Yesterday, Orlando Hall was executed for the 1994 murder of 16-year-old Lisa Rene.
Per Fox News, the 49-year-old was put to death by lethal injection at 11:47PM on Thursday, November 19, at the Federal Corrections Complex in Terre Haute in the state of Indiana.
According to federal court documents, Hall was a marijuana trafficker in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, who would sometimes buy drugs in Dallas in Texas.
On September 24, 1994, he met Rene's two brothers at a nearby car wash and paid them $4,700 for the marijuana.
When Rene's brothers claimed to have lost the money, Hall and four others tracked down the address of their Arlington apartment and broke in. The kidnapped Rene, who was home alone, kidnapped her, and repeatedly sexually assaulted her in a motel in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, over the following two days.
On September 26, Hall and two other men drove Rene to Byrd Lake Natural Area in Pine Bluff and led her to a freshly-dug grave. Hall placed a sheet over her head and battered her repeatedly over the head with a shovel.
The 16-year-old girl was then gagged, thrown in the grave, doused in gasoline, and buried alive.
Commenting on the case, retired Arlington detective John Stanton stated:
"[Rene] was studying for a test and had her textbooks on the couch when these guys came knocking on the front door... It was one that I won’t ever forget. This one was particularly heinous."
Meanwhile, Rene's sister Pearl stated that she and the rest of her family "are very relieved that this is over."
Pearl added: "We have been dealing with this for 26 years and now we’re having to relive the tragic nightmare that our beloved Lisa went through."
Per a report by The Mirror, Hall was found guilty by an all-white jury, which his attorneys claimed was the result of racial discrimination, and his execution came after the US Supreme Court overturned a previous ruling blocking it on the grounds of the method used.
Reports state that Hall's final words before the drug was administered were:
"I'm okay. Take care of yourselves. Tell my kids I love them."
According to witnesses at the execution, Hall winced briefly and twitched his feet, before opening his mouth in a wide yawn. His breathing became increasingly labored and then halted.
He was declared dead by an official at the scene who confirmed that his heart had stopped shortly thereafter.
Bruce Webster, one of Hall's other accomplices, was also was sentenced to death, Fox News reports. Yet that sentence was vacated due to Webster's intellectual disabilities. Meanwhile, the other three other men involved received lesser sentences in exchange for their cooperation with prosecutors.
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