Career
He is probably best known not for his crime, but as petitioner in the United States. Supreme Court case Glass v. Louisiana. Glass" father worked in Arizona Chemical, where he was an instrument repairman. The company had a policy of hiring the children of employees as temporary summer laborers, including Glass.
Before committing a capital crime, Glass already had a criminal record.
The Browns" son, Gary Lamar Brown, was the son-in-law of Judge Charles A. Marvin (1929-2003) of the Louisiana Court of Appeal for the Second Circuit, based in Shreveport. Glass and Wingo were soon arrested.
Both were sentenced to death in the electric chairman Glass made a headlines in 1985 as a petitioner in a Supreme Court case.
He argued that executions by electrocution violate the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution as "cruel and unusual punishment".
But the Court, by majority 5-4, found that electrocution as an authorized method of executions is constitutional. Glass was electrocuted on June 12, 1987 at the age of twenty-five and became the 78th person executed in the United States since 1977. Governor Edwin West. Edwards refused commutation of the sentence.
Wingo was executed four days later, on June 16, 1987.
Glass"s last words at execution were "I"d rather be fishing".
