Lang
2/5/25
A key figure in Iowa abolishing the death penalty in the 1960’s has died in custody at the Iowa Medical and Classification Center in Coralville.
According to a news release from the Iowa Department of Corrections, 84-year-old Leon Robert Tice Jr. was pronounced dead at 11:14 a.m. on Thursday, January 30th. Tice had been serving a life sentence for murdering two boys ages 13 and 2 in Council Bluffs in 1963. His sentence began on September 27th of that year.
Tice was initially sentenced to death by hanging. In what was considered a controversial move at the time, then-Iowa Governor Harold Hughes commuted the sentence to life in prison in January of 1965 as he urged the state legislature to ban the death penalty. The legislature obliged the next month, and Hughes signed the bill into law.
Bills to reinstate the death penalty have been introduced into the Iowa legislature as recently as last year, but none have reached the governor’s desk.