Florida executes man for 1991 rape-murder of child

MIAMI (Reuters) - Florida executed a death row inmate by lethal injection on Tuesday for the 1991 kidnapping, sexual battery and murder of an 11-year-old boy, marking the state's first execution since a Supreme Court ruling ended a nationwide moratorium.

Officials at the Florida State Prison near Starke pronounced Mark Dean Schwab, a 39-year-old native of Ohio, dead at 6:15 p.m. EDT after injecting him with a deadly cocktail of drugs that paralyzed his lungs and stopped his heart, a spokeswoman for Gov. Charlie Crist said.

He became the 10th person to be put to death in the United States since the U.S. Supreme Court in April rejected a legal challenge to the three-drug cocktail used in most executions over the past 30 years.

Schwab was also the first inmate executed in Florida since the botched December 2006 execution of Angel Diaz, who took an unusually long 34 minutes to die after intravenous tubes used to administer the deadly drugs were connected improperly.

The Diaz case reignited national debate over how to enforce the death penalty in the United States. Opponents have long argued that lethal injection, which is used in 37 states, is cruel and unusual punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution.

Schwab was executed exactly 16 years after he received the death sentence for the April 1991 rape and murder of Junny Rios-Martinez Jr. in Brevard County.

(Reporting by Tom Brown, Editing by Cynthia Osterman)