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Steven Parsons had just been convicted of sodomizing a 14 year old girl and sentenced to as much as seven years in prison.
The inmate fell to the ground and began having convulsions and within minutes he was dead.
Somehow Parsons had 100 grams of cyanide shipped to him at the lock-up and took the pill after the sentence was announced.
Fox 4 in Kansas City reports Parsons walked into the hearing with the capsule in his mouth, ready to take the next step.The attorney for the prosecution told the TV station "I can't speculate to what he was going through but I'm firmly convinced that his death was not a result of a wrongful verdict by the jury."
Parsons wasn’t new to the justice system. He had everything from traffic tickets to probation violations in a long history of thumbing his nose at the law.
A sheriff who was in the courtroom when it all went down put it bluntly.
"It’s not common to see someone just fall over dead in the courtroom even though they’ve just been found guilty of a crime."
Parsons had family in court when he died.
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