Washington (AFP) - A man convicted of murdering a child was executed by lethal injection Friday, the fifth federal inmate to be put to death in the US in two months.
Keith Nelson, 45, was pronounced dead at Terre Haute prison in the Midwestern state of Indiana, his lawyers said.
Nelson was sentenced to death in 2003 for kidnapping a 10-year-old girl while she was roller skating in front of her house in Kansas in 1991.
He raped and then strangled her before abandoning her body in the neighboring state of Missouri.
Most crimes committed in the United States are tried in state courts, some of which are authorized to apply capital punishment.
But federal courts can take up and try the most serious case, or crimes committed in multiple jurisdictions.
Federal courts rarely deliver capital punishment sentences and carry them out even less frequently. From 1988 until July, only three people on federal death row were executed.
Under the administration of President Donald Trump, a staunch advocate of the death penalty, executions have been stepped up, however.
The Republican billionaire, who is standing for re-election on November 3, has advocated expanding the use of the death penalty, in particular for those convicted of killing police officers or children and for drug traffickers.
Five people have been executed since July, including Nelson and the only Native American on death row, despite opposition from the Navajo Nation in the latter case.
The death penalty is on the decline in the US, where only a handful of states -- particularly in the south -- still use it. Twenty-two executions took place in 2019 and 12 since the beginning of 2020.
Support for the death penalty has eroded among the general US population but remains strong among Republican voters.
