Georgia execution ends hiatus

JACKSON, Ga. — He didn't have any last words, and he refused an offer of a last prayer. With a shudder and a yawn, William Earl Lynd became the first inmate put to death in more than seven months, a hiatus prompted by the Supreme Court's examination of lethal injection.

The Georgia execution on Tuesday was the first since the court ruled April 16 that the three-drug protocol most commonly used in executions by states and the federal government did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment. The execution triggered what is expected to be a new wave of executions.

Lynd, 53, was pronounced dead at 4:51 p.m. PDT. The execution came less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected efforts to block it.

He was sentenced to die for kidnapping and fatally shooting his live-in girlfriend, Ginger Moore, 26, 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 a road to help him.

Lynd never denied killing Moore two days before Christmas in 1988. But his lawyers had sought a last-minute reprieve, arguing that new evidence showed he could not have kidnapped her because she was dead when he stuffed her in the trunk of her car.

Prosecutors said Moore was alive when Lynd placed her in the trunk. They said Lynd told authorities that he fired the final, lethal shot when he heard her "thumping around" in the trunk. The kidnapping had been an essential "aggravating" circumstance that made Lynd eligible for the death penalty.

At the state Capitol in Atlanta late Tuesday, more than 40 people protested and unfurled a red, white and blue banner that said "Stop the Death Penalty."

Material from The Washington Post is included in this report.