JARRATT, Va. A career criminal who pleaded guilty to murder and cooperated with prosecutors in an attempt to avoid the death penalty was executed by lethal injection on Monday after seven years on Virginia's death row. Johnile Dubois, sentenced to die for the 1991 slaying of a Portsmouth, Virginia, convenience store clerk, was put to death by lethal injection at 9:09 p.m. EDT (0109 GMT) after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a final appeal and the state governor refused a clemency request. I send love to my family and friends and everyone who knows me, Dubois, 31, said as he lay strapped to a gurney in the death chamber of the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, about 55 miles (90 km) south of Virginia's state capital of Richmond. According to prosecutors, store clerk Philip Council was shot and killed in November 1991 when Dubois and three accomplices two 16-year-olds and an 18-year-old robbed the in-a-hurry convenience store where he was working. Council, 39, who had been left mentally impaired by an automobile accident, was shot to death when he did not open a cash register quickly enough for the robbers, prosecutors said. As Dubois' accomplices jumped the counter and began beating Council, Dubois shot the clerk in the chest, prosecutors said. The robbers made off with $400. Dubois was on parole at the time of the shooting. He had been convicted of grand larceny in 1987 and assault and possession of a firearm in 1990. Robbery and attempted robbery charges were pending against him when he was sentenced to die. Prosecutors said Dubois had fathered nine children but was not paying child support and was pocketing about $2,500 a month selling drugs in Portsmouth, a working-class town in the coastal Virginia beach area. Dubois pleaded guilty and cooperated with prosecutors as part of a plea bargain. Portsmouth Circuit Judge Johnny Morrison rejected the plea agreement and sentenced Dubois to die, calling him a danger to others by virtue of his way of life. State prison officials did not release details of Dubois' last meal, honoring his request. He was the eighth death row inmate executed in Virginia this year and the 54th in the state since capital punishment was reinstated by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. Virginia's total trails only Texas' 156 in modern times. (Reuters)