An Arizona man, Franklin Arnett Clifton, has been sentenced to face the death penalty following a deadly drive-by shooting in 2014 that left one woman dead and another critically injured. The judgment, passed down recently, includes additional sentences of two concurrent 23-year prison terms for attempted first-degree murder and kidnapping. According to court documents mentioned in a report by FOX 10 Phoenix, Clifton, who was 39 at the time of the sentencing, committed the crime in October 2014 at Campbell and 27th Avenue in Phoenix, Arizona.
Details described in the same report reveal that Clifton engaged in this violent act following a heated dispute with the two female victims a week before the incident. Mounted on a motorcycle, he carried out the shooting, which resulted in immediate fatal consequences for one victim, while leaving the other with multiple gunshot wounds. At the time of the arrest, police conjectured that the shooting might have been linked to drugs, as neighbors speculated to Arizona's Family.
With a history of brushes with the law, Clifton was previously on trial for a road rage incident that almost turned fatal for a 21-year-old woman. The trial ultimately resulted in a mistrial, mainly because the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision. Clifton claimed self-defense in that trial, as reported by FOX 10 Phoenix. "I recognized his picture on the television before they even announced his name," the mother of the road rage victim, Andrea Smith, recollected bitterly back in 2014.
As it stands, the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry lists 108 inmates on death row, with 105 being men and only three women. Clifton was not listed as a death row inmate as of the department's latest update on January 29. Inmates executed since 2013 have reportedly spent an average of over 25 years on death row before their execution, based on statistics shared by the Department and cited by FOX 10 Phoenix.
