State prison workers use new injection rules

COLUMBUS (AP) -- Prison workers followed new execution guidelines with an inmate scheduled to die today, examining his veins a day earlier than in the past to try to prevent injection problems that caused the last man executed to ask staff to kill him another way.
Rocky Barton, 49, says he deserves to die for murdering his wife with an up-close shotgun blast and gave up his appeals that could have delayed his execution for years.
The state's lethal injection protocol was changed after the May execution of Joseph Clark, when prison staff struggled to find a viable vein and one they used collapsed. The state now requires staff to make every effort to find two injection sites and use a new method to make sure the veins stay open once entryways are inserted.
Barton and his wife, 44-year-old Kimbirli Jo, had a stormy 11/2-year marriage, and Barton killed her in 2003 after she told him she was leaving him.
Barton had a history of violence. He served eight years in Kentucky for attempted murder when he beat his second wife with a shotgun, stabbed her three times and cut her throat. A third wife accused him of domestic violence, and Kimbirli Jo, his fourth wife, accused him of threatening her but refused to file charges. Four months later, she said she was leaving and Barton went into a rage.
He was examined Tuesday morning shortly after being driven about 140 miles from a prison in Mansfield to the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, which houses Ohio's death chamber, prisons spokeswoman Andrea Dean said.