UNITED STATES – A man convicted of the 1992 murders of three people has been put to death by lethal injection in Florida on Thursday in the 11th execution in the southern US state this year.
Curtis Windom, 59, was sentenced to death for killing his girlfriend Valerie Davis, her mother Mary Lubin, and Johnnie Lee, a man who allegedly owed him a gambling debt.
The execution was carried out yesterday at 18:17 (22:17 GMT) at the Florida State Prison, and his last words were unintelligible, according to US media witnesses.
The US Supreme Court rejected his final appeal Wednesday. Windom’s defense attorneys had argued his initial trial lawyer was not qualified.
Windom was convicted of killing Lee over a $2,000 debt, before fatally shooting his girlfriend at her apartment, and shooting her mother while she was stopped at a stop sign nearby, CBS News reported.
Advocacy group Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty released a statement from relatives and friends of the victims which decried the execution.
“We are heartbroken that the State of Florida didn’t listen to our pleas,” the statement said.
The statement criticized the state for asking the families to witness Thursday’s “dog-and-pony show.”
The relatives of the victims described celebrating “graduations and weddings over the phone” with Windom over the years, even bringing their grandchildren to visit him in prison.
“We have forgiven him.”
There have been 30 executions in the United States this year, the most since 2014 when 35 inmates were put to death.
Florida has carried out the most executions – 11 – followed by South Carolina and Texas with four each.
Twenty-five of this year’s executions have been carried out by lethal injection, two by firing squad and three by nitrogen hypoxia, which involves pumping nitrogen gas into a face mask, causing the prisoner to suffocate.
The use of nitrogen gas as a method of capital punishment has been denounced by United Nations experts as cruel and inhumane.
The death penalty has been abolished in 23 of the 50 US states, while three others – California, Oregon and Pennsylvania – have moratoriums in place.
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.”
Trump said earlier this week that he would seek the death penalty for murders in Washington as part of a crackdown on crime in the nation’s capital.
