desire to make condemned inmates die painlessly

A desire to make certain condemned inmates die painlessly prompted 
changes made earlier this month to the protocols used by Ohio’s 
executioners to carry out lethal injections, according to the state 
prison system’s attorney.

“There are very few guarantees in life, but we certainly want to do 
everything we can to ensure that the person being executed does not 
suffer,” Gregory Trout, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department 
of Rehabilitation and Correction, said Wednesday.

But Trout also said that simply because the new procedures — 
including calling out an inmate’s name, shaking his shoulder and 
pinching him after he’s been given a powerful sedative — have been 
written down doesn’t mean they haven’t been used before in the death 
house at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

The state’s execution team has checked to make sure the condemned 
inmate is truly unconscious in the past few executions before the 
final two drugs in the lethal three-drug cocktail used by the state 
are administered.

While the sedative, thiopental sodium, is supposed to render the 
condemned unconscious, death penalty critics say there’s a chance the 
inmate could remain conscious when the final two drugs begin to flow 
into his veins. The new protocols call for an extra dose of the 
sedative to be on hand in case the inmate remains conscious after the 
first dose.

The second drug, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes the inmate before the 
last drug, potassium chloride, induces a heart attack.

One thing that will definitely be new for convicted killer Daniel 
Wilson, who will be the first inmate to be executed under the new 
protocols if his scheduled June 3 execution goes forward, is having 
an execution team member check the equipment that carries the drugs 
into an inmate’s veins after the sedative is administered, Trout said.

“It’s all part of continuing to verify that there has not been a 
problem in the delivery of the drugs,” he said.

Last year Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge ruled that the 
state couldn’t guarantee that the sedative would knock out an inmate, 
who could suffer horribly as the other drugs took effect if he were 
still conscious. It was a violation, Burge said, of a state law 
requiring a “quick and painless” death.

Trout said there’s only been one instance in Ohio’s history of 
executions in which an inmate didn’t succumb quickly to the sedative 
— during the 2006 execution of Joseph Clark.

Execution team members had trouble finding veins on Clark, a former 
intravenous drug user, in which to insert the shunts that carry the 
lethal drugs into an inmate’s blood stream. Eventually execution team 
members settled on using only one shunt instead of the normal two, 
but that line failed and another line had to be established to finish 
the job.

Clark told officials during the execution that the drugs weren’t 
working.

“The concern, I suppose, was first manifested, and only manifested, 
in the execution of Joseph Clark when he spoke,” Trout said.

Death penalty critics have gone so far as to call for brainwave 
monitors to be attached to condemned inmates, but Trout said that’s 
not necessary and the protocols now being used by the execution team 
are enough.

“Evaluating consciousness is a pretty simple matter,” he said. “It’s 
not something that needs medical equipment.”

Alan Rossman, an assistant federal public defender who represents 
Wilson, said prison officials should be commended for taking the 
concerns of critics into account.

Wilson, who was sentenced to death for murdering Carol Lutz by 
locking her in the trunk of her car, puncturing the gas tank and 
setting the car ablaze in 1991, is among the death row inmates who 
have challenged how the state carries out its executions and the 
training of the people who handled the drugs and injections.

“It looks like they sat down to specifically address the concerns 
that were being litigated,” Rossman said.

Rossman said he and Wilson’s other attorneys are still evaluating how 
the new protocols will impact Wilson’s fight to stay alive. He said 
he has concerns over whether the execution team members meet the 
training and experience requirements set forth in the new protocols.

Trout said they do.

Wilson also is challenging whether he was properly sentenced to death 
and is awaiting a decision from Gov. Ted Strickland on clemency.

Contact Brad Dicken at 329-7147 or bdicken@chroniclet.com

http://www.chroniclet.com/2009/05/corrections-official-some-death-
penalty-changes-already-in-use/