Ohio: Child killer to get untried 2-drug injection

COLUMBUS (AP) — Ohio will use an untried-dose of two drugs to put to death a condemned inmate who raped and killed his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter, the state prisons agency said today.

A warden determined the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility doesn’t have enough pentobarbital, the drug Ohio formerly used until its manufacturer put it off-limits for executions, JoEllen Smith, a Department of Rehabilitation and Correction spokeswoman, said in an email.

Instead, the state will use an intravenous combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller, in the Nov. 14 execution of Ronald Phillips of Akron.

Those drugs are included in Ohio’s untested backup execution method, which requires them to be injected directly into an inmate’s muscle. No state has put a prisoner to death with those drugs in any fashion.

Phillips, 40, was sentenced to death for killing Sheila Marie Evans in 1993 after a long period of abusing her.

Ohio’s revamped execution policy calls for it to try to buy specialty batches of pentobarbital from compounding pharmacies, which mix individual doses of drugs for specific patients. If that fails, the policy calls for the use of the two-drug approach.