South Dakota: Charles Rhines execution scheduled for Monday

Charles Russell Rhines is scheduled to be executed the Department of Corrections Monday, the Department of Corrections announced.

Rhines, 63, was sentenced to death in 1993 for the 1992 murder of 22-year-old Donnivan Schaeffer inside a Rapid City doughnut shop.

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The execution will be at 1:30 p.m. at the South Dakota State Penitentiary in Sioux Falls by lethal injection.

Rhines will be the 20th person executed in South Dakota since 1877.

Rhines' execution comes after a lengthy list of appeals from the circuit courts all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Most recently, Rhines protested the state's decision to use pentobarbital as the lethal barbiturate drug in his execution.

Rhines had requested the state execute him with an ultra-short-acting barbiturate and a chemical paralytic, something the state did when he was sentenced in 1993.

Current law allows inmates sentenced before a 2007 execution statute change to choose the manner of their execution by current law or at the time of their sentencing.

A circuit court judge denied Rhines' request for a preliminary injunction and stay of execution, a decision Rhines appealed to the South Dakota Supreme Court.

The South Dakota Supreme Court has not issued a ruling.

Rhines also asked the U.S. Supreme Court to step in and stay his execution. There has not been a ruling.

The last person to be executed in South Dakota was Rodney Berget, who was executed on Oct. 29, 2018, for the 2011 killing of correctional officer R.J. Johnson.

Source: argusleader.com, Danielle Ferguson, November 1, 2019

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