Lethal Injections

Given a choice, Florida's death row inmates would rather be executed by lethal injection than in the electric chair, the state Department of Corrections said Tuesday. Two-thirds of the 366 inmates on death row had until Monday to inform the Florida State Prison warden if they wanted to go to the electric chair rather than be injected with a fatal combination of drugs. None did, the state Department of Corrections said. The remaining third have appeals pending before the Florida Supreme Court.

SANTIAGO, Chile - Chilean authorities on Monday exhumed the body of Pablo Neruda to check claims by a former chauffeur that the Nobel Prize-winning poet may have been killed by government agents shortly after the 1973 overthrow of his friend, President Salvador Allende. Under a special tent and wearing protective clothing, a team of forensic pathologists that included a U.S. toxicologist gathered in the coastal resort town of Isla Negra to oversee the exhumation. Neruda died on Sept.

nashville -- A federal judge's ruling Wednesday that Tennessee's lethal injection procedure could cause excruciating pain is another blow to the three-drug cocktail used by every state that executes by lethal injection. Federal judges reached similar conclusions in Missouri and California last year, and now states have to decide whether to defend the three-drug method or find a new way to put inmates to death by injection.

HOUSTON -- Texas officials Wednesday were preparing for the state's first single-drug lethal injection after the U.S. Supreme Court  rejected the appeals of death row inmate Yokamon Hearn. The justices refused Hearn's appeals hours before he was scheduled to be executed for the 1998 murder of Frank Meziere, a stockbroker shot after a carjacking at a Dallas car wash. Hearn's execution, which could start any time after 6 p.m. Central time, will be the sixth in Texas this year -- for a total of  482 since the state began executing inmates by lethal injection in December 1982, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman told the Los Angeles Times.

Death by lethal injection faces a significant challenge in federal court today in Oklahoma City, with doctors contending that the state's method creates an unnecessary risk that a condemned inmate will suffer excruciating pain, in violation of the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. Nearly 30 years ago, Oklahoma became the first state to develop a procedure for lethal injection -- leading three dozen other states to develop similar methods.

The Supreme Court justices sounded split along conservative and liberal lines Wednesday during arguments on whether injections may be a cruel and painful method of execution. The justices are not likely to decide that ultimate question in the Florida case at hand, which focuses on a narrow issue. But the arguments offered insights into how the high court viewed the issue.

One minute past midnight on Jan. 26, an anonymous executioner at San Quentin is scheduled to inject massive overdoses of drugs into William Kirkpatrick Jr. as he lies strapped atop a table. The drugs first will anesthetize Kirkpatrick, then paralyze his muscles. Finally they will stop his heart, making the convicted killer of two Burbank fast-food workers the first prisoner in California to die by lethal injection.

A Kentucky dentist allegedly killed thoroughbred racehorses so owners could collect insurance money, the FBI said Monday. Dr. Joseph James Brown of Shelbyville, Ky., was arrested and charged with wire fraud Feb. 17 at Calder Race Course after an investigation by the FBI and the New York-based Thoroughbred Racing Protective Board. "Brown was arrested . . . by FBI agents as he was about to administer a lethal injection to a thoroughbred race horse," FBI spokesman Paul Miller said.

Convicted killer Carroll Edward Cole, who insisted that prolonging his life would be a waste of tax dollars, died by lethal injection here early Friday, the first execution in the Far West since 1979. Cole, convicted of killing five women, fulfilled his death wish shortly after 2 a.m., when officials at Nevada's maximum-security prison sent powerful doses of three undisclosed drugs flowing though an intravenous needle in the condemned man's arm.

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 man who admitted killing two women and four girls is scheduled to be executed Thursday after spending almost 29 years in a Florida prison. David Alan Gore on Thursday met with his mother and an ex-wife and is scheduled to be put to death at 6 p.m. EDT. Gore, now 58, had confessed to killing four teenage girls and two women in the 1980s in the eastern Florida town of Vero Beach, but was condemned to death for killing 17-year-old Lynn Elliott....

A judge on Friday threw out California's new lethal injection protocols, which have been five years in the making, because corrections officials failed to consider a one-drug execution method now in practice in other death penalty states. In ruling that the new protocols were "invalid," Marin County Superior Court Judge Faye D'Opal noted that one of the state's own experts recommended the single injection method as being superior to the three-drug sequence approved last year. State officials now must decide whether to appeal D'Opal's ruling or again revise the lethal injection procedures that were deemed unconstitutional by a federal judge in 2006.

Attorneys for the state of California and death row prisoners have agreed to a timetable for reviewing new lethal injection procedures, effectively postponing any such executions for another year. State attorneys representing prison authorities and lawyers for four of the 12 death row inmates who have exhausted their appeals and are eligible for death warrants filed papers Thursday with the San Francisco federal judge newly assigned to the complex and protracted case. The papers set a Sept.

Unless there is a last-minute stay, Troy Anthony Davis will die Wednesday by lethal injection, raising the distinct possibility that the state of Georgia will have executed an innocent man. His is perhaps the highest-profile death penalty case in the country, attracting the attention of such public figures as former President Jimmy Carter, Pope Benedict XVI and former FBI Director William Sessions, all of whom have called for clemency, as...

He was known as Dr. Death, a Michigan physician who helped his patients kill themselves. In doing so, Jack Kevorkian inflamed a nationwide debate in the 1990s over a terminally ill patient's right to die. And he served eight years in prison for second-degree murder for administering the lethal injection rather than helping the patient do it himself. Kevorkian began his crusade mindful of his own mortality. "You don't know what will happen when you get older," he said in a 1998 interview with "60 Minutes.

New legal challenges threaten to further delay California's effort to resume executions despite five years of costly reforms and reconstruction to meet a federal judge's concerns that previous procedures might have inflicted cruel and unusual punishment. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel on Tuesday toured San Quentin State Prison's new $900,000 execution facility, questioning state corrections authorities about the death penalty machinery and methods revised to address the concerns that led him to halt executions in 2006.

A judge Thursday blocked two executions in North Carolina, creating a de facto moratorium on capital punishment in the state until it changes its lethal injection procedure. The ruling by Superior Court Judge Donald W. Stephens in Raleigh means that 11 states, including California, have now halted executions stemming from challenges to lethal injection.

Two of the three drugs used in lethal injection are not administered in a way that reliably produces painless death for inmates, leaving at least some to die of suffocation and be conscious enough to realize it, according to a new analysis of executions in California and North Carolina. Reviewing the cases of 41 inmates dating back to 1984, the researchers found that the dose of anesthesia given at the start of an execution varied widely and was often insufficient to keep an inmate unconscious.

In response to violations of international human rights norms, Western governments are slapping sanctions on a rogue regime by halting exports of a deadly substance. That's nothing new; what is new is that the rogue nation is the United States. The substance in question is sodium thiopental, a fast-acting anesthetic designed for surgery that has been put to a more sinister purpose in 34 states, which use it to numb condemned prison inmates before injecting another drug that stops their breathing and a third that stops their hearts.

Jared Lee Loughner surfed the Internet for information on lethal injection and assassins in the hours before the Tucson shooting rampage, computer information that prosecutors are likely to use as evidence to show he was not mentally incompetent, a federal law enforcement official said Thursday. Loughner pleaded not guilty Monday in federal court to attempted-murder charges in the shootings of Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and two of her aides. Six people were killed, including a federal judge, and 13 were wounded in the Jan. 8 attack.