Death will come at 11 a.m. on their execution date for all Kansas prison inmates condemned for capital murder.
The warden, chaplain and correctional officers serving on an execution strapdown team will enter the condemned inmate's holding cell on the 4th floor of an administration building at Lansing Correctional Facility.
The warden will read the order of execution.
The prisoner will be escorted to the lethal injection chamber on that same floor, strapped onto a gurney and allowed to make a final statement, which the warden will write down to be released later to the media.
Prison officials will confirm there is no reason to stop the execution, then open curtains to the injection chamber so witnesses can watch.
Those steps are part of the 57-page protocol for carrying out executions that the Kansas Department of Corrections has had in place since 2001.
8 Kansas inmates, all men, face death sentences.
That number would rise by one if an Osage County judge on Oct. 11 follows the guidance a jury provided this past week.
Jurors recommended James Kraig Kahler, 48, be executed for capital murder in the November 2009 gunshot slayings of his estranged wife, their 2 teenaged daughters and his wife's grandmother.
None of those facing death sentences in Kansas figures to go to the execution gurney any time soon.
This state, where the last execution took place by hanging in 1965, hasn't put anyone to death since its law allowing for capital punishment by lethal injection took effect in 1994.
All inmates currently facing death sentences are pursuing appeals they have yet to exhaust, and none has ever seen an execution date set.
The condemned include Gary Kleypas, who in 1998 became the 1st person sentenced to death under the current law after he was convicted of the 1996 murder of a Pittsburg State University student.
The Kansas Supreme Court vacated Kleypas' sentence for legal reasons in 2001 before he was again sentenced to death in the same case in 2008.
The inmates with the longest-standing current death sentences are brothers Jonathan and Reginald Carr, condemned in 2002 for capital murder committed 2 years earlier in the deaths of 3 young men and a young woman in Wichita. The Carrs also were sentenced to life imprisonment for a separate, unrelated murder.
Kansas legislators supporting capital punishment have been quick to cite the Carrs' crimes when that topic comes up for debate.
The Kansas Senate in a 20-20 vote in February 2010 rejected a bill that would have abolished the death penalty for murders committed after July 1 of that year while leaving it in place for cases where a death sentence had already been imposed.
A bill that would have made those same moves was introduced this year in the Kansas House but never received a hearing in its Federal and State Affairs Committee.
Meanwhile, Lansing Correctional Facility warden David McCune says the corrections department — rather than maintaining a specific "death row" — chooses to keep its capital inmates in administrative segregation at El Dorado Correctional Facility.
McCune said no specific death row was established because the feeling was that the administrative segregation unit at El Dorado was an appropriate security level for inmates being held on a death sentence.
Corrections department spokesman Jan Lunsford said those in administrative segregation, including inmates who aren't facing death sentences, are locked alone in their cells for all but one hour five times a week, when they are allowed to come out and exercise by themselves in a secure pen.
Lunsford said inmates in administrative segregation also are allowed out of the cells in restraints when they are taken to shower alone.
Lunsford said seven of the state's capital inmates are at El Dorado while one — Scott Cheever, convicted in the 2005 slaying of Greenwood County Sheriff Matt Samuels — is at Lansing. Cheever is at Lansing because victims of his crime are employed at the El Dorado facility, McCune said.
The decision to house capital inmates at one prison and execute them at another was made to benefit staff members who take care of those prisoners on a long-term basis, then-Kansas Corrections Secretary Chuck Simmons told The Topeka Capital-Journal in 2001.
"An execution is something that has a certain amount of impact on all of the staff who participate," Simmons said.
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| Death Chamber Lansing Correctional Facility |
He spoke at a 2001 media event where the state showed reporters the lethal injection chamber it had completed the previous year on the top floor of a 4-story administration building at Lansing Correctional Facility. The building previously had been declared structurally unsound and stood vacant for 20 years before the state renovated it.
Corrections officials at the event also displayed an 8-foot-by-10-foot holding cell on the building's top floor where condemned inmates are to spend their final days.
They said each condemned prisoner would be allowed a last meal of either the regular fare served that day to the other inmates at Lansing or something costing no more than $15 from a Lansing restaurant.
Corrections officials said the execution would be witnessed by people in 3 rooms, including one containing as many as 3 people invited by the inmate, who would be able to see them through the glass.
They said the inmate wouldn't be able to see those in the other rooms, which would contain family members of the victims and representatives of the news media and the government.
The execution protocol adopted 10 years ago remains in place, Lunsford said.
He provided The Capital-Journal a copy of that protocol. For security reasons, redactions had been made to all or part of 35 of the document's 57 pages.
The protocol calls for a team of Lansing Correctional Facility officials to travel 1 week before the execution date to the prison where the condemned inmate is being kept.
The inmate then will be transferred to the building housing the lethal injection chamber at Lansing.
Lunsford said the building's fourth floor has gone unused over the past 10 years, through its lower 3 floors have been used on a daily basis for administrative functions.
On the day of the execution, the protocol calls for an injection team and a strapdown team of corrections department employees to help carry out the sentence. Lunsford said the state has yet to determine which employees will serve on those.
The protocol calls for the injection team to prepare all injection drugs on the morning the sentence is to be carried out.
At execution time, protocol calls for 1 intravenous tube each to be placed in the right and left arms of the condemned inmate.
The inmate will then be injected with sodium pentothal, to make him unconscious; pancuronium bromide, to halt breathing; and potassium chloride, to stop the heart.
The sole American manufacturer of sodium pentothol, also known as sodium thiopenal, announced in January it would no longer produce the drug.
The move was expected to force some states to adopt new drug combinations for lethal injection and to delay further executions, some of which had already been moved back because of the drug's limited supply.
McCune said Friday that the state of Kansas has yet to obtain the chemicals it will need to carry out executions by lethal injection
“We do not stock any of these drugs as they have expiration shelf lives,” he said.
Source: Capital-Journal, September 4, 2011
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