Urgent Action

UA-Nr: UA-116/2008-1
AI-Index: AMR 51/037/2008
Datum: 07.05.2008

DEATH PENALTY / IMMINENT EXECUTION

Further information on UA 116/08 (AMR 51/023/2008, 30 April 2008) USA (Ohio)

William Earl Lynd (m), white, aged 52

William Earl Lynd was executed in Georgia on the evening of 6 May. He was sentenced to death in 1990 for the murder of his friend Virginia ("Ginger") Moore on 23 December 1988.

On 5 May, the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles voted to deny clemency. In the early afternoon of 6 May, the state Supreme Court unanimously voted to reject William Lynd's appeal for a stay of execution. The US Supreme Court similarly refused to issue a stay of execution, and the execution began shortly after 7.30pm local time. William Lynd was pronounced dead at 7.51pm, 17 minutes after the first drug was administered.

William Lynd becomes the first person to be put to death in the USA this year, and the first since late September 2007 when a de facto moratorium on executions emerged after the US Supreme Court agreed to consider the constitutionality of Kentucky's lethal injection procedures. A number of states have now set execution dates following the Supreme Court's ruling on 16 April upholding Kentucky's lethal injection protocol (see 'The pointless and needless extinction of life': USA should now look beyond lethal injection issue to wider death penalty questions, http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/AMR51/031/2008/en).

The USA has put 1,100 men and women to death since judicial killing resumed in 1977. Georgia accounts for 41 of these executions.

No further action by the UA Network is requested. Many thanks to all who sent appeals.

Quelle

http://www2.amnesty.de/internet/deall.nsf/AlleDok/AF2546A060AD851DC1257442003ED5ad?open

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