Ohio department revises its protocol for lethal injection

ELYRIA, Ohio (AP) — Beginning with its next execution, Ohio will use a revised lethal-injection protocol that allows executioners to use a second dose of sedative to ensure that a condemned inmate is sufficiently unconscious before fatal drugs are injected.

Ohio has said it previously made sure that inmates being executed were unconscious and, therefore, not in pain when fatal drugs were given, but death-penalty critics have argued that Ohio’s process allows the possibility that execution causes pain. A federal lawsuit is challenging Ohio’s lethal-injection system.

Greg Trout, lawyer for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, on Wednesday confirmed a report in The (Elyria) Chronicle-Telegram that the procedures had been adjusted as of last week.

The next execution is planned for June 3, when the state plans to execute 39-year-old Daniel Wilson, of Elyria. Wilson was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of Carol Lutz, whom he locked in the trunk of her car before puncturing the gas tank and setting the car on fire.

Trout said the protocol changes amount to amendments of procedures already in place. The three drugs used remain unchanged.

The policy directive says the prison warden will call the condemned inmate’s name, shake his shoulder and pinch his upper arm.

“If there is no response, it is a pretty clear indicator he is unconscious,” Trout said.

It requires a close inspection of intravenous connections to assure they are adequate to deliver proper doses.

The revised protocol also requires that the execution team prepare 4 grams of the sedative, thiopental sodium, instead of the 2 grams that had previously been required. Trout said 2 grams will be used, as before; the other 2 grams would be used only if needed.

The sedative amount has been “significantly more than a surgical dose, and we believe it is more than sufficient. The aim overall of the policy directive is to achieve the execution in conformity with the direction of the Ohio Supreme Court and in a manner that is professional, dignified and humane.”

The amounts of pancuronium bromide, which follows the sedative and causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which is the final drug given and induces a heart attack, remain the same as under the state’s previous protocol, which had been in effect since October 2006.

The state has come under fire from death-penalty opponents and death-row inmates who claim that there is no way to guarantee that an inmate is unconscious and free of pain before the final two drugs are administered.

In a ruling last year, Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge came to the same conclusion and ordered the state to use only the sedative to execute two inmates.

The state also was criticized by U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost after he reviewed the state’s previous execution protocol in the case of convicted killer Kenneth Biros, who also is awaiting execution.