Florida executes Mark Asay with untested lethal injection protocol
By
Kate Randall
25 August 2017
[date]25/08/2017[/filename]
The state of Florida executed Mark James Asay at the state prison in Raiford on Thursday evening. Asay, 53, was executed at 6:22 p.m. local time without incident, according to Florida corrections officials.
Asay, who was white, was convicted and sentenced to death in 1988 for the 1987 shooting deaths of Robert Lee Booker, 34, a black man, and Robert McDowell, 26, who was mixed race, white and Hispanic.
On Thursday afternoon, the US Supreme Court denied a stay of execution request on Asay’s behalf without comment. Marty McClain, Asay’s lawyer, had filed a final appeal with the court, arguing that his client was wrongly convicted on an unreliable ballistics report and made-up testimony from a jailhouse informant.
Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, also refused to grant Asay clemency.
Highlighting the racially disproportionate application of the death penalty in Florida, Asay is the first white person in the state put to death for the murder of a black person since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Since that time, at least 20 of the 92 Florida inmates executed were black men convicted of murdering white victims, according to the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC).
Asay, who prosecutors said was a white supremacist, claimed in his final interview that he was not a racist. He said he had gotten a number of racist tattoos when he was in prison at age 19 because he wanted to “fit in” with a white supremacist gang and “keep safe,” but had since had most of them covered up or “burnt off.”
Asay’s execution was the first in Florida in 18 months, after the US Supreme Court ruled Florida’s capital…