A Mississippi man convicted of rape and murder was put to death by lethal injection, the third execution in the United States this week.<\/p>\n
Charles Crawford, 59, was sentenced to death for the 1994 rape and murder of 20-year-old college student Kristy Ray.<\/p>\n
The execution was carried out at 6pm local time (11pm Irish time) at the Mississippi State Penitentiary in Parchman, and Crawford was pronounced dead 15 minutes later.<\/p>\n
Two convicted murderers were put to death on Tuesday – in Florida and Missouri – and another execution is scheduled for tomorrow.<\/p>\n
Richard Djerf, 55, is to be executed by lethal injection in Arizona tomorrow for the 1993 murders of four members of a Phoenix family.<\/p>\n
There have been 38 executions in the United States so far this year, the most since 2013, when 39 inmates were put to death.<\/p>\n
Florida has carried out the most executions with 14, followed by Texas with five and South Carolina and Alabama with four.<\/p>\n
Thirty-two 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
US 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 Mississippi man convicted of rape and murder was put to death by lethal injection, the third execution…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":83843,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-83842","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\/83842","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=83842"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/83842\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83843"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=83842"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=83842"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=83842"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}