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Keith Nelson, 45, was executed in the United States on Friday for killing a 10-year-old girl, the fifth federal execution in two months.
Keith Nelson received a lethal injection in the execution room of the Department of Justice in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was pronounced dead at 4:32 p.m. local time (11:30 p.m. Romanian time).
The detainee received a lethal dose of pentobarbital, generally used for anesthesia, despite a court ruling that the lethal injections violate US law, Reuters writes, according to News.ro.
According to kansascity.com, Nelson did not respond when asked by a prison official if he wanted to say something before receiving the lethal injection. The official waited 15 seconds for a response, after which he administered the substance.
Nelson was sentenced to death in 2003 after being found guilty of the kidnapping of a 10-year-old girl who was riding a roller coaster outside her home in Kansas. He raped her and then strangled her, then dumped the body in neighboring Missouri.
In the United States, crimes are generally tried by state courts, but federal justice deals with serious cases or, as in the present case, involving multiple jurisdictions.
Federal justice rarely condemns the death penalty and executes those convicted less frequently.
From 1988 to 2003, three convicts were executed at the federal level, and then none, for 17 years.
But the administration of Donald Trump, a staunch supporter of the death penalty, hoping to win a second term on November 3 through a strong speech, decided a year ago to resume federal executions.
After legal revocations, he succeeded, and Keith Nelson’s execution is the fifth since July, following the execution on Wednesday of an American Indian, Lezmond Mitchell, also charged with murder, despite opposition from the Navajo nation.
The Trump administration can thus boast that in two months it has executed more convicts than the US administrations in the last 57 years.
The death penalty is on the decline in the United States, where only a handful of states in the south use it. A total of 22 executions were carried out in 2019, and 12 convicted persons have been executed since the beginning of the year.
According to opinion polls, support for the death penalty has fallen among the American population, but remains strong among Republican voters.
