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Home News Injustice in Ohio Ardemy Dennis Ardemy Dennis
Monday, 17 July 2006
Ardemy Dennis was executed 13 October 2004
Dennis was 18 when he and an accomplice tried to rob two men outside an Akron home in 1994. One of the men gave up $15. The other, Kurt Kyle, 29, began searching his pockets, and Dennis shot him to death.
Dennis blamed Kyle for failing to cooperate and notice that he was high on drugs.
"I ain't saying it's all his fault, but why did he move?" Dennis said from death row. "Every day I think about that. It ain't 'Why did you kill that man?' It's 'Why did you move?"
Adremy Dennis was 18 years and five months old at the time of the crime, emerging from a childhood of deprivation and neglect. The State of Ohio, in line with international law, prohibits the execution of people who were under 18 at the time of the crime, recognizing the immaturity of youthful offenders. Indeed, the state does not allow anyone under the age of 21 to buy alcohol or anyone under the age of 18 to buy cigarettes.
Adremy Dennis was served alcohol in various bars on the night of the crime. He had smoked marijuana dipped in embalming fluid. He was immature, impulsive and intoxicated, and armed with a sawn-off shotgun.
Adremy Dennis was born to a 19-year-old mentally unstable mother and an abusive father who she left when her son was five or six years old. When he was 12 or 13, his mother took a turn for the worse and became, in effect, an absent parent. Adremy Dennis was eventually taken into case by social services.
Accomplice Leroy Lamar Anderson was 17 at the time of the crime and Ohio law prohibits the death penalty for those younger than 18. He is serving a life sentence.
Twenty-eight-year-old Dennis was the youngest inmate executed in Ohio since 1962, and the 15th to die since the state resumed the death penalty five years ago.
Attorney General’s spokeswoman Kim Norris says Dennis was pronounced dead by injection at 10:10 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.
Dennis’ mother witnessed his execution. She began to sob when the warden asked for a last statement.
Dennis said he is in God’s hands now—he said, “"I'm in God's hands now. Everything's going to be just the way it was intended. I'll see everybody when they get there."