EXECUTIONS State challenges use of lethal injections

The suit argues that the drugs used are torturing convicts.
COLUMBUS (AP) -- The Ohio Public Defender's Office has filed a new lawsuit challenging the use of injections to execute convicted killers in the state.
The lawsuit filed Thursday in federal court argues that pain caused by chemicals used in the injections torture inmates and violate constitutional protections against cruel and unusual punishment.
"We're arguing that there's too great of a risk that Ohio's lethal drug cocktail is actually torturing guys to death in ways we cannot see," said Greg Meyers, head of the public defender's office capital crimes division.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of death row inmates Adremy Dennis and Richard Cooey, both convicted in Summit County in Northeast Ohio.
Meyers' office unsuccessfully filed a similar lawsuit in December on behalf of convicted killers Lewis Williams and John Glenn Roe, both of whom have since been executed.
High court ruling
A U.S. Supreme Court decision earlier this year strengthens the ability to raise the issue, Meyers said Friday.
The country's highest court ruled in May for the first time that a death row inmate can pursue a last-ditch claim that lethal injection is unconstitutionally cruel.
"This is not a new claim," said Bob Beasley, spokesman for Ohio Attorney General Jim Petro. "Here and throughout the country this method of lethal injection has passed tests in the courts, including the Supreme Court."
The public defender's office argues that a paralyzing drug used in executions, pancuronium bromide, does not dull sensation and exposes inmates to excruciating pain caused by two other drugs used to induce suffocation and heart failure.
Concern about the drugs' effects is so strong that veterinarians aren't allowed to use the same combination to put animals to death, Meyers said.
Dennis, 28, was sentenced to death row for fatally shooting an Akron man in 1994. Cooey, 37, was sentenced to die for the rape and murder of two University of Akron students in 1986.
Cooey was 12 hours from being executed last year when the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal judge's ruling to give Cooey's new lawyer more time to study his case.