Virginia, Lethal Injection | featured news

A Virginia man who raped and suffocated an 88-year-old widow has become the state's first inmate executed using a new drug cocktail. Thirty-year-old Jerry Terrell Jackson was executed by lethal injection at 9:14 p.m. Thursday at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt. Jackson was sentenced to death for the August 2001 rape and murder of Ruth Phillips in her Williamsburg apartment.

The first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years has been put to death in Virginia for arranging the killings of her husband and a stepson over a $250,000 insurance payment.

Forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis died by injection at 9:13 p.m. Thursday. She became the first woman executed in Virginia in nearly a century. Supporters and relatives of the victims watched her execution at Greensville Correctional Center.