Joseph Mulligan, 35, died in the electric chair Friday night insisting he was innocent of the murder of his brother-in-law and a woman in a scheme to collect life insurance.
”This has nothing to do with right or wrong,” he said calmly before the electrodes were attached to his body.
Mulligan, a black man, was the first person executed in the United States since the Supreme Court ruled last month in another Georgia case that there is no evidence the death penalty is racially discriminatory.
Mulligan died 2 1/2 hours after the Supreme Court, in a 7-2 vote, refused for the third time to stay his execution.
Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan dissented.
