA Times
Mitchell Rupe, 51, a former death row inmate once found too obese to execute by hanging, died at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla on Tuesday following a long battle with liver disease, a prison spokeswoman said.

Rupe was convicted on murder charges in the shooting deaths of two female bank tellers during a 1981 robbery in Olympia. Juries twice sentenced him to death, but higher courts overturned the sentences.

After his incarceration, he gained 80 pounds by consuming an average of almost 6,000 calories a day and declining any physical exercise.

In 1994, a federal judge upheld Rupe’s conviction but agreed with his contention that because he weighed more than 400 pounds, he was too obese to hang due to the risk of decapitation.

Rupe argued that that would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

After lethal injection was chosen as the state’s main method of execution, prosecutors sought the death penalty a third time. But a jury deadlocked 11-1, failing to meet the unanimous vote needed for execution.

At the time of his death, officials said that Rupe weighed between 260 and 270 pounds.

Technorati Tags: Mitchell Rupe, execute by hanging, decapitation

Ivan Ivanovich, aka, Suit-Sat has been reported as silent after only a couple orbits of our globe…at least according to CBS affiliate source

But, perhaps like Mark Twain the stories of Ivan’s death are greatly exaggerated. Another source swears that young Ivan’s signal is faint, weak surely, but very much detectable.

So perhaps we are not quite to the point of Dosvidanya! Mr. Smith!. “Keep Listening!”

~~The ODDones for OurDailyDead.com

Technorati tags: Ivan Ivanovich, Suit-Sat, Mark Twain

LA Times
Herbert Schilder, 77, a dental surgeon who made root canals safer and more successful by refining instruments and techniques used to perform them, died of the brain malady Lewy body disease Jan. 25 at his home in Newton, Mass., his family said.

In the 1960s, Schilder devised a root canal technique that involved cleaning a tooth’s infected tissue, filling it vertically and compacting it with a heated plastic material that upon cooling expands to fill the gap.

The approach, which stopped the tooth’s internal tissue from deteriorating, remains widely used today.

His pioneering method was immortalized in the 2003 film “Finding Nemo” when Nemo — a fish in an aquarium in a dentist’s office — watches a root canal being performed. “Now he’s doing the Schilder technique,” says the wincing starfish Peach.

Technorati Tags: Herbert Schilder, root canal, Finding Nemo