Ion Pistol
Last person sentenced to death in Romania apart from Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu
Ion Pistol (1 December 1946 – 12 May 1987) was a Romanian convicted murderer, the last person put to death in what was then the Socialist Republic of Romania prior to the execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. He was tried for murder on 9 April 1986, before a 500-person auditorium. His lawyer, Liviu Ardeiaș, claimed that sentencing him to death would result "not in execution, but in murder". The same day, the Teleorman County tribunal handed down a death sentence. On 4 May 1987, Ceaușescu rejected his plea for clemency. Eight days later, he was executed by shooting at a prison in the Bucharest area.
According to Pistol's criminal record, he was born in the commune of Trivalea-Moșteni, where he was living at the time of his arrest, and had a fourth-grade education. The report indicates he killed his mother Gheorghița with multiple axe blows on the night of 30–31 October 1985 and was arrested on 1 November 1985. He was taken to Jilava Prison prior to his execution and asked for an onion omelette for his last meal.
“Ion Pistol” enters the record as last person sentenced to death in Romania apart from Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Pistol, Last and person can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 16, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16011963. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1946, 1987, 1986 and 1985.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ion Pistol” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.