Convicted US killer executed in Mississippi: prison official

0 Comments | AFP, May, 2008

WASHINGTON (AFP) — An inmate convicted of kidnapping and murdering a woman in 1987 was executed Wednesday in the southern state of Mississippi, prison officials said.

Earl Wesley Berry, 49, died at 6:15 pm (2315 GMT) at the state prison in the town of Parchman, an official with the Mississippi Department of Corrections told AFP.

Berry is the second inmate executed in the United States since the US Supreme Court ended a defacto seven-month hiatus on executions while the constitutionality of lethal injections -- the method used to execute most death penalty inmates -- was challenged.

In April the Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection did not amount to "cruel and unusual punishment," which is banned by the US constitution, and in early May an inmate was...