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Convicted Killer Executed In Florence
You guys still embarrassed to have Larry the Cable Guy as a fan?FLORENCE, Ariz. -- After more than 20 years of appeals, reprieve requests and stays, doctors at the Arizona State Prison in Florence pronounced convicted killer Jeffery Landrigan dead at 10:26 p.m. Tuesday. He was executed by lethal injection.
Just a few hours before, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5 to 4 to lift the stay that was preventing Arizona from executing him.
Landrigan thanked his family for being there with him, and his last words were "boomer sooner."
Landrigan had been on death row since his 1990 conviction for murdering Chester Dyer of Phoenix in a 1989 killing that prosecutors said part of a robbery.
Monday, a federal judge in Arizona blocked the execution because the state obtained the drug from a previously unidentified overseas source. The judge questioned whether it might be unsafe.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals agreed in a ruling early Tuesday, but the nation's high court reversed that decision.
"There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe," the unsigned order said. "...Speculation cannot substitute for evidence that the use of the drug is 'sure or very likely to cause serious illness and needless suffering."'
Arizona said Tuesday that it got its sodium thiopental from Great Britain, the first time a state has acknowledged obtaining the drug from outside the United States since the shortage began slowing executions in the spring.
That, in part, lead to the U.S. Supreme Court lifting the stay.
Stick with KPHO.com and CBS 5 News for more on this Breaking News story