Death Penalty News

Recently a convicted Ohio killer was executed by a new one-drug intravenous lethal injection. The new method in the Buckeye state involves a large dose of anesthetic, similar to how animals are euthanized. The Ohio method has been praised by most experts as painless. Death penalty opponents still opposed this most recent execution as the equivalent of "human experimentation." Despite attempts by the opponents to stop this innovation, the United States Supreme Court refused to intervene and the new method went as planned. Opponents criticized the latest method based on the fact its backup plan of using intramuscular injection if the authorities are unable to find a usable vein as not yet being properly tested by legal and medical experts. Terry Collins, director of the Ohio Department of Corrections, said the drug took about 10 minutes to take effect, roughly the same length of time as the 3-drug cocktail used in Texas. The inmate Kenneth Biros, 51, died after it took t...

All you crooks might want to think twice before bumping somebody off in Ohio. Because the state now has a proven method for putting murderers to death quickly and seemingly without pain and a long line of death row inmates waiting to make the trip to Lucasville for their special meals and last words. Executions are currently scheduled through October after the Ohio Supreme Courts recent decisions in several cases. On Friday, justices set Oct. 6 for the execution of Michael Benge, convicted in the 1993 murder of his girlfriend in Butler County. Granted, we're no Texas. Yet. That state accounts for 449 of the 1,195 inmates executed in the United States since 1976, according to statistics compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center (online at http://www.deatpenaltyinfo.org/ ). Our once-a-month execution schedule won't match the 24 executions in the Lone Star State last year. Ohio has put 35 inmates to death since 1999, including last month's execution of Mark Aaron ...

After a relative lull in the number of executions Ohio carries out annually, it appears poised to sharply increase lethal injections in the months to come, possibly setting a state record for most in a year. The state executed condemned killer Mark Brown on Thursday, the third execution in as many months and one of nine scheduled for this year. Ohio put seven people to death in 2004, a record for the state and second in the nation behind Texas, and executed four last year. It executed two people in each of the two previous years. Brown, 37, had been sentenced to die for killing a Youngstown store owner in a 1994 shooting that mimicked a scene from the Samuel L. Jackson movie "Menace II Society." He was pronounced dead Thursday morning from a dose of a powerful anesthetic under the state's new injection procedure, with death coming about nine minutes after the drug began flowing. The state recently switched from a three-drug lethal-injection process, which opponents sa...

Ohio's failure to kill a man has stirred another hornet's nest in the fight over the death penalty. Kenneth Biros, 51, gave his brothers and sisters his seven CDs, his address book and his rosary beads as he waited out his last hours in an Ohio prison before becoming number 15,229 on the list of American executions since 1608. His last words, two weeks before Christmas, were: "I am paroled to my Father in heaven." Far away in Ohio's east, a Catholic church bell tolled Father Bernard Schmalzried's lament for another executed man. The blackened life of Kenneth Biros ended 13 minutes before noon that day; he became the first person executed in the United States by a single lethal injection. The mega-dose of sodium thiopental that coursed into his body took 10 minutes to kill Biros, who had descended into unconsciousness within a minute. It was the merciful ending that his victim, Tami Engstrom, 22, did not have. Biros met her in a bar. He tried to rape her....

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- Another successful execution using a lethal injection of just one drug instead of the traditional three has fueled debate over whether the state's unique approach should be adopted elsewhere. In Ohio's second such execution, killer Vernon Smith was pronounced dead Thursday morning eight minutes after the dose of sodium thiopental, a common anesthetic, began flowing through his body at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. In the first such execution, performed last month, it took 10 minutes for Kenneth Biros to die for killing a woman he met at a bar. The one-drug method may be the wave of the future since it appears to be simpler, about as fast and potentially less painful, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. But states probably will want to see the one-drug method debated in the courts before adopting it based on just two executions, he said. ''This is expe...

After a failed execution in September, the state of Ohio may have revolutionized capital punishment in America when it put a different inmate to death last month. It executed Kenneth Biros on Dec. 8 with a single drug, marking the first time in the United States that a lethal injection was not done with a three-drug “cocktail” that has been the subject of numerous legal challenges in recent years. Missouri and Kansas prison officials say they have no immediate plans to change their protocols, which employ the three-drug method. But death penalty experts think it’s highly likely that other states will follow Ohio’s lead. “I had wondered for years why one drug wasn’t used,” said death penalty proponent Dudley Sharp. “There was some speculative downsides, all of which were, easily, overcome.” Critics of the three-drug method repeatedly have suggested using just one strong sedative. That way, executioners would avoid the possibility of a condemned person suffering excruciating pain...

More death row convicts were executed in the United States this year than last, but juries continue to grow more wary of capital punishment, according to a new report. Death sentences handed down by judges and juries in 2009 continued a trend of decline for seven years in a row, with 106 projected for the year. That level is down two-thirds from a peak of 328 in 1994, according to the report being released Friday by the Death Penalty Information Center , a research organization that opposes capital punishment. Read the full article here . Source: The New York Times, December 17, 2009

Kentucky released its execution protocols for the 1st time Wednesday, and the public and legislators will get a chance to comment on the rules next year. It's ultimately up to Gov. Steve Beshear to readopt the procedure or any changes. The protocol covers a variety of areas, ranging from how quickly an inmate must become unconscious to when a coroner and physician are called in to certify death. After fighting for several years to keep the protocol secret, the state released it just weeks after the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled 4-3 that it hadn't been properly adopted. The court barred any executions until the method was redone. The ruling didn't challenge the technique, which is used by dozens of other states and has passed U.S. Supreme Court scrutiny in a case brought by Kentucky death row inmate Ralph Baze. The protocol will be opened to public comment in January. Various legislative committees then review it before it goes to the governor for approval. It could...

This is what passes for progress in the application of the death penalty: Kenneth Biros, a convicted murderer, was put to death in Ohio last week with one drug, instead of the more common three-drug cocktail. It took executioners 30 minutes to find a vein for the needle, compared with the two hours spent hunting for a vein on the last prisoner Ohio tried to kill, Romell Broom. Technicians tried about 18 times to get the needle into Mr. Broom’s arms and legs before they gave up trying to kill him. Mr. Biros was jabbed only a few times in each arm. Ohio adopted the single-drug formula after the botched execution. It may well be an improvement over the three-drug cocktail, or may not. (Death penalty advocates who hailed it as less painful have no way, obviously, of knowing that.) But the execution only reinforced that any form of capital punishment is legally suspect and morally wrong. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg noted, in a dissenting opinion in a death penalty case last year, that c...

Kentucky plans to keep using a three-drug lethal injection on death-row inmates and won't use Ohio's novel 1-drug overdose method, as officials work through legal hurdles so executions can resume in the state. Kentucky Justice and Public Safety Cabinet spokeswoman Jennifer Brislin said on Monday that the current protocol will be put through public hearings as the state seeks to comply with a Kentucky Supreme Court ruling. "We're filing to put our existing protocol into place," Brislin said. The state's high court ruled 4-3 last month that Kentucky didn't properly adopt its lethal injection protocol and barred any executions until the method was readopted. Kentucky injects condemned inmates with sodium thiopental, a fast-acting sedative; pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis; and potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. Ohio on Tuesday became the first state to use an overdose of a single drug to execute an inmate, 51-year-old Kennet...

Biros first to get 1-drug injection It was quiet. 18 years of appeals, reprieves, stays, cries of protest from the victim's family and protests from those who said the death penalty was inhumane ended in not much more than the sound of a hum in a room that was about the size of a hallway. The only other sound in the Southern Ohio Penitentiary's death house Tuesday morning was Mary Jane Heiss' oxygen tank as she watched the man who killed her daughter convulse, lie still, then turn pale with a large vein protruding across his forehead. Then her family clapped as the curtain was drawn on Kenneth Biros. Biros was convicted in 1991 of sexually assaulting, robbing, murdering, then dismembering 22-year-old Brookfield resident Tami Engstrom after he offered her a ride home from a bar one night. Biros was declared dead at 11:47 a.m. Tuesday morning, following 11 minutes of anesthetic pumping into his arm under a new death penalty the state never used before. The massive...

When Ohio inmate Kenneth Biros was executed Dec. 8 with a one-drug lethal injection -- the first person in the U.S. to be executed in this manner -- the Ohio Catholic Conference did not specifically address the execution but instead reiterated the church's opposition to all means of capital punishment. "The death penalty is wrong no matter what you use" to carry it out, Carolyn Jurkowitz, executive director of the Ohio Catholic Conference, told Catholic News Service Dec. 9. The U.S. Supreme Court rejected Biros' final appeals the day of his execution. The 51-year-old inmate was executed by one lethal injection, instead of the three-drug cocktail used in all other states, because Ohio adopted this execution method after a failed attempt to execute Romell Broom in mid-September. Prison authorities spent more than two hours trying to find a usable vein in Broom, 53, convicted of the 1984 abduction, rape and murder of a 14-year-old girl. Death penalty opponents ha...

A hearing on whether the state can try a second time to execute a condemned killer has ended early with a judge saying arguments can be made through court filings. Judge Gregory Frost of Federal District Court said it appeared that arguments by the death row inmate, Romell Broom, were limited to a narrow legal question. Judge Frost’s decision canceled what was expected to be a couple of days of testimony, including a discussion of how much pain Mr. Broom suffered during an attempted execution in September. The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit ruled Monday that another death row inmate had not presented evidence that a new backup execution method could cause severe pain in violation of the Constitution. Judge Frost said he did not believe that Mr. Broom’s lawyers could overcome the circuit court’s ruling. Mr. Broom was sentenced to die in the rape and killing of Tryna Middleton, 14, whom he abducted in Cleveland in September 1984. Source: The New York Times, Dece...

The state would face numerous procedural hurdles in carrying out capital punishment as in Ohio, which put a murderer to death with single-drug lethal injection. An Ohio murderer put to death with the nation's 1st single-drug lethal injection died swiftly Tuesday, inaugurating an execution method some analysts consider more humane than the 3-drug procedure used in California and 33 other states. But the method used in Ohio is unlikely to gain traction in California, experts say, because of procedural hurdles and persistent concerns about how the drugs -- whatever their number -- are administered to the condemned. Kenneth Biros, 51, who killed and dismembered a woman in 1991, died nine minutes after being injected with a massive dose of sodium thiopental, a powerful barbiturate that puts its subjects into a sleep so deep they stop breathing. Ohio prisons director Terry Collins described the execution as problem-free. California and several other states that have the death penalty on ...

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A day after Ohio became the first state in the country to use a single drug in a lethal injection, the condemned killer whose botched September execution prompted the change from a three-drug method returns to court to argue that another try to put him to death would be unconstitutional. A federal judge was to hear arguments beginning Wednesday on whether the state, having bungled inmate Romell Broom's execution Sept. 15, should be prevented on constitutional grounds from a second attempt. Following that execution try, which U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost has labeled a "debacle," the state changed its execution methods to one intravenous drug with a backup method involving intramuscular injection. On Tuesday morning, the state executed killer Kenneth Biros with one dose of thiopental sodium in the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility. Biros, 51, became the first inmate in the country to be executed with one drug. The U.S. Supr...

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 ...