A 59-year-old woman Suzanne Basso who was a seamstress was executed by lethal injection at the Texas state penitentiary in Huntsville, near Houston. She became the fourteenth woman to be executed in the United States in the modern era after a last-minute appeal to the Supreme Court failed.
It is said that Basso was the first female inmate executed in the US since Kimberly McCarthy was put to death in Texas last June. Only four women have been executed nationwide since 2002 - three in Texas, which accounts for more than a third of the total number of prisoners executed in the US.
It was reported that Basso Suzzanne had declined to make a final statement before she was executed and was pronounced dead at 6.26pm local time, eleven minutes after the lethal dose of pentobarbital was administered to her body.
Winston Cochran, Basso Suzzane's lawyer had appealed to the Supreme Court to review Texas's criteria for assessing the mental health of prisoners sentenced to death.
Though in earlier appeals to state and federal courts, Suzzane's lawyer Winston argued that her client was delusional and did not meet the standard of mental competency required for an execution to be carried out.
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