After Moratorium, Georgia Man Is Executed
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JACKSON, Ga. — A Georgia man who killed his live-in girlfriend was executed yesterday, the first inmate put to death since the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injections.
William Earl Lynd was pronounced dead at 7:51 p.m. EDT, a Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman, Mallie McCord, told the Associated Press. It came less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected efforts to block it.
The roughly three dozen states around the country that use lethal injection held off on carrying out any executions for more than seven months while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of the three-drug cocktail that’s used. It was the longest pause in American executions in a quarter century.
The Supreme Court last month upheld the legality of lethal injections.
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.