A man whose death sentence had been overturned three times was executed in the US state of Missouri on Tuesday.
As the prison administration announced, the 56-year-old Carman Deck received a lethal injection.
Deck had killed an elderly couple in a suburb of St. Louis in 1996.
He had always admitted responsibility for the crime.
However, due to procedural errors, his trial had to be repeated three times.
Local activists had called for the death penalty to be commuted to life imprisonment because of the judicial marathon.
However, both Missouri Gov. Mike Parson and the US Supreme Court refused to further stay the execution.
According to local media, the Missouri Supreme Court overturned Deck's first death sentence in 2002 because his attorneys had poorly defended him.
Among other things, they had failed to describe his difficult childhood with foster parents.
The US Supreme Court invalidated a second trial in 2005 because Deck had been presented at trial with ankle, wrist, and stomach cuffs on, which could affect jury perception.
He was sentenced to death at a third trial in 2008, but the sentence was overturned by a federal judge in 2017 on the grounds that the jury had not been presented with all available evidence.
An appeals court restored the verdict in 2020.