Virginia Executes Man Who Killed During Robbery

Ronald Dale Yeatts, who slashed an elderly woman’s throat during a 1989 robbery, was put to death by lethal injection Thursday night, a prison spokesman said.

Yeatts, 38, was executed hours after Virginia Gov. James S. Gilmore rejected a clemency petition that claimed the jury was not adequately informed of its options to sentence Yeatts to life in prison after finding him guilty of murder.

Yeatts made no statement before he was injected with a dose of chemicals at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, about 55 miles from Richmond.

Yeatts was the eighth person executed this year in Virginia, which trails only Texas in the number of executions since the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment in 1976.