LUCASVILLE, Ohio — A Trumbull County man became the first person in American history executed using a single drug instead of a three-drug cocktail.
Kenneth Biros (left), 51, was pronounced dead today at 11:47 a.m. after being lethally injected in his arms with a single massive dose of barbiturates in the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. The single drug is similar to what is used by veterinarians to euthanize animals.
Ohio prison officials had announced a new execution procedure, including the single-drug protocol on Nov. 13, following a brief moratorium ordered by Gov. Ted Strickland.
The convicted killer from the Youngstown-area became the 33rd person put to death in Ohio since executions resumed in 1999. The state’s unprecedented use of a single drug to kill Biros has thrust Ohio’s new execution procedures into the national spotlight as supporters and opponents of capital punishment closely monitor the newest wrinkle to lethal-injection procedures.
The three-drug method was also the source of several lawsuits claiming Ohio’s procedures were cruel and unusual because inmates could feel pain while being sedated, paralyzed and killed by the drugs.
Biros was convicted for the 1991 murder of Tami Engstrom, a 22-year-old woman that he severely beat, strangled and then dismembered after promising her a ride home from a bar. Biros had confessed to killing Engstrom, but he said he suffocated her after she hit her head trying to flee his car.
Biros was supposed to be executed on March 20, 2007, but he never made it past the holding cell adjacent to the death chamber at Lucasville because of a U.S. Supreme Court order that stayed his execution.
It was a different story today as Biros’ attorney, Tim Sweeney, was unable to sway federal courts to block the execution with an argument that the state was experimenting on his client with the newly established procedures. Read more on Ohio's one-drug execution protocol.
Source: cleveland.com, December 8, 2009
Ohio first to use 1-drug method
Trumbull County killer Kenneth Biros this morning became the 1st person in the United States to be executed using a 1-drug lethal injection protocol.
With his victim's family looking on, Biros, 51, died at 11:47 a.m. in the Death House at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility near Lucasville following the intravenous injection of single, large dose of thiopental sodium, a powerful anesthetic.
"Now I am paroled to my Father in heaven, and I will spend Christmas with my Lord and Savior," Biros said. "Peace be with you."
It was the 1st execution in the nation involving 1 drug as opposed to the 3-drug cocktail protocol abandoned by Ohio but still used in 35 other states.
Biros, 51, was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering Tami Engstrom, who was 22 at the time, after offering to give her a ride home from a bar in Masury, Ohio, on Feb. 7, 1991. He dismembered her body, leaving body parts in Ohio and Pennsylvania.
Watching Biros' execution from a room about 10 feet away and separated by glass were Mary Jane Heiss, Engstrom's mother, and Tom and Deb Heiss, her brother and sister. Trumbull County Sheriff Thomas Altiere also watched the execution.
Biros' attorneys, Timothy Sweeney and John Parker, argued unsuccessfully to the courts that the execution should be stopped because it involved "experimentation" using untried and untested procedures.
The new protocol was unveiled Nov. 13, 2 months after the execution of Romell Broom was halted when prison medical technicians spent 2 hours unsuccessfully trying to attach IV lines. Broom has gone to federal court to challenge the state's right to try to execute him a 2nd time.
Prison officials did not have to rely on a new backup method involving large doses of 2 high-potency painkillers.
Biros was the 5th person to be executed in Ohio this year and the 33rd to die since the state resumed capital punishment in 1999.
Biros becomes the 51st condemned inmate to be put to death this year in the USA and the 1187th overall since the nation resumed executions on January 17, 1977.
Sources: Columbus Dispatch and Rick Halperin, December 8, 2009
New Execution Method Is Used in Ohio
Saying he was now “paroled to my Father in heaven,” a convicted killer in Ohio on Tuesday became the first person in the United States to be executed with a one-drug intravenous lethal injection.
The new method, which involved a large dose of anesthetic, akin to how animals are euthanized, has been hailed by most experts as painless and an improvement over the three-drug cocktail used in all other states that employ lethal injection, but it is unlikely to settle the debate over the death penalty.
While praising the shift to a single drug, death penalty opponents argue that Ohio’s new method, and specifically its backup plan of using intramuscular injection if the authorities are unable to find a usable vein, has not been properly vetted by legal and medical experts. Since it had never been tried on humans before, they contend it is the equivalent of human experimentation.
But the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene on Tuesday morning, and the procedure went largely as planned.
The inmate, Kenneth Biros, 51, died at 11:47 a.m. Terry J. Collins, director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the drug took about 10 minutes to take effect, roughly the same length of time as the three-drug cocktail. It took about 30 minutes for the execution team to find a usable vein, after having inserted the needle several times into each arm.
Ohio adopted the one-drug method last month after a failed execution attempt in September in which the authorities spent more than two hours trying to find a usable vein in Romell Broom, 53, who was convicted of the 1984 abduction, rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl.
Mr. Biros was convicted of sexually assaulting and killing Tami Engstrom, 22, near Warren, in northeastern Ohio, in 1991 after offering to drive her home from a bar, then scattering her body parts in Ohio and Pennsylvania. She had been stabbed more than 90 times. Mr. Biros acknowledged killing her but said it was done during a drunken rage.
Ms. Engstrom’s mother, brother and sister attended the execution, as did one of Mr. Biros’s lawyers, John Parker, and two of Mr. Biros’s friends. Thomas Altiere, the sheriff for Trumbull County, where the murder occurred, also watched the execution.
As Ms. Engstrom’s family members entered the prison on Tuesday, a reporter asked if they were ready. “We’ve been ready for 18 years,” one of the Engstroms said, according to The Columbus Dispatch.
Shortly before the execution, Mr. Biros gave his personal belongings — seven CDs, an address book, a portable CD player, a rosary and a notebook — to his siblings.
“I’m sorry from the bottom of my heart,” he said after thanking his family and friends for their support.
Opponents of the death penalty have long argued that using a single drug is more humane than the three-drug cocktail, which involves a short-acting barbiturate to render the inmate unconscious, followed by a paralytic and then a chemical to stop the heart.
Still, death penalty opponents criticized the state for not allowing more time for closer scrutiny of the new protocol.
“The key is due process,” said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington. He said that, for example, when New York introduced the electric chair in 1890, the case went to the Supreme Court, which decided that the punishment might be more humane than hanging.
“The court held that death row prisoner received due process because the New York Legislature had considered the punishment method carefully,” Mr. Dieter added. “In this case, however, everyone has taken the Ohio Department of Corrections at their word, without an adversarial debate.”
But Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, which supports the death penalty, said he doubted that the state’s new protocol would merit a Supreme Court review.
Mr. Scheidegger also dismissed the criticism that the new approach was untested on humans. “What kind of test do they expect?” he said. “A controlled study with volunteers? Not likely.”
Deborah W. Denno, a Fordham University law professor who is an expert on the death penalty and lethal injection, said she believed that the constitutionality of the new state protocol could be challenged if it was found not to be “substantially similar” to the three-drug method used by the State of Kentucky, which the court approved last year.
A federal judge in Ohio disagreed, however, and on Monday he denied a request from Mr. Biros to delay his execution until lawyers could conduct a review of the new protocol.
On Monday night, Mr. Biros’s lawyers filed an emergency request with the Supreme Court asking for his execution to be stopped. That was rejected.
Mr. Biros was moved to the holding area for death row inmates about 15 feet from the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville on Monday morning, prison officials said.
In the afternoon, he had a snack of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. At night, he was to be served a meal of cheese pizza, onion rings, fried mushrooms, Doritos, French onion dip, blueberry ice cream, cherry pie and Dr Pepper, they said.
On Tuesday, Mr. Biros received communion and seemed calm as he awaited his fate, prison officials said.
Source: The New York Times, December 8, 2009
Ohio becomes the first US state to execute a prisoner using a single drug
Convicted murder Kenneth Biros dies after receiving the powerful anaesthetic thiopental sodium.
Ohio today became the first state in America to put to death a prisoner using a single drug lethal injection in a technique that lawyers and campaigners have criticised as human experimentation.
Kenneth Biros was pronounced dead at 11.47am today, about 10 minutes after being given an overdose of the powerful anaesthetic thiopental sodium through an intravenous drip (IV) into his left arm.
The procedure was introduced by the Ohio state authorities to circumvent legal challenges brought after Romell Broom was given a stay of execution as he was actually lying on the gurney after technicians had tried and failed for two hours to give him the three-drug lethal injection - the most common form of capital punishment in America. He was sent back to death row. The executioners had been unable to find a working vein to insert the IV. The new single-drug method was designed to allow for a back-up position in which a combination of two painkillers could be injected directly into muscle.
Paradoxically, the executioners again struggled for up to half an hour on Tuesday to find a vein in Biros in which to put the IV through which his single anaesthetic was administered. His lawyers, who had made numerous attempts to persuade the courts to postpone his execution on grounds that the technique was untried and amounted to human experimentation, said the procedure had proven flawed.
John Parker, one of Biros' lawyers, said he had counted nine attempts to find a vein in the prisoner's left arm.
Deborah Denno, a specialist in execution methods at Fordham University in New York, said on the one hand it was good news that Ohio had dropped the use of a paralytic agent - the second in the three-drug cocktail used by all 35 other death penalty states - because that had been shown to induce extreme pain, but finding veins was still clearly a problem, and the so-called back-up of injecting painkillers into muscle was untested and could lead to a lingering death. She predicted future challenges.
Debi Heiss, sister of Tami Engstrom who was murdered by Biros in 1991 when she was 22, attended the execution, and told the Columbus Dispatch that it had gone "too smooth. I think he should have gone through some pain for what he did".
Ohio will today reconsider whether to send Broom back to the death chamber under the single-drug policy.
Source: guardian.co.uk, December 8, 2009
Bell Tolls Honor Life
After convicted killer Kenneth Biros was put to deathTuesday morning, a local priest tolled the bells of his church in Warren.
Father Bernard Schmalzried of Saint Mary's Catholic Church started the tradition back in 1999, when Ohio executed its 1st inmate in 36 years. He said he tolls the bells not for the inmate, rather for the people of Ohio.
Father Schmalzried said he believes this gesture serves as a reminder that the death penalty promotes hatred and violence, rather than solves those problems.
Biros was sentenced to death after being convicted in killing Tami Engstrom of Hubbard in 1999.
Source: WYTV News, December 9, 2009
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