By Greg Bluestein,

JACKSON, Ga. — Georgia executed Troy Davis on Wednesday night for the murder of an off-duty police officer, a crime he denied committing right to the end as supporters around the world mourned and declared that an innocent man was put to death.

Defiant to the end, he told relatives of Mark MacPhail that his 1989 death was not his fault. “I did not have a gun,” he insisted.

“For those about to take my life,” he told prison officials, “may God have mercy on your souls. May God bless your souls.”

Davis, 42, was declared dead at 11:08 p.m. The lethal injection began about 15 minutes earlier, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected an eleventh-hour request for a stay.

The justices did not comment on their order, which came about four hours after they received the request and more than three hours after the planned execution time.

Although Davis’s attorneys said seven of nine key witnesses against him disputed all or parts of their testimony, state and federal judges repeatedly ruled against granting him a new trial. As the court losses piled up Wednesday, his offer to take a polygraph test was rejected and the pardons board refused to give him one more hearing.

Davis’s supporters staged vigils in the United States and Europe, declaring “I am Troy Davis” on signs, T-shirts and the Internet. Some tried frenzied measures, urging prison workers to stay home and even posting a judge’s phone number online, hoping people would press him to stop the lethal injection. President Obama deflected calls for him to get involved.

“They say death row; we say hell no!” protesters shouted outside the Jackson prison where Davis was executed. In Washington, a crowd outside the Supreme Court yelled the same chant.

As many as 700 demonstrators gathered outside the prison as a few dozen riot police stood watch, but the crowd thinned as the night wore on and the outcome became clear. The scene turned eerily quiet as word of the high court’s decision spread, with demonstrators hugging, crying, praying, holding candles and gathering around Davis’s family.

Laura Moye of Amnesty International said the execution would be “the best argument for abolishing the death penalty.”

“The state of Georgia is about to demonstrate why government can’t be trusted with the power over life and death,” she said.

About 10 counterdemonstrators also were outside the prison, showing support for the death penalty and MacPhail’s family. MacPhail’s son and brother attended the execution.

“He had all the chances in the world,” his mother, Anneliese MacPhail, said of Davis in a telephone interview. “It has got to come to an end.”

Davis was not the only U.S. inmate who was put to death Wednesday.

In Texas, white-supremacist gang member Lawrence Russell Brewer was executed for the 1998 dragging death of a black man, James Byrd Jr., one of the most notorious hate-crime murders in recent U.S. history.

— Associated Press