A Death Row prisoner in the US made obscene hand gestures and swore at a prison warden before being executed for the gruesome murder of a hitchhiker 30 years ago.
Asked if he had any final words, Carey Dale Grayson swore at Terry Raybon, warden of the William C Holman Correctional Facility in Alabama, prompting prison officials to turn off the microphone.
Mr Raybon pulled the microphone away after Grayson started by saying, “for you, you need to f*** off” according to Alabama-based AL.com, which added that the rest of his statement “went unheard” by witnesses.
Alabama Corrections Commissioner John Q Hamm told reporters: “He [Grayson] has cursed out most of our employees tonight, so we were not going to give him the opportunity to spew that profanity.”
The curtain to the execution chamber opened just after 6pm local time. Grayson raised both middle fingers as nitrogen gas began to enter his body via a breathing mask.
Strapped to a gurney with a blue-rimmed gas mask on his face, the 50-year-old shook at times and took a series of gasping breaths as the gas flowed – as two others previously executed by nitrogen did.
He was also seen rocking his head and pulling against the gurney restraints.
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Mr Hamm said the deadly gas flowed for 15 minutes and that an electrocardiogram showed his heart stopped beating after around 10 minutes.
He appeared to stop breathing at 6.21pm and was pronounced dead at 6.33pm.
Grayson was one of four male teenagers convicted of killing Vickie DeBlieux as she hitchhiked from Chattanooga, Tennessee, to her mother’s home in West Monroe, Louisiana in February 1994.
Ms DeBlieux, 37, was attacked, beaten and thrown off a cliff and her mutilated body was found at the bottom of a bluff near Odenville, Alabama.
Prosecutors said that, after offering her a ride, the four men took her to a wooded area and attacked and beat her, returning later to mutilate her body.
They left her face so fractured that she was identified by an earlier X-ray of her spine, a medical examiner said.
The teens were identified as suspects after one of them showed a friend one of the victim’s severed fingers and boasted about the killing, according to investigators.
It is the third time an inmate has been put to death using nitrogen hypoxia in the state this year.
The condemned person breathes only nitrogen gas through a mask while being deprived of oxygen.
Campaigners say it can cause prolonged suffering, but a federal appeals court this week rejected arguments made by the condemned man’s lawyers, allowing Grayson’s execution to go ahead.
Ms DeBlieux’s daughter, Jodi Haley, who was 12 when her mother died, told reporters at the prison after the execution that her parent was “unique”, “spontaneous”, “wild” and “funny”.
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But she criticised the sentence handed to Grayson, saying “murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop”.
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The execution was carried out hours after the US Supreme Court turned down Grayson’s request for a stay.
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Alabama is the only US state to have used nitrogen hypoxia to carry out a death sentence, but two others, Oklahoma and Mississippi, have also approved its use.
