The first execution in California for three years has taken place after Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger denied a convicted murderer clemency.
Donald Beardslee, 61, was killed by lethal injection in San Francisco's San Quentin State Prison this morning.
He was convicted of the murders of two young women in 1981 while on parole from an earlier murder conviction.
Beardslee's lawyers had argued that the prisoner suffered from serious brain damage that prevented him from making independent judgements at the time of the killings.
