Ohio executes Richard Cooey

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DEATH ROW PLEA: Richard Wade Cooey II is on death row in the Ohio State Penitentiary for the killings of two University of Akron students in 1982. In an interview this week, he denied killing anyone. Cooey is challenging his execution in federal in federal court on the basis of his obesity.

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) — Ohio on Tuesday executed a 5-foot-7, 267-pound double murderer who argued he was too fat to die humanely by lethal injection, the state’s first execution since the end of an unofficial national moratorium.

Richard Cooey, 41, died at 10:28 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

There were no immediate reports of problems finding suitable veins to deliver the deadly chemicals, a problem that delayed previous executions in the state.

Cooey’s attorneys had argued that his weight problem would make it difficult for prison staff to access a vein. A prisons spokeswoman said Cooey received a pre-execution exam early Tuesday and was cleared.

Cooey, who killed two University of Akron students in 1986, walked into the death chamber at 10:15 a.m. wearing gray pants and was strapped onto the gurney.

“You (expletive) haven’t paid any attention to anything I’ve said in the last 22 1/2 years, why would anyone pay any attention to anything I’ve had to say now,” Cooey said looking at the ceiling. He made no other comment.

Cooey tapped the fingers of his left hand several times before he died and his face took on a purple shade.

Six family members of one of his victims watched the execution. Summit County Prosecutor Sherri Bevan Walsh said the family was disappointed that Cooey was vulgar and hateful at the end.

Cooey was the first inmate executed in Ohio in more than a year, and the state’s first since the end of the unofficial moratorium on executions that began last year while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky’s lethal injection procedure.

Before the moratorium, Ohio had one of the nation’s busiest death chambers.

Cooey lost a final appeal earlier Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down without comment his complaint that the state’s protocol for lethal injection could cause an agonizing and painful death. Cooey wanted the state to use a single drug rather than a three-drug combination, and asked for a stay of execution pending a hearing on that motion.

The court on Monday denied a separate appeal based on Cooey’s claim that his obesity was a bar to humane lethal injection. The argument also had been rejected by a federal appeals court in Cincinnati and the Ohio Supreme Court, with both courts ruling that he missed a deadline for filing appeals.

Cooey is 75 pounds heavier than when he went to death row — the result of prison food and 23-hour-a-day confinement, his lawyers said.

They also argued that a migraine medicine prescribed by a prison physician could reduce the effect of the anesthetic used as part of the three-drug lethal injection.

They claimed that Ohio has a history of botched executions.