RALEIGH, Dec 2: Double murderer Kenneth Lee Boyd became the 1,000th prisoner executed in the United States since the reinstatement of capital punishment when he was put to death by lethal injection on Friday.
The execution drew global attention because of its symbolism since the US Supreme Court allowed the death penalty to be brought back in 1976 after a nine-year unofficial moratorium.
It helped spur renewed debate over US capital punishment, and came on a day that executions in Singapore and Saudi Arabia also sparked international concerns.
“God bless everybody in here,” Boyd said in his last words to witnesses from the death chamber at Central Prison in North Carolina’s state capital, Raleigh.
Kenneth Boyd, who was 57, was a Vietnam war veteran with a history of alcohol abuse. He was executed for killing his wife and father-in-law in 1988, in front of two of his children.
“This 1,000th execution is a milestone, a milestone we should all be ashamed of,” his lawyer Thomas Maher said.
BUSH SUPPORT: With polls showing that a declining majority of the American public backs the death penalty, the White House reiterated US President George W. Bush’s support.
“The president strongly supports the death penalty because he believes ultimately it helps save innocent lives,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan told reporters.
Mr Bush is a former governor of Texas, which has accounted for 355 of the 1,000 executions — more than three times as many as any other state.
Mr Boyd was wheeled into the death chamber, strapped to a gurney and injected with a fatal mix of three drugs.
He seemed ‘sort of resigned’, said witness Elyse Ashburn.
World reaction to Mr Boyd’s death was swift.
“It is a scandal that the death penalty still exists in a civilized country like the United States of America,” said Petra Herrmann, chairwoman of the German group Alive e.V.
“How can a citizen realize that murder is wrong if the state is allowed to murder its own citizens?” she said.
Akiko Takada, of Japan’s anti-capital punishment group Forum 90, said that despite frequent US use of the death penalty ‘crime there shows no signs of diminishing, so ultimately the death of these people has no effect’.
“This is one small step for humankind — backwards,” American campaigner Clive Stafford Smith said.—Reuters
