Death Penalty News

Alabama’s corrections department has bungled the procedure on three recent occasions, with IV teams failing on hours at end, adding immense distress to a difficult situation On three occasions in the past four months, Alabama’s department of corrections has bungled its lethal injections procedure. At 7.57pm on 17 November, prison guards entered the “death cell” at Holman correctional facility in Atmore, south Alabama, where Kenneth Smith was awaiting execution by lethal injection for the 1988 murder-for-hire of a preacher’s wife.

An independent post-mortem examination completed earlier this month confirmed that Alabama’s execution of Joe Nathan James was, as Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, put it , “among the worst botches in the modern history of the U.S. death penalty.” James was executed on July 28 for the 1994 murder of Faith Hall (despite the objections of her children). In the early preparations for his death by lethal injection, the execution team had great difficulty finding a vein in which to insert the IV line. State officials kept him secluded for three hours while they repeatedly poked him with needles and subjected him to great suffering . From start to finish, James’s execution may well have been the longest in American history . He joined a disturbingly long list of people, including Clayton Lockett , Joseph Wood , Doyle Hamm , Romell Broom and John Marion Grant , whose executions by lethal injection made headlines in recent years when they went h...

ONE WEEK BEFORE he was killed in the death chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, Donald Grant asked a woman named Sue Hosch a question about his coming execution. “He asked me, did I think it was going to be botched?” Hosch recalled. “And I said, ‘I don’t know.’” As an activist who corresponded with men on death row, Hosch hoped that Grant would die peacefully — “you know, go to sleep.” But he told her that he was scared. Grant had good reason to be afraid. In his years on death row, he had seen neighbors taken to die whose executions had gone horribly wrong. Since 2014, Oklahoma’s 3-drug lethal injection formula had relied upon midazolam, a sedative that experts warned was inadequate to provide anesthesia. In a lawsuit, attorneys for people on Oklahoma’s death row argued that using midazolam put their clients at risk of “severe pain, needless suffering, and a lingering death.” After a series of disastrous executions made national news, officials announced that they would revise ...

An Ohio death row inmate who survived an attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2009 has died of possible complications of Covid-19, the state prisons system said. Romell Broom, 64, has been placed on the “Covid probable list” maintained by the department of rehabilitation and correction, spokeswoman Sara French said on Tuesday.  Inmates on that list are suspected to have died of Covid-19, pending a death certificate, she said.  The state says 124 inmates have died from confirmed or probable cases of the coronavirus. Ohio unsuccessfully tried to put Broom, then aged 53, to death by lethal injection on 15 September 2009. The execution was called off after two hours when technicians could not find a suitable vein, and Broom cried in pain while receiving 18 needle sticks. At the time, Broom was only the second inmate nationally to survive an execution after they began in modern times. RELATED |  Death-row inmate Romell Broom who survived execution attempt dies; COVID...

Inmate who survived execution attempt dies; COVID suspected An Ohio death row inmate who survived an attempt to execute him by lethal injection in 2009 died Monday of possible complications of COVID-19, the state prisons system said. At the time of the 2009 procedure, condemned prisoner Romell Broom was only the second inmate nationally to survive an execution after they began in modern times. Broom, 64, has been placed on the “COVID probable list” maintained by the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, spokesperson Sara French said Tuesday.  Inmates on that list are suspected to have died of COVID-19, pending a death certificate, she said.  The state says 124 inmates have died from confirmed or probable cases of the coronavirus. Ohio unsuccessfully tried to put Broom, then age 53, to death by lethal injection on Sept. 15, 2009.  The execution was called off after two hours when technicians could not find a suitable vein, and Broom cried in pain while receiving 18...

The US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on Tuesday denied Ohio death row inmate Romell Broom’s request for habeas relief and held that a second execution attempt would not constitute cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment. Ohio had previously tried to execute Broom by lethal injection in 2009, but officials were unable to maintain a viable IV connection to his veins. Broom was convicted of two counts of kidnapping, two counts of rape (one against a child), two counts of attempted kidnapping, one count of the aggravated murder of a 14-year-old, one count of aggravated robbery and one count of robbery, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Corrections. Broom was sentenced to death, which was affirmed on appeal. The execution was scheduled for September 15th, 2009, but, after two hours and 18 failed attempts, the medical team at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility was unable to deliver the injection. According to Broom’s petition, the...