A 53-year-old man convicted of killing two men in 1987 has been executed in the state of Florida with a lethal injection that included a drug never before used in a US execution.
The execution was carried out at 6.22pm (11.22pm Irish time) at the Florida State Prison in Bradford County, about 80km southwest of Jacksonville, where the two murders took place.
Mark James Asay was the first white man to be put to death in Florida for killing a black man since the state reinstated the death penalty in 1979.
Asay was sentenced to death in 1988 for killing two men in separate incidents on the same day a year earlier.
Florida prison officials said the drug, etomidate, was used in Asay's execution. It had not been used in a US execution before.
Use of etomidate was a factor in the lone dissent from a Florida Supreme Court ruling earlier this month denying a stay of execution.
Justice Barbara Pariente wrote that Asay was being treated as "the proverbial guinea pig" for the untested death penalty drug, which she said would violate the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
After using a racial slur during an argument, Asay shot Robert Lee Booker in the stomach.
He killed Robert McDowell by shooting him multiple times in the chest.
Asay said later he believed McDowell had cheated him out of $10.
Asay's last meal consisted of his requested fried ham, fried pork chops, french fries, vanilla swirl ice cream and a can of Coca-Cola, said Ashley Cook, spokeswoman for the Florida Department of Corrections.
He is the 93rd person to have been executed in Florida since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in the mid-1970s, according to the Death Penalty Information Centre.
That includes 91 men and two women.
Only Texas, Virginia and Oklahoma have put more people to death in that span, the centre said.
As of April 2017, Florida had 386 people on death row, behind only California, with 744.
Florida had not killed an inmate on its death row since January 2016, when the US Supreme Court ruled the state's death penalty process was unconstitutional because it gave powers to judges that should be reserved for juries.
Florida's legislature has since altered the state's death penalty law so that only a unanimous vote of a jury can condemn a person.
