John Edward Swindler

A legislative act in 1983 made lethal injection the only method of execution in Arkansas. However, inmates who had been sentenced to death before the legislation was adopted were allowed to choose between lethal injection and electrocution. When Charles Laverne Singleton chose lethal injection, John Edward Swindler earned the distinction of being the last inmate to die in Arkansas' electric chair.

John Edward Swindler shot and killed Patrolman Randy Basnett in the afternoon of September 24, 1976. Officer Basnett had stopped at a service station at the Kelly Highway exit in Fort Smith, Arkansas, when Swindler also stopped there in a stolen car with a South Carolina license plate. Swindler was returning to Leavenworth, Kansas to settle some personal grudges that had arisen when he had been imprisoned there. Passing the I-540 exit on I-40 near Van Buren, Arkansas, the illiterate Swindler became confused and exited, driving across the Arkansas River and into Fort Smith. That morning, Basnett had been briefed to be on the lookout for Swindler, who was the suspect in the double murders of teenagers Gregory L. Becknell and Dorothy Ann Rhodes in South Carolina and other felonies in Georgia and South Carolina. The briefing contained information about Swindler's description, the car he was thought to be driving, and the fact that he was considered to be armed and dangerous. After he noted Swindler and the stolen car, Basnett radioed dispatchers that Swindler was at the service station. Back-up officers were immediately dispatched to his location.

Swindler was the first person executed by the state of Arkansas since Furman v. Georgia, 408 U.S. 238 (1972), after new capital punishment laws were passed in Arkansas and that came into force on March 23, 1973.

Swindler refused to choose between lethal injection and the electric chair, according to the Arkansas Department of Correction. By not choosing, Swindler effectively selected electrocution. Warden David White said Swindler might have wanted the notoriety of being the last Arkansas inmate to die in the electric chair. His was also the only execution in the new electric chair constructed by the state in the 1970s.

John Edward Swindler (May 12, 1944 – June 18, 1990) was an American murderer and suspected serial killer who was executed by the state of Arkansas for the 1976 murder of Patrolman Randy Basnett. He was also convicted of the murders of two teenagers: Greg Becknell and Dorothy Rhodes, in Columbia, South Carolina, and was charged but never convicted of the murder of Jeffrey McNerney in Florida. Swindler was the first person to be executed by the state of Arkansas since 1961, and is the only person to have been executed in the electric chair in Arkansas since the reinstatement of capital punishment in 1976.