A triple murderer was executed in California this morning, the first death penalty carried out in the State in three years.
California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger declined last night to grant clemency to Donald Beardslee citing "grisly and senseless killings".
As expected, Mr Schwarzenegger said he would allow the execution of Beardslee (61) to proceed by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco at one minute after midnight (8.01 a.m. Irish time) this morning.
Beardslee's lawyers argue he was duped by accomplices and was suffering from mental illness aggravated by brain injuries when in 1981 he shot Stacey Benjamin (19) and choked and slashed the throat of Patty Geddling (23) in California.
The Air Force veteran, who was out on parole at the time for a 1969 murder of a young woman in Missouri, confessed to both killings and was sentenced to death in 1984.
"The state and federal courts have affirmed his conviction and death sentence, and nothing in his petition or the record of his case convinces me that he did not understand the gravity of his actions or that these heinous murders were wrong," Mr Schwarzenegger said in a statement.
Beardslee's lawyers had asked the governor to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole.
In a detailed five-page response, Mr Schwarzenegger detailed the brutality of Beardslee's three killings and rejected the argument that the killer was mentally impaired.
"We are not dealing here with a man who is so generally affected by his impairment that he cannot tell the difference between right and wrong," Mr Schwarzenegger said.