John B. Nixon

Governor of Mississippi Haley Barbour denied clemency for Nixon on December 10, 2005. "[J]ustice in this case has been delayed for more than 20 years," Barbour said in a statement after denying clemency. "... [A] delay of this length greatly reduces the deterrent effect of the death penalty."

Nixon was pronounced dead at 6:25 p.m. CST on December 14, 2005, after his execution by lethal injection at the Mississippi State Penitentiary. It was the seventh execution by the state of Mississippi since the Gregg v. Georgia decision and the 1004th overall in the United States.

Nixon was convicted by a jury of capital murder after a three-day trial and sentenced to death on April 2, 1986. The jury found that the aggravating circumstances of the murder being for hire were especially heinous, atrocious and cruel, and that Nixon had previously been convicted of a felony involving the use or threat of violence to a person.

On January 22, 1985, Nixon, his son, Henry Nixon, and Gilbert Jimenez arrived at the home of Thomas and Virginia Tucker. Upon entering the house, Nixon pulled out a .22 caliber pistol and said, "I brought y'all something."

There were several aspects of Nixon's life that were not brought to the attention of the jury. He had twice saved people from death — once a drowning boy in a flooded irrigation ditch and the other a woman from a burning plane crash at Houston International Airport (now William P. Hobby Airport) in 1966. He had volunteered to serve in the United States Navy during World War II and received an honorable discharge. He later enlisted in the United States Army, getting a hardship discharge after his father abandoned his mother. Nixon did not tell his lawyers any of this, and they had to discover it through their own private investigations.

The prosecution claimed that Nixon was convicted of a violent or forceful rape, when he had in fact pleaded guilty to statutory rape in 1958 in Texas. In a federal court, after an appeal by Nixon, the state prosecutors admitted that it could not ethically use the statutory rape charge as evidence of a prior violent felony, but the court held that error was harmless, as the jury found two other aggravating circumstances in the penalty phase.

John B. Nixon, Sr. (April 1, 1928 – December 14, 2005) was an American convicted murderer. He was convicted of the January 22, 1985 murder-for-hire of Virginia Tucker in Rankin County, Mississippi. Born in Midnight in Humphreys County, Mississippi, he was executed in 2005 by the U.S. state of Mississippi.

At 77 years old, he was the oldest person executed since 1976 and, according to the Espy Files compiled by M. Watt Espy, the oldest person executed in the United States since Joe Lee in Virginia at the age of 83 on April 21, 1916. Nixon's record was surpassed by Walter Moody, who was executed on April 19, 2018, at the age of 83.