[3] By the time he entered junior high school, Rector possessed only third-grade level writing skills, which was later ascribed to an undiagnosed learning disability.

[4] By age 17, Rector developed severe anger issues and regularly got into fights, reportedly due to a mix of insecurity about his poor academic performance, insults about his perceived lack of intelligence by classmates and abusive racial remarks from white townsfolk.

[3] After Rector was expelled from school in tenth grade for fighting, he began working as a blue-collar laborer in construction, often shuffling between Conway and Detroit.

When one friend who could not pay the $3 cover charge was refused entry, Rector became incensed and pulled a .38 caliber pistol from his waist band.

He fired several shots, killing 33-year-old Arthur D. Criswell, who died almost instantly after being struck in the throat and forehead, also wounding 52-year-old William Hervey and his 23-year-old son Charles.

[15][16] In 2002, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the execution of people with intellectual disabilities in Atkins v. Virginia, ruling that the practice constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

As noted above, Rector left the pie on the side of the tray, telling the corrections officers who came to take him to the execution chamber that he was "saving it for later.

The state later attributed the difficulty in finding a suitable vein to Rector's great weight and to his having been administered an antipsychotic medication.

By 1992, Bill Clinton was insisting that Democrats "should no longer feel guilty about protecting the innocent" and indicated his support of capital punishment.

[4] Others tend to cite the execution as an example of what they perceive to be Clinton's opportunism, directly influenced by the failed presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis, who was labeled by Republicans as too soft on crime.

The writer Christopher Hitchens, in particular, devotes much of a chapter of his book on Clinton, No One Left to Lie To, to what he regards as the immorality of the then Democratic candidate's decision to condone, and take political advantage of, Rector's execution.