Lethal Injection

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his lawyers have switched strategies in the legal battle to resume executions, agreeing to submit revised lethal injection protocols for public review rather than continue appealing state court decisions that the redrafted rules are illegal. Although the move is intended to speed up a return of capital punishment, conservative law-and-order advocates and victims' rights groups expressed frustration over the persistent delays.

The state's method of execution is unconstitutional because two of the three drugs it uses for lethal injection can cause "an agonizing and painful death," a judge ruled. Executioners must stop using the three-drug combination and use a single anesthetic drug because state law requires a painless death, the judge ruled in Elyria. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the lethal injection procedure in Kentucky, which uses the same three drugs as Ohio.

As executioners poked his limbs with an IV needle, Romell Broom initially tried to speed along his own demise, flexing his arm and tugging on a rubber tourniquet to better expose a vein on the inside of his elbow. But as prison workers repeatedly failed to find a vein strong enough to take the lethal injections, the convicted rapist-murderer began to despair over his protracted end. Witnesses and the execution-team log from Tuesday describe how the 53-year-old winced and cried as a shunt inserted in his leg also failed to open a pathway for the fatal drugs.

The legal battle over lethal injection, which comes before the U.S. Supreme Court today, has been conducted in unusual secrecy, with courts permitting states across the country to keep from lawyers and the public precisely how death row inmates are executed.

Supreme Court justices reacted skeptically Monday to the claim that the lethal injections used to carry out executions in the United States were flawed in practice and amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Death penalty critics had hoped that the court would declare unconstitutional the use of a three-drug compound that has been the standard means of execution since the early 1980s.

A procession of legal experts declared Thursday that the state's manner of meting out the death penalty had become so bogged down and dogged by inequities that wholesale repair was needed. But during the first of three hearings by a state criminal justice commission there was little agreement on what would constitute the best fix.

Despite a top prosecutor's prediction that executions could resume this year in California -- at a rate of one a month -- the state still faces significant legal hurdles before it can send more inmates to their deaths, legal experts said Wednesday. Chief Assistant Atty. Gen. Dane Gillette said the U.S. Supreme Court ruling upholding Kentucky's use of lethal injection should help persuade a federal judge to end the state's two-year moratorium on executions.

A national drive to halt the death penalty met defeat at the Supreme Court on Wednesday when the justices ruled that lethal injections, if properly administered, were a humane means of executing a condemned prisoner. By a surprisingly large 7-2 margin, the court rejected a constitutional attack on the main method of carrying out the death penalty across America. Its ruling cleared the way for executions to resume in several states after a seven-month delay.

Death penalty opponents and the attorneys for two condemned men at San Quentin won another round in their quest to delay executions in California when a state appeals court on Friday held that newly revised rules for administering lethal injections are illegal.

In response to a scathing opinion from a San Jose federal judge, California officials said Tuesday that they would issue a report by May 15 outlining revisions they propose for the state's lethal injection executions. State authorities said their written report would address "deficiencies" identified in December by U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel, who concluded that current procedures create an unnecessary risk that condemned inmates will suffer an unconstitutional level of pain.