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A man convicted of the 1996 killing of a University of Oklahoma dance student has been executed.

44-year-old Anthony Sanchez was pronounced dead following a lethal injection Thursday at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester. As he was strapped to the gurney, he repeated his claim of innocence.

Sanchez was convicted in 2006 of raping and killing 21-year-old Juli Busken. The Benton, Arkansas, native was abducted on Dec. 20, 1996, from the parking lot of her Norman apartment complex. Her body was found hours later, and she had been raped and shot in the head. The case went unsolved for years until DNA recovered from her clothes matched that of Sanchez while he was serving prison time for burglary.

Sanchez is the third inmate put to death in Oklahoma this year and the 10th since the state resumed carrying out the death penalty in 2021, ending a six-year moratorium brought on by concerns about its execution methods.

Oklahoma's next scheduled execution is Nov. 30, when Phillip Hancock is set to receive a lethal injection for killing two men in Oklahoma City in 2001.