HUNTSVILLE, United States : Two men were executed in US prisons, one of them a certified psychotic who had to be drugged to be rendered "fit" to die, and another who had renounced all appeals and was executed as a "volunteer," prison officials said.

A court of appeal stayed a third scheduled execution of an allegedly mentally impaired man who was convicted of killing his 12-year old niece.

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At the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville, Ynobe Matthews was declared dead at 6:18 pm central time (0016 GMT Wednesday) of a lethal injection begun eight minutes earlier, said prison spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.

She said Matthews, 27, convicted of the May 2000 rape and murder of a 21-year-old woman, whose house he then set afire, died without making a final statement, as a handful of peaceful anti-death penalty protestors demonstrated outside.

Matthews had renounced the long appeals that are normally filed on behalf of death row inmates in order, he said, to spare his and his victim's families from further anguish.

The Texas prison system thus classified him as a "volunteer" for execution, said Lyons.

Later at the Arkansas State Penitentiary in Varner, Charles Singleton was executed by lethal injection at approximately 8:30 pm central time (0230 GMT Wednesday) and Karl Roberts was due to be executed the same way shortly afterwards, a prison spokesman said.

Singleton, 43, was medicated to allay his psychosis and keep him calm for the execution, spokeswoman Dynah Tyler said beforehand.

David Elliot of the Washington-based National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said both Singleton's prosecutors and defense lawyers had agreed that he suffers from "serious mental illness and requires medication to prevent psychotic behavior."

Singleton, convicted of murdering a young woman in Arkansas, initially won lower court appeals challenging whether the state "could forcibly medicate" him "in order to make him sane enough to execute," said the coalition.

However, the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision and ruled that he could be forcibly be medicated, and the US Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal.

Elliot said Tuesday that, as far as he knew, Singleton was taking his anti-psychosis medication "voluntarily."

Just hours before Karl Roberts was to be executed at the state penitentiary in Varner, the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a stay of execution after his lawyers filed a las minute appeal, CNN said early Wednesday.

Arkansas State Attorney General Mike Beebe said his office was considering whether to appeal the stay of execution to the Supreme Court, CNN added.

Roberts, 35, confessed to murdering his niece in 1999, but his lawyers contend he was mentally impaired at the time of the crime, having suffered brain injury when he was run over by a truck as a child.

Elliot of the national coalition said the injury "destroyed 15 percent of his brain, the portion that directs impulse control.

"A prominent neurologist testified that, if it were not for the injury... Karl Roberts could not have committed this crime," said Elliot, "Prior to Karl's accident, he had no behavioral problems."

At trial, Roberts was found to have been mentally competent at the time of his confession and the ruling was affirmed in a mandatory appeal to a higher court.

- AFP