2012-01-06 Reuters
By Steve Olafson
A convicted murderer who tried but failed to kill himself three weeks ago in prison was put to death by lethal injection on Thursday in Oklahoma in the country's first execution of 2012.
Gary Roland Welch, sentenced to death for the fatal stabbing of Robert Dean Hardcastle during a drug dispute in 1994, was declared dead at 6:10 p.m. on Thursday at the state prison in McAlester, prison spokesman Jerry Massie said.
Welch was the first U.S. inmate executed this year, and the first in Oklahoma since January 2011, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks death penalty data. He was 49 years old.
