Ohio on Tuesday became the first state in the US to put a prisoner to death using a single lethal injection in a new technique lawyers and campaigners have criticized as human experimentation.
Kenneth Biros was pronounced dead at 11.47am, about 10 minutes after a massive overdose of the powerful anesthetic thiopental sodium was injected through an intravenous drip into his left arm.
The new procedure was introduced by the Ohio state authorities as a way of circumventing legal challenges that were brought after another of its inmates, Romell Broom, was given a stay of execution as he was actually lying in the execution chamber. Technicians failed to apply the three-drug lethal injection — the most common form of capital punishment in the US — and after two hours of trying Broom was sent back to death row.
The problem on that occasion was the executioners could not find a working vein in Broom in which to apply the IV. The new method was designed to avoid such a fiasco happening again by allowing for a back-up position in which a combination of two painkillers could be injected directly into the prisoner’s 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 anesthetic was administered.
Lawyers for Biros, who had made numerous failed attempts to persuade the courts to postpone the execution on grounds that the new technique was untried and amounted to human experimentation, said the procedure had proven to be flawed.
John Parker, one of Biros’ lawyers, said he had counted technicians make 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 the results of Biros’ death were mixed. 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 Denno said finding veins was still clearly a problem, and the so-called back-up of injecting painkillers into muscle had vast problems as it was untested and could lead to a lingering death.
Denno predicted that “other inmates in Ohio would have more time and information to challenge Ohio’s procedures and might get different results.”
Debi Heiss, sister of Tami Engstrom, who was murdered by Biros in 1991, told the Columbus Dispatch that the execution had gone “too smooth. I think he should have gone through some pain for what he did.”
Ohio now moves swiftly on to reconsider the fate of Broom. A hearing was planned yesterday to consider whether to send him back to the death chamber under the new single-drug policy.
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