A Virginia man sentenced to die for beating another man to death with a baseball bat in 1998 was executed by lethal injection last night amid protests the execution amounted to state-assisted suicide.
Thomas Wayne Akers, 31, who pleaded guilty to killing 24-year-old Wesley Smith during a robbery in Roanoke, in southwest Virginia, told a judge more than 10 years ago while in prison on an unrelated charge that he wanted to die in the electric chair.
Akers was pronounced dead at 9:18 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia.
There were about 60 protesters - many more than normal - in a field just outside the prison. Death penalty opponents protested the Virginia execution and another scheduled to be carried out in Oklahoma next Thursday, which is International Death Penalty Abolition Day.
That marks the day in 1847 that Michigan became the first English-speaking territory in the world to ban executions.
Akers and an accomplice, Timothy Dwayne Martin, beat Smith to death with an aluminum baseball bat during a robbery in December 1998. Akers was driving the victim's car and had his wallet in his possession when the two men were captured in New York, near the Canadian border.
Martin later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison.