A transgender woman convicted of murder was executed late Tuesday, officials said, in the first such execution in the United States.
Amber McLaughlin, 49, died shortly before 7 p.m. local time at the Diagnostic and Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Missouri, according to a state prison department statement.
McLaughlin died by lethal injection, according to local news station Fox2now.
McLaughlin was the country’s first transgender person of either sex to be executed, as well as the first person to die by capital punishment this year.
She was convicted of murdering a former girlfriend in 2003 in a St. Louis suburb before transitioning.
McLaughlin stalked the victim to the point where the ex-partner sought a restraining order.
The day of the killing, McLaughlin waited for the woman — named Beverly Guenther — as she left work.
Guenther was raped and stabbed to death with a kitchen knife. Her body was dumped near the Mississippi river.
In 2006 a jury found McLaughlin guilty of murder but was deadlocked on what her punishment should be.
The trial judge stepped in and imposed the death penalty. Such intervention is allowed in Missouri as well as in Indiana.
Citing the fact that a jury did not sentence McLaughlin to death, her lawyers asked Governor Mike Parson to commute her sentence to life in prison.
“The death sentence now being considered does not come from the conscience of the community — but from a single judge,” her attorneys argued in their clemency request.
They also claimed McLaughlin had a difficult childhood and suffered from mental health issues.
High-profile supporters of her cause included two Missouri members of the US House of Representatives, Cori Bush and Emanuel Cleaver.
They claimed in a letter to the governor that McLaughlin’s adoptive father beat her with a baton and even tasered her.
“Along with this horrendous abuse, she was also silently struggling with her identity, grappling with what we now understand to be gender dysphoria,” according to the letter. The condition describes people who believe their sex at birth and gender identity are incompatible.