Missouri serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin was executed by lethal injection early today after the US Supreme Court cleared the way for him to be put to death.
The 63-year-old was pronounced dead at 6.17am local time (12.17pm Irish time) at the Missouri Eastern Correctional Center in Bonne Terre.
The US Supreme Court cleared the way earlier today for the execution to move forward.
The court lifted two final stays that would have allowed Franklin to challenge Missouri's new lethal drug protocol and his claim that he was too mentally incompetent to be executed.
Franklin, an avowed white supremacist, was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Gerald Gordon, 42, and wounding two other men in 1977.
He was also linked to the deaths of at least 18 other people.
Franklin was convicted of killing eight people in the late 1970s and 1980s in racially motivated attacks around the US.
The victims included two African-American men in Utah, two African-American teenagers in Ohio, and an interracial couple in Wisconsin.
Franklin also had admitted to shooting Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt in 1978, paralysing him.
Mr Flynt argued that Franklin should serve life in prison and not be executed.
Franklin was the 35th inmate executed in the US this year and the first in Missouri in nearly three years, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
He was one of nearly two dozen plaintiffs challenging the constitutionality of Missouri's new execution protocol.
In October, the state changed its protocols to allow for a compounded pentobarbital, a short-acting barbiturate, to be used in a lethal dose for executions.
The state also said it would make the compounding pharmacy mixing the drug a member of its official “execution team”, which could allow the pharmacy's identity to be kept secret.
