A convicted killer has become the first death row inmate to be executed in America since the Supreme Court upheld the use of lethal injection, ending a seven-month moratorium.

William Earl Lynd, 53, was put to death at Jackson state prison in Georgia late on Tuesday after a final meal of two pepper jack barbecue burgers with crispy onions, baked potatoes with sour cream, bacon and cheese, and a large strawberry milkshake.

Executions had been on hold since September when the Supreme Court agreed to hear a challenge to Kentucky's use of a three-drug cocktail to put prisoners to death. The drugs put the inmate to sleep, then paralyse him and finally cause death.

Lawyers for two death row inmates argued that the drug cocktail could cause an excruciatingly painful death because the prisoner was paralysed and could not show if he was suffering. They contended that the procedure ran foul of the ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” in the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution.

On April 16 the Supreme Court upheld the use of lethal injection by seven votes to two. Chief Justice John Roberts ruled that “efforts to implement capital punishment must certainly comply with the Eighth Amendment, but what that Amendment prohibits is wanton exposure to ‘objectively intolerable risk', not simply the possibility of pain”.

“The real-world impact is that executions will commence again in some states,” John Holdridge, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union's Capital Punishment Project, said. Lynd was sentenced for killing his girlfriend, Ginger Moore, while they were high on Valium, marijuana and alcohol. With his tattooed arms and neck strapped down to a gurney, he blinked repeatedly, shuddered and yawned as the chemicals were administered. He was pronounced dead 17 minutes later.

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