Monday, January 27, 2014
COLUMBUS (AP) — An attorney for a condemned Ohio inmate whose slow, gasping execution with a new drug combination renewed questions about the death penalty was temporarily suspended last week while officials investigated whether he had coached the condemned man to fake symptoms of suffocation.
The Office of the Public Defender said Robert Lowe, one of the attorneys representing inmate Dennis McGuire, was back at work today after an internal review failed to substantiate the allegation.
State prison records released today say McGuire told guards that Lowe counseled him to make a show of his death that would, perhaps, lead to abolition of the death penalty. But three accounts from prison officials indicate McGuire refused to put on a display.
"He wants me to put on this big show in front of my kids, all right when I'm dying!" McGuire is reported as having told one guard. "I ain't gonna do this. It's about me and my kids, not him and his cause!"
Amy Borror, a spokeswoman for the public defender's office, said all accounts from execution eyewitnesses — which did not include Lowe — indicate McGuire was unconscious at the time he struggled to breathe.
"We have no way of knowing, obviously, because we can't interview Mr. McGuire," she said.