Amber McLaughlin, a 49-year-old inmate at a prison in Missouri, has become the first transgender person executed in the United States.
McLaughlin was confirmed dead shortly before 7 pm local time at the Diagnostic and Correctional Centre in Bonne Terre, Missouri, a state prison department statement said.
Her execution, by lethal injection, occurred after the Republican governor of Missouri, Mike Parson, declined a clemency request.
McLaughlin, while still a man named Scott, was in 2006 convicted of killing a former girlfriend in suburban St Louis in 2003.
Two Missouri members of Congress, Democrats Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver, led the push for the convict’s death sentence to be commuted to life imprisonment.
The legislators last week wrote to Governor Parson to hold off the execution but he declined the request.
McLaughlin has thus become the first transgender person of either gender to be executed in America, and the first person to die by capital punishment this year in the country.
Leave a Reply