WASHINGTON >> A 57-year-old Florida man who had argued that lethal injection would cause “needless pain and suffering” because he has Parkinson’s disease was executed Thursday evening after the Supreme Court rejected a last-minute request to halt the proceeding.

The decision was unsigned and did not include the court’s reasoning, which is typical in such emergency cases.

The case of the man, Loran Cole, has drawn particular attention because of the abuses he said he had suffered at a notorious reform school, which formed the basis for Colson Whitehead’s novel “The Nickel Boys.” Over the years, former students at the institution, the Arthur G. Dozier School for Boys, have come forward to share accounts of brutality.

Cole, who was executed at Florida State Prison, had been convicted in the 1994 killing of a Florida State University student.

— The New York Times