A British citizen convicted of a 1986 rape and murder has been executed in Texas despite high-level government efforts to stall his execution and a last-minute legal battle for DNA tests that supporters say could have cleared him.
In the latest case to pit a foreign government against the Texas criminal justice system, John "Jackie" Elliott was executed by lethal injection at the Walls prison in Huntsville, Texas.
Elliott, his long hair and goatee flecked with streaks of white, said as he lay strapped to a trolley in the pale green death chamber that he had no final statement.
He turned briefly to the observation room where his son, sister and other personal witnesses were watching and mouthed a message to them.
A prison doctor pronounced Elliott dead at 7:09 p.m. (1:09 Irish time today), seven minutes after the cocktail of drugs began flowing into his veins.
In another observation room, the parents and a sister of victim Ms Joyce Munguia watched, wiping away tears and sobbing quietly.
Munguia's mother told reporters later that Elliott's death had been "too easy" for him, compared with the beating her daughter suffered.
"The people who are against the death penalty, good for them," Ms Matilde Munguia said. "But... they have never walked in our shoes."
She said Elliott had committed the crime in Texas, not Britain. "So what if they don't believe in the death penalty. We want justice. That's what it was."
Elliott is the third Briton executed in the US in the modern era of capital punishment. Georgia executed two British citizens in 2002 and in 1995. Texas, which leads the nation in capital punishment, had already executed six people this year.
Since 1982, when the state resumed carrying out the death penalty after a four-year national ban in the 1970s, Texas has killed 296 people.
His lawyers had fought an 11th-hour battle for a reprieve so they could obtain DNA test results they said might clear Elliott. They had argued that the witnesses against him were the real killers and that DNA tests of blood on one of the men's shoes would have shown it was Munguia's.
Elliott, 42, was born in Britain, where his father was a US airman. A thrice-convicted felon, he has said he moved to the United States with his family six months after he was born.