Disabled Death Row Inmate Frank Atwood Is Killed By Lethal Injection

A disabled death row inmate who killed an eight-year-old girl has been executed by lethal injection.

Frank Atwood, who was convicted of killing the girl in 1984, has been put to death in the US state of Arizona after a hiatus of almost eight years.

The 66-year-old died by lethal injection at 10.16am local time at the Arizona state prison complex in Florence.

His victim was Vicki Hoskinson, whose body was found in the desert in 1985, months after she had gone missing while going to deliver a birthday card to her aunt.

He regularly protested his innocence and his lawyers made several pleas to halt the execution, but they were ultimately unsuccessful.

Atwood's fate was sealed when US District Judge Michael Liburdi made the decision for the execution to proceed.

The Daily Mirror reports Atwood claimed the state of Arizona's death penalty procedures would violate his right not to be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment due to his disability.

He has a degenerative spinal that left him in a wheelchair, and his lawyers argued he would be in excruciating pain if strapped to a gurney as part of the process of being administered with a lethal injection.

His appeal was knocked back in the courts with a ruling that the use of a pillow and tilting the execution gurney would alleviate most of the pain Atwood might feel.

Since his crime occurred before 1992, Atwood was given a choice between lethal injection and the gas chamber, but his method of execution defaulted to the injection after he failed to make a choice.

Atwood is the second Arizona prisoner to be executed in less than a month after the state's suspension of capital punishment ended.

Arizona had put executions on hiatus after the botched lethal injection of Joseph Wood in 2014, when a process that should have taken 10 minutes lasted almost two hours.

Per AZ Central, Vicki Hoskinson's mother attended Atwood's clemency hearing in May and said his execution would bring justice to their family.

Debbie Carlson said: "We chose the death penalty because we never wanted another child to have to be faced by this monster.

"We wanted to make sure another family was spared and not have to live what we have lived for the last 37-and-a-half years."

They also report that around 40 people attended Atwood's execution, including Carlson and Atwood's wife Rachel.

Media witnesses said Atwood remained calm throughout the procedure and smiled at his wife several times.

Witnesses also say he made no acknowledgement of Hoskinson's family or apologised for the crimes he was convicted for.

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