A similar device linked to Moody killed Robert E. Robinson, a black civil rights attorney from Savannah, Ga. Two other mail bombs were later intercepted and defused, including one at an NAACP office in Jacksonville, Fla. (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday denied last-minute appeals to spare the life of an 83-year-old convicted killer, clearing the path for Alabama’s execution of a man who would be the oldest inmate put to death in the modern era of U.S. capital punishment. As his scheduled lethal injection neared, Moody sought to have it stayed, arguing against Alabama's ability to execute him because he was first sentenced on federal charges. Image copyright Reuters

The authorities in the US state of Alabama have executed a man of 83 found guilty of murdering a judge and a lawyer in bomb attacks in 1989. Moody was convicted in 1972 of possessing a pipe bomb - the FBI said it detonated, injuring his wife - and was sentenced to three years in prison. The execution - which occurred at a correctional facility in Atmore, Alabama, about 118 miles outside Montgomery, the capital - came in the wake of a recent string of bombings in Austin that evoked the 1989 explosions for which Moody was sentenced to death. Bob Vance, son of the assassinated judge who is also a judge himself, was quoted in local media as saying there "wasn't any real good reason" for Moody's targeting of his father. More than 2,800 people remain on death row nationwide at a time when states are carrying out fewer and fewer executions, falling to 23 executions last year from a modern peak of 98 in 1999, according to Death Penalty Information Center records.
Alabama executes 83-year-old Walter Moody via lethal injection, who assassinated United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit judge Robert Smith Vance on December 16, 1989. Moody is the oldest prisoner to be executed in the US since the death penalty was reinstated by the Supreme Court in 1976.