A man accused of murdering a woman he’d met at a nightclub in 1994 was put to death in Georgia Thursday night, following a series of eleventh-hour attempts to delay his death.
The state of Ohio, which last put someone to death in January 2014, has delayed all of its scheduled executions again, until at least 2017, the Associated Press reports. The prisons department announced that it has run out of supplies of lethal injection drugs and hasn’t been able to acquire new chemicals.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday approved the continued use of a sedative called midazolam in lethal injections, despite the controversy around a painful botched execution in Oklahoma last year. The petitioners in the case, Glossip v. Gross, are three Oklahoma death row inmates arguing the state’s execution drug cocktail constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.
The mostly Republican Legislature of the mostly Republican state of Nebraska voted Wednesday to ban capital punishment by a margin that’s likely to withstand the governor’s veto.
After a botched execution left a condemned man writhing and gasping for air, Ohio announced this month that it would be returning to an earlier, sodium thiopental-based lethal injection formula. Now the state says it's delaying all executions until 2016 as it struggles to secure a supply of the drug.
For centuries, we Americans have sought easier ways to kill our convicts. Lethal injection had been the gold standard for sending toughs to oblivion. But amid a sudden spate of botched shots and poison shortages, what are we to do? Let's go back to guns, gas and zap juice!
