A convicted serial killer who faced the death penalty in two states became the first inmate to be executed in almost three years in Virginia.
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“The lawsuit argues that use of the purported pentobarbital imposes an exceptional and entirely unnecessary risk of a cruel and painful execution”, Prieto’s lawyers said in a news release before his execution on Thursday.
Prieto has been convicted or linked by evidence to nine killings, the Washington Post reported, including the 1988 shootings of Rachael Raver and Warren Fulton III on the outskirts of the U.S. capital.
The El Salvador native had already been on death row in California for the rape and murder of a 15-year-old girl at the time. He reportedly thanked his lawyers and family members before mumbling, “Get this over with”.
UPDATE: 10/1/2015 8:45 p.m. California officials extradited him to Virginia. California has had 747 inmates sentenced to death, but has carried out only 13 executions since 1976.
Virginia received the drugs from Texas.
Alfredo Prieto, 49, was sentenced to death in the 1988 killing of two college students near Reston.
“However, because Virginia uses a paralytic in its lethal injection protocol, we will never know whether Mr. Prieto’s execution is legal and humane”.
Elise Cleva stands holding a sign as she participates in a moment of silence during an anti-death penalty vigil in reaction to the planned execution of Alfredo Prieto, near the Clarendon metro station in Arlington, Va., on Thursday, October 1, 2015.
The appeal centered on concern over quality of one of the lethal injection drugs the state meant to use. It’s one of three drugs the state plans to use in Prieto’s execution.
“It is time for this to end”, Margaret O’Shea, a lawyer from Attorney General Mark Herring’s office, said Thursday.
Virginia had been planning to execute Prieto at 9 p.m. Thursday at the Greensville Correctional Center, but a federal judge in Alexandria approved an order Wednesday temporarily blocking the execution. The Supreme Court ruled past year that Florida can’t use rigid cutoffs on IQ test scores to determine whether someone is intellectually disabled.
Prieto’s attorneys have also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the execution, arguing that he’s intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty.
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As of Wednesday evening, no judge had been assigned in Richmond and no hearings had been scheduled.
