News Staff Report
Alabama Department of Corrections officials announced this week that an execution date has been set for convicted killer Dominique Ray.
According to a DOC-issued press release, Ray’s 20-year designation as a condemned state inmate is scheduled to end at 6 p.m. on Thursday, February 7, at William C. Holman Correctional Facility near Atmore.
Ray was convicted and sentenced to die in 1999 for the 1995 rape and stabbing death of Tiffany Harville, a 15-year-old Dallas County girl who disappeared from her Selma home on July 15, 1995.
The teen’s decomposing body was found in a field a month later.
According to court documents and published accounts of the trial, Ray’s co-defendant, Marcus Owden, testified that Ray cut the girl’s throat after the two picked her up from her home and raped her. They also took the girl’s purse, which had less than $10 in it.
Just a few months prior to his death penalty trial, Ray was sentenced to serve a life sentence for the 1994 slaying of two brothers, 13-year-old Reinhard Mabins and 18-year-old Ernest Mabins.
Another man was initially charged in Harville’s slaying, but the charges were dropped when Owden confessed to a role in all three killings. According to Owden’s confession, the Mabins brothers were shot to death in February 1994 after they refused to join a gang organized by Owden and Ray.
Ray, a Muslim, has complained that the prison system is violating his rights by having a Christian chaplain present during his execution.