A man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend was put to death by lethal injection in Texas in the first execution in the United States this year.<\/p>\n
Charles Thompson, 55, was pronounced dead at 6.50pm Central Time yesterday at a state prison in Huntsville, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said.<\/p>\n
Thompson was sentenced to death for the 1998 murders of his ex-girlfriend, Dennise Hayslip, 39, and her boyfriend, 30-year-old Darren Cain.<\/p>\n
They were shot at Hayslip’s apartment in a Houston suburb. Cain died at the scene and Hayslip died from her wounds in hospital a week later.<\/p>\n
Wade Hayslip, Ms Hayslip’s son from a previous marriage, planned to attend the execution. He was 13 when his mother was killed.<\/p>\n
In an interview with USA Today, Mr Hayslip said Thompson’s execution will be “the end of a chapter and the beginning of a new one.”<\/p>\n
“I’m looking forward to the new one,” he said.<\/p>\n
There were 47 executions in the United States last year, the most since 2009, when 52 inmates were put to death.<\/p>\n
Florida carried out the most executions in 2025 – 19 – followed by Alabama, South Carolina and Texas, where there were five each.<\/p>\n
Thirty-nine of last year’s executions were carried out by lethal injection.<\/p>\n
Three were by firing squad and five by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a face mask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.<\/p>\n
The use of nitrogen gas as a method of capital punishment has been denounced by United Nations experts as cruel and inhumane.<\/p>\n
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – have moratoriums in place.<\/p>\n
President Donald Trump is a proponent of capital punishment and has called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend was put to death by lethal injection in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":269868,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-269867","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=269867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/269867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/269868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=269867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=269867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=269867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}