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Related content • Daniels weighed inmate's death • Letter from murder victim's sister

The execution early Thursday of Donald Ray Wallace Jr. weighed heavily on the mind of Gov. Mitch Daniels as he handled his first death penalty case since taking office in January.

"There was a very thoughtful and methodical process," he said of his final review of the case.

"It's not a position you imagine yourself in," he added, speaking to reporters about 13 hours after Wallace was executed at the State Prison in Michigan City.

The governor, who spent the night at his official residence on North Meridian Street, said he examined the events that led to Wallace's death sentence in the waning hours before the execution.

At one point, he left the governor's residence to talk with death penalty opponents who were protesting outside.

J. David Donahue, commissioner of the Indiana Department of Correction, called Daniels at 12:55 a.m. EST on a special phone line to ask him if the execution should proceed.

In the end, Wallace, 47, was put to death by a series of chemical injections just after 1 a.m. EST Thursday.

Wallace was convicted of murdering an Evansville family of four -- Patrick and Theresa Gilligan and their two children, Lisa, 5, and Gregory, 4 -- during a botched burglary in January 1980. Wallace was the first to die under Indiana's death penalty since June 2003.

Diana Harrington, Theresa Gilligan's sister, complained in a letter addressed to the governor Thursday about the amount of media coverage Wallace received during his incarceration. The attention, she wrote, overshadowed the victims and added to the family's pain.

"I did not hate Donald Wallace," Harrington's letter read, "but I hated the crime he committed and despised the situation he had caused, and I was angry about his years and years of media coverage and antics."

Call Star reporter Theodore Kim at (317) 444-6247.

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