A Florida man who confessed to the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl was executed by lethal injection yesterday, Reuters reports. Eddie Wayne Davis, 45, was sentenced to death in 1995 after he admitted to taking the girl from her mother’s home, sexually assaulting and strangling her. His death follows a string of executions in the South last month, including those of two other men in Florida and Georgia, after a botched Oklahoma execution in April that sparked an uproar among death penalty opponents.
Davis is the seventh person executed in Florida this year, matching the total number of executions in 2013. The state has not seen more executions in a single year since 1984, when eight prisoners were put to death. A convicted murderer in Georgia had his death sentence, also due to be carried out yesterday commuted to life imprisonment by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. Tommy Lee Waldrip, 68, was convicted of the 1991 shooting death of a man who had been scheduled to testify against his son in an armed robbery trial. It was the fifth death sentence commuted by the Georgia Parole Board since 2002 and the first since April 2012.