Ky. has hearing on protocols for exeuctions

FRANKFORT, Ky. (AP) — Carolyn Wehrle wants to provide spiritual counseling to Kentucky’s only female death row inmate when her execution date arrives.

But Wehrle said the state’s proposed execution protocols as written will prevent Virginia Caudill from receiving the sacraments prescribed by her faith.

“I was allowed to baptize her, but I can’t minister to her in her last days?” asked Wehrle, a minister with Light of Christ Ministries in Richmond.

Wehrle was one of 18 critics of Kentucky’s lethal-injection protocol to speak Friday at the state’s first public hearing on how executions are conducted.

The hearing came a month after the Kentucky Supreme Court ordered all executions halted because the state skipped public hearings on the administrative regulations that make up the protocol.

Comments during the 21‚Ñ2-hour hearing ranged from outright calls to abolish the death penalty to tweaking the mechanics.\

David Barron, a public defender who represents multiple death-row inmates, suggested that Kentucky follow Ohio’s lead and switch to a one-drug protocol, which he described as a quicker and less painful way to conduct an execution.

Caudill has about five years left on her appeals for the 1998 beating death and robbery of a 73-year-old woman in Lexington.