A 53-year-old man convicted of the 2001 rape and murder of a teenage girl has been executed by lethal injection in the US state of Indiana, authorities said.<\/p>\n
Roy Lee Ward was sentenced to death in 2002 for the murder of 15-year-old Stacy Payne at her home in the town of Dale.<\/p>\n
Stacy was stabbed repeatedly and died of her injuries several hours after the attack.<\/p>\n
Ward was arrested at the scene while still holding a knife.<\/p>\n
The execution was carried out shortly after midnight local time at a state prison in Michigan City, the Indiana Department of Correction said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Ward was the third person put to death in Indiana since the state resumed executions last year after a 15-year hiatus because of difficulties obtaining the lethal drugs used in them.<\/p>\n
His last meal included a hamburger, a steak melt, chips, shrimp and breadsticks.<\/p>\n
There have now been 35 executions in the United States this year, equalling the number of inmates that were put to death in 2014.<\/p>\n
Florida has carried out the most executions with 13, followed by Texas with five and South Carolina and Alabama with four.<\/p>\n
Twenty-eight of this year’s executions have been carried out by lethal injection, two by firing squad and four 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, on his first day in office, called for an expansion of its use “for the vilest crimes.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A 53-year-old man convicted of the 2001 rape and murder of a teenage girl has been executed by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":71310,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-71309","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71309","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=71309"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/71309\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/71310"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=71309"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=71309"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=71309"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}