Missouri Executes Black Man who Killed 2 White People on 4th of July [Most Death Row Defendants are Executed for Killing White People]

Since 1977, the overwhelming majority of death row defendants (77%) have been executed for killing white victims, even though Blacks make up about half of all homicide victims. [MORE] Lyncing functioned as a powerful incentive for blacks to "learn their place" in the racial hiearchy. [MORE]

From [HERE] A Black inmate in Missouri has been put to death for killing two white people during a restaurant robbery in 1998. Forty-year-old Earl Ringo Jr. was executed Wednesday, the eighth person put to death in Missouri this year and the 10th since November.

The Department of Corrections said he was executed at 12:22 a.m. local time by lethal injection. 

Ringo and an accomplice killed delivery driver Dennis Poyser and manager trainee JoAnna Baysinger at a Ruby Tuesday restaurant in the early hours of July 4, 1998. Both were shot to death at point-blank range.

Earlier in the evening, the U.S. Supreme Court refused to halt the execution, a decision that came after a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a stay of execution and Gov. Jay Nixon refused to halt the execution.

The appeal made by defense attorney Richard Sindel questioned Missouri's use of the sedative midazolam before executions, claiming it could dull the inmate's senses, leaving him potentially unable to express any pain. 

St. Louis Public Radio reported last week that Missouri used midazolam before each of the last nine executions. Corrections spokesman David Owen said the drug can be administered at the request of the inmate or at the direction of officials with the corrections department. It wasn't clear what circumstances would prompt an inmate to get the sedative if he didn't want it.

"The quantity being administered to these guys, that is a very significant amount of the drug and could have a major effect on their ability to think and recall and formulate any kind of thought," Sindel said.

Owen said midazolam "is used to relieve the offender's level of anxiety" and is not part of the actual execution process.

Midazolam has come under scrutiny after it was used in problematic executions earlier this year in Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona. In each case, witnesses said the inmates gasped after their executions began and continued to labor for air before being pronounced dead.

The execution is one of two scheduled for Wednesday in the U.S.; Texas was scheduled to execute Willie Trottie for killing his common-law wife and her brother in 1993.