State supply of pentobarbital injection expired last month
By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
AP Legal Affairs Writer
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — The state’s new lethal injection drug policy could cause condemned inmates “tremendous” pain and discomfort by allowing the use of a non-federally regulated form of Ohio’s execution drug, according to a court filing by an inmate facing execution next month for raping and killing a 3-year-old girl.
The state’s policy adopted earlier this month also breaks previous agreements with a federal judge that puts all decisions about executions in the hands of the prison directors or wardens, by allowing the designation of other individuals to do those jobs instead, the filing said.
The documents filed in federal court in Columbus late Friday also ask Judge Gregory Frost to allow whatever specialty pharmacy chosen to make the drug doses to be included in the ongoing lawsuit over executions in Ohio.
There is no procedure under which the state can guarantee the drugs the state intends to use “will not cause tremendous pain and discomfort,” according to the filing by lawyers for death row inmate Ronald Phillips and several others involved in the long-running court battle.
Phillips, 40, is scheduled to die Nov. 14 for the death of his girlfriend’s daughter, Sheila Marie Evans, in Akron in 1993 after a long period of sexual assaults on the girl. He is awaiting Gov. John Kasich’s decision whether to spare him on the grounds he suffered sexual, physical and verbal abuse as a child. The Ohio Parole Board unanimously recommended against mercy last week.
The state’s supply of Food and Drug Administration-regulated pentobarbital expired last month. Ohio created a new execution policy that allows it to buy specially produced batches of the drug from a compounding pharmacy, which is licensed by the state but not FDA-regulated.
The warden at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, where death row is housed, has until the end of the week to announce whether a supply of compounded pentobarbital has been obtained. If not, the state says it will use an intravenous injection of two drugs — midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller — in Phillips’ execution.
Both methods are untried in Ohio and no U.S. inmate has ever been executed with the midazolam and hydromorphone combination.
The state previously has told Frost it doesn’t believe a new challenge to the updated policies is necessary because they essentially are the same. Frost gave the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction until Wednesday to respond to Phillips’ request to sue.
Messages left with the prisons agency and the Ohio Attorney General’s office had not been returned Monday morning.
