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Georgia Breaks Pause In Lethal Injections

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The Associated Press

Published: May 7, 2008

JACKSON, Ga. - A Georgia man who killed his live-in girlfriend was executed Tuesday, 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., Georgia Department of Corrections spokeswoman Mallie McCord told The Associated Press. Death came less than an hour after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected efforts to block the execution.

About three dozen states across the country that use lethal injection held off on carrying out any executions for more than seven months while the Supreme Court reviewed the constitutionality of the three-drug cocktail that is used. It was the longest pause in U.S. executions in a quarter century.

The Supreme Court last month upheld the legality of lethal injections, and Georgia was the first state to carry one out.

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.
Lynd has never denied killing Moore, 26, two days before Christmas in 1988. But his lawyers had sought a last-minute reprieve from the courts, arguing that new forensic medical evidence showed he could not have kidnapped her - an "aggravating" circumstance - because she was already dead when he stuffed her in the trunk of her car.

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