A man convicted over the shooting deaths of three people was executed on Wednesday in Texas, while another execution scheduled for the same time in Georgia was halted by a judge.

It’s the fifth execution in Texas this year. Georgia has yet to put anyone to death this year. The nation’s busiest death chamber is in Florida, which accounted for more than half the 25 executions already carried out in the US this year.

LeJames Norman, 40, was sentenced to death over the 2005 deaths of Samuel Roberts, 24, Tiffani Peacock, 18, and Celso Lopez, 38, inside the home they shared in a small, rural town. He died by injection of the sedative pentobarbital at the state penitentiary in Huntsville, Texas.

Stacey Humphreys, 53, was convicted of malice murder and other crimes in the 2003 killings of 33-year-old Cyndi Williams and 21-year-old Lori Brown. He had been scheduled to die at 7pm ET at the state prison near Jackson in Georgia. However, a judge halted Humphreys’ execution late on Tuesday after his lawyers filed a petition seeking a resentencing under a new state law that allows victims of abuse to have their sentences reconsidered and reduced, if they can tie their crimes to abuse they suffered.

The state appealed against that ruling, asking the Georgia supreme court to find that Humphreys was not entitled to have his sentence reconsidered under the new law. But the high court declined to hear that appeal before the scheduled execution time and left the lower court’s stay in place.

Norman and Ker’Sean Ramey believed there was cocaine in the house in Edna, a small, rural city about 100 miles (161km) south-west of Houston, and hoped to steal it, according to court records. But they never found any drugs and fatally shot three people in the home. Lopez was shot four times, including three in the back of his head. Peacock was shot twice in the head. Roberts was shot five times to the chest, neck and head.

Norman was arrested about five months after the killings while trying to cross back into the US from Mexico. He pleaded guilty to capital murder, leaving a jury to decide his punishment.

Ramey was also convicted in the shootings and sentenced to death. His execution is set for next week.

The Texas board of pardons and paroles on Monday voted against commuting Norman’s sentence to a lesser penalty or recommending a 90-day reprieve of execution. After the Texas court of criminal appeals on Monday denied a motion from Norman’s attorneys for a stay of execution based on claims regarding actions by the prosecution, his attorneys have asked the US supreme court to review the decision.

In 2017, the supreme court refused to review Norman’s appeal that raised questions about the competence of his trial attorneys.

The two women Humphreys killed were working as real-estate agents for a new subdivision in the Atlanta suburb of Powder Springs. He entered the sales office in a model home around midday on 3 November 2003, and forced them to strip naked and give him their bank pins before fatally shooting them, according to evidence presented at trial.

Humphreys withdrew more than $3,000 from the women’s bank accounts, according to court filings. He told police after his arrest that he had recently taken out some high-interest payday loans and needed money for a payment on his truck.

Witnesses told police they saw a man fitting Humphreys’ description at the sales office and a vehicle in the parking lot that matched his black Dodge Durango. Police zeroed in on Humphreys and tried to question him at his Dunwoody home days later. He fled and was arrested in Wisconsin after leading police on a high-speed chase.

Humphreys’ lawyers have argued that he should be resentenced because his death sentence was tainted by a biased juror who lied during jury selection and bullied other jurors into voting for a death sentence. Courts have repeatedly rejected those arguments for procedural reasons, though US supreme court justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by the other two liberal justices, argued last year that the issue should be further explored rather than leaving it “caught in a web of procedural barriers”.

Additionally, Humphreys’ lawyers have argued that it was not fair that his clemency application was heard by only four members of the five-person state board of pardons and paroles. A judge had ordered one member of the board to recuse herself, agreeing with Humphreys’ legal team that there was a conflict of interest because she previously worked as a victim advocate with the Cobb county district attorney’s office and had worked with the victims in his case. The parole board on Tuesday denied clemency for Humphreys.