MIAMI — Convicted child rapist and murderer Mark Dean Schwab was put to death Tuesday at Florida State Prison, the state's first execution since a botched lethal injection 18 months ago raised concern that a condemned man had endured a "cruel and unusual" ordeal.
Schwab, 39, was executed for the rape and murder of 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez of Cocoa. He killed the boy in April 1991, just a month after early release from a previous prison term for sexually assaulting a 13-year-old boy.
Schwab died at 6:15 p.m. EDT, said Erin Isaac, spokeswoman for Florida Gov. Charlie Crist.
Attorneys for Schwab made a fruitless appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court late Monday, arguing that the last execution at the prison near Starke, in December 2006, was bungled, inflicting severe and prolonged pain on 55-year-old Angel Nieves Diaz.
"Florida is a state with a long history of failed and disconcerting executions," Schwab's appeal said, referring to macabre incidents in the 1990s when the state's electric chair, nicknamed Old Sparky, set fire to the heads of condemned men before they died.
The Diaz case, in which executioners missed the inmate's vein and injected chemicals into muscle tissue, spurred then-Gov. Jeb Bush to impose a moratorium on executions and order a review of lethal-injection procedures.
The state Department of Corrections made modest changes based on the review panel's recommendations but retained the three-drug method used since Florida switched from executions by electric chair to lethal injection eight years ago.
Death penalty opponents contend that the drugs are poorly understood by those who administer them and that they can inflict pain, in violation of the constitutional prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.
Analysis of the state's death chamber records showed that errors had occurred in 53% of the executions, based on excessively long interludes between chemical administration and death or physical signs that the inmate wasn't fully unconscious or paralyzed, said Peter Cannon of the Capital Collateral Regional Counsel, a state agency that handles death penalty appeals.
Under the three-drug lethal-injection routine practiced by Florida and three dozen other states, sodium thiopental is administered first to render the inmate unconscious, then the paralytic agent pancuronium bromide, and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart.
