Missouri death row prisoner executed in state

Missouri executed a man on death row on Tuesday night, the state's second lethal injection carried out this year.

David Hosier, 69, was pronounced dead at 6.11pm following a single-dose injection of the sedative pentobarbital at the state prison in Bonne Terre, said Missouri corrections department spokeswoman Karen Pojmann via text message.

Hosier has maintained his innocence in the 2009 murders of a couple, Angela and Rodney Gilpin, and two Missouri Congress members called for the execution to be halted earlier this week.

Hosier has acknowledged that he had an affair with Angela Gilpin, telling the Associated Press that she ended the relationship and got back together with her husband. The couple was fatally shot near the doorway of their apartment in Jefferson City, the state capital, in September 2009.

Police said Hosier had made comments threatening to kill Angela Gilpin prior to the shooting and that authorities later found in the woman's purse an application for a protective order that referenced fears Hosier could harm her and her husband.

Hosier was arrested in Oklahoma and had weapons in his car, though ballistic tests on the weapons were inconclusive.

Lawyers for Hosier focused on the defendant's traumatic childhood in his clemency petition, which Missouri governor Mike Parson rejected on Monday. The petition noted that Hosier's father, Glen Hosier, was murdered when he was 16 years old. His father was a detective sergeant with the Indiana state police and was fatally shot on the job by a man he was trying to arrest.