May 1 (UPI) -- Florida on Thursday evening executed Gulf War veteran Jeffrey Hutchinson for killing his live-in girlfriend and her three young children in 1998, making him the 15th death row inmate to be killed in the United States this year, despite calls to halt his sentence due to mental illness caused during his military service.
Hutchinson's execution began around 8 p.m. EDT Thursday at the Florida State Prison in Railford, located about 47 miles southeast of Jacksonville. The method of execution was a lethal injection of a three-drug cocktail. He was pronounced dead at 8:14 p.m., the Florida Department of Corrections said in a statement.
Hutchinson, 62, was sentenced to death on four counts of first-degree murder in 2001 for killing his girlfriend, Renee Flaherty, 32, and her three children, Geoffrey, 9, Amanda, 7, and Logan, 4, on Sept. 11, 1998.
Following an argument with Flaherty, Hutchinson, who had been drinking, left their home, loaded his car with clothes and guns, and drove to a bar, only to later return and break down the front door his house.
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Court documents state that Hutchinson, in a "drunk rage, shot Flaherty once in the head with a shotgun as she lay in bed in the master bedroom with Amanda and Logan, whom he both fatally shot. Geoffrey's body was found in the living room, shot twice: once in the head and once in the chest.
He was executed Thursday evening after the Supreme Court rejected his lawyers' request for a stay on the grounds that their client was not competent to be put to death due to "a longstanding and disabling collection of fixed persecutory delusions, which render him unable to rationally understand why he is about to die."
The alleged mental conditions stemmed from his time serving as a paratrooper and United States Army Ranger from 1986 to 1994.
After his arrest, he told investigators that government operatives may have committed the murders to silence him over his advocacy for veterans suffering from so-called Gulf War Illness. According to his attorneys, those beliefs persisted until his death.
After Gov. Ron DeSantis signed Hutchinson's death warrant in late March, 132 veterans wrote a letter urging the Republican to halt the execution, arguing that to proceed was not justice but "a failure of responsibility."
"Jeff suffered from neurocognitive impairment, hallucinations, paranoia and uncontrollable aggression -- symptoms we now understand were not character flaws but the result of traumatic brain injury and chemical warfare exposure," the letter dated Friday states.
"But instead of receiving care, Jeff was met with silence. The science was not there. The VA was not there. His government was not there."
The veterans wrote that Hutchinson came home injured from the war and his mind was a casualty.
To execute him, they said, "is the final abandonment of someone our country broke and then left behind."
Florida argued against the stay of execution, pointing in filings to a state court ruling from late last month that found he did not suffer from any current mental illness and that his delusions were "demonstrably false."
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty mourned Hutchinson's death in statement emailed to UPI, saying he was executed following "a rushed, shallow and politically compromised" legal process that rubber-stamped DeSantis' commission's findings that he was competent to be killed, rather than allowing sufficient time to make such a determination.
"Executing a man who was physically and psychologically shattered by war -- a man who never got the treatment or understanding he needed and deserved -- is not justice," the anti-death penalty organization said.
"The devastating murders for which Jeff was convicted do not erase the sacrifices he made for our nation. The blood of those children and their mother is on our hands, too. We failed them all. And that failure did not have to end in more death and more victims."
Hutchinson is the fourth person to be executed in Florida this year and the 15th nationwide.
