South Dakota prison officials on Tuesday night executed a man convicted of the rape and murder of a 9-year-old girl he abducted from a Sioux Falls convenience store in 1990, a state corrections department spokesman said.
Donald Moeller, 60, was pronounced dead at 10:24 p.m. local time, becoming the second South Dakota inmate put to death by lethal injection this month, but only the fourth executed by the state since 1913, the department said.
Moeller had professed his innocence and fought for two decades to prevent his execution, but he admitted during a court hearing in early October that he had killed Becky O'Connell and halted appeals that would have further delayed his death sentence from being carried out.
Donald Moeller, 60, was pronounced dead at 10:24 p.m. local time, becoming the second South Dakota inmate put to death by lethal injection this month, but only the fourth executed by the state since 1913, the department said.
Moeller had professed his innocence and fought for two decades to prevent his execution, but he admitted during a court hearing in early October that he had killed Becky O'Connell and halted appeals that would have further delayed his death sentence from being carried out.
© Thomson Reuters 2012
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