In the US state of Oklahoma, a 35-year-old man was executed after being sentenced to death for a quadruple murder. Authorities stated Gilbert Ray Postelle was executed by lethal injection at the McAlester City Jail on Thursday.
According to reports, the execution went off without any complications. When asked whether he had any final words, Postelle shook his head.
Postelle and his brother David were found guilty of murdering four persons in Del City, Oklahoma, in 2005.
During the attack on a mobile home where a man called Donnie Swindle was living, assault weapons fired around 60 shots.
Earl Postelle, the boys’ father, blamed Swindle — wrongly, as it turned out — for a motorbike accident that left him badly wounded the previous year.
Swindle, as well as two other men and a woman who were present at the time, were killed.
In a hearing before the Oklahoma clemency board in December, Gilbert Postelle said he had been a methamphetamine addict since the age of 13.
“My life at that time was filled with chaos and drugs,” Postelle said. “It was a family addiction.”
“In no way does that excuse my actions,” he added. “I do regret the pain and the loss that I have caused.”
Postelle said he was under the influence of his father, who was declared mentally incompetent because of brain injuries from the motorcycle accident and did not go on trial. He has since died.
“My dad was everything to me, even with all of his flaws,” Postelle told the clemency hearing.
Postelle’s brother David was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole for his role in the slayings.
The other man involved, Randal Wade Byus, cooperated with the authorities and was sentenced to six years in prison.
A series of botched executions in Oklahoma led to a temporary moratorium on capital punishment in the state in 2015, but the moratorium was lifted in 2021.
The US Supreme Court struck down the death penalty in 1972 but reinstated it four years later.
The number of executions carried out annually in the United States has been declining in recent years.
Capital punishment has been abolished in 23 US states, while three others — California, Oregon and Pennsylvania — have observed a moratorium on its use.
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