US executes first inmate in seven months
A Georgia man has become the first inmate put to death since the US Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of executions by lethal injection.
Convicted killer William Earl Lynd was pronounced dead at 7:51pm local time, a state prisons official said.
The 53-year-old Lynd was convicted of kidnapping and shooting to death his 26-year-old girlfriend two days before Christmas in 1988.
The roughly three dozen US states that use lethal injection held off on carrying out any executions for more than seven months while the US Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of the three-drug cocktail that is used.
It was the longest pause in US executions in a quarter of a century.
The Supreme Court last month upheld the legality of lethal injections, and Georgia was the first state to carry one out.
Lynd, 53, was sentenced to die for kidnapping and shooting his live-in girlfriend, Ginger Moore, three times in the face and head two decades ago.
After he buried Moore’s body in a shallow grave near a south Georgia farm, authorities said Lynd fled to Ohio, where he shot and killed another woman who had stopped along the side of the road to help him.
Lynd has never denied killing Moore, 26, two days before Christmas in 1988.
But his lawyers had sought a last minute reprieve from the courts, arguing that new forensic medical evidence showed he could not have kidnapped her because she was already dead when he stuffed her in the trunk of her car.
Prosecutors alleged that Moore was still alive when Lynd placed her in the trunk – despite two gunshot wounds to the head.
They said Lynd confessed to authorities that he fired the final, lethal shot when he heard her “thumping around” in the trunk.
The kidnapping had been an essential “aggravating” circumstance that made Lynd eligible for the death penalty.
Lawyers say Lynd and Moore had a volatile relationship and were in a heated argument over a trip to Florida when he shot her.
His attorney, Tom Dunn, argued that the shooting was not premeditated but, rather, took place during an argument and after taking Valium, marijuana and alcohol.
In the days leading up to Lynd’s execution, Mr Dunn asked several courts, including the US Supreme Court, to block it but was turned down each time.
Death penalty opponents staged vigils around the state to protest the first of an expected wave of executions around the country.
Texas conducted the nation’s previous execution, putting Michael Richard to death on September 25, 2007, the same day the Supreme Court agreed to consider a Kentucky case brought by two prisoners who claimed the lethal injection method violated the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
