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More than 1,000 people packed the pews of a church in this Georgia coastal city Saturday for the funeral of Troy Davis, whose execution for the murder of a Savannah police officer despite his claims of innocence sparked protests around the world and led to a renewed campaign to abolish the death penalty in the U.S. Davis was celebrated as "martyr and foot soldier" by family, activists and supporters who spent years trying to persuade judges and Georgia prison officials that Davis was innocent but were unable to prevent his execution Sept. 21. The crowd that filled Savannah's Jonesville Baptist...

A white supremacist who was sentenced to death for the murder of a black man in an horrific killing that echoed the atrocities of the lynching era is to be executed today. Lawrence Russell Brewer, 44, is scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection at 6pm for his part in the 1998 killing of James Byrd, Jr in East Texas. Brewer was one of three men convicted of killing Byrd after they offered him a lift along a remote country road.

A chilling look inside the minds of female prisoners unfolds on Thursday with the première of the new TLC show, Prison Diaries. The first episode of the series focuses on Emilia Carr, one of just 63 women on death row in the U.S. Carr is seen in ankle chains and handcuffs, led by a burly, fully-armed female guard as she leaves her cell. She wears bright orange overalls and trainers, her long, dark hair allowed to fall around her hunched shoulders.

As Texas governor, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry has presided over 234 executions. It's a record number, which, The Washington Post reported last week, bestows on Perry "a law-and-order credential that none of his competitors can match -- even if they wanted to." Watch how pundits will try to turn that statistic into a political negative -- and paint Perry as the governor with blood on his spurs -- even though American voters overwhelmingly support the death penalty. The temptation to tout Texas' status as the state with the most executions will prove too seductive. It won't matter that, as...

Dementia sufferers are being killed by doctors in Holland under the country’s euthanasia laws, official figures are to reveal. A total of 21 patients with early-stage dementia, including Alzheimer’s, died by lethal injection last year, according to a forthcoming annual report. This is the first time dementia sufferers have been included in the country’s euthanasia statistics. None of the cases is thought to have involved any illegal act on the part of health professionals, and each time the patient was considered capable of giving their consent. But the figures have caused alarm among critics who say the pool of patients...

Mississippi is set to execute later on Tuesday a man convicted in 1999 of slaying four people, the first inmate in the state to be put to death using a new drug as part of the lethal injection. Benny Joe Stevens is scheduled to be executed shortly after 6 p.m. local time on Tuesday, according to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. He will be executed using the drug pentobarbital, a sedative often used to euthanize animals, because of a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental. Several states have switched to pentobarbital because of the shortage.

The Obama administration has launched a quiet campaign over the past two months to seize from local officials a key drug used in lethal injections -- part of a spreading investigation that has contributed to a de facto death penalty freeze in several states. The investigation stems from concerns about the overseas source of the drug, though some question whether those concerns make a handy excuse to slow the pace of executions. "States have death penalty laws, and the federal government is trying to make it harder for the states to execute those laws," Saunders said.

South Carolina on Friday executed a man who strangled his cellmate, using a new combination of lethal injection drugs for the first time. Jeffrey Motts, 36, was declared dead at 6:17 p.m. He was given the sedative pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental as part of the lethal three-drug combination because federal agents seized the state's supply as part of a nationwide investigation into whether prisons obtained the drugs legally from England. Motts was sentenced to death for killing his cellmate at a state prison in Greenville County in 2005. He was already serving a life sentence for killing two elderly...

(Reuters) - Texas on Tuesday carried out its first execution using a sedative often used to euthanize animals. Cary Kerr, 46, was put to death by lethal injection for the 2001 sexual assault and strangling of Pamela Horton. The new drug, pentobarbital, replaced sodium thiopental in Texas' three-drug execution protocol.

President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war - this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws - on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers. On March 15, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, the first drug given under the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in most of the country's 34 death-penalty states. The DEA also asked Kentucky and Tennessee for their sodium thiopental to aid its investigation. Why? The DEA referred me to the Department of Justice,...

The Drug Enforcement Administration on Tuesday seized the state of Georgia's supply of a key lethal injection drug less than two months after the state executed a man who unsuccessfully argued it was bought from a "fly-by-night" supplier in Britain. Agency spokesman Chuvalo Truesdell wouldn't elaborate on exactly why the DEA wanted to inspect Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, a sedative that is part of a three-drug cocktail used in executions that has been in short supply since the sole U.S. manufacturer stopped making it. "We had questions about how the drug was imported to the U.S.," he said. "There...

The New York Times ran an editorial today about federal judge Jeremy Fogel and his ruling five years ago in Morales v. Tilton. Fogel, it notes, ordered California "to halt all executions after he found that the way it administered its lethal injection created too much risk that an inmate would suffer extreme pain." Quoth the edit: For legislators in state capitols considering whether to abolish the penalty, however, this case has done much more than that. It has documented how lethal injection can be cruel and unusual punishment when unprofessionally administered and how the culture of prisons breeds that...

Executions of Florida death-row inmates could be on hold for months in the wake of a decision last week by an Illinois drug company to stop producing an anesthetic used in lethal injections here. Though no new executions are scheduled, the halt in production of the drug effectively means that the state will have to come up with a new procedure to kill inmates. And any new drug "cocktail" developed likely will result in legal challenges down the line. The drug in question is sodium thiopental, one of three used by Florida and many other states in the lethal-injection sequence....

The Food and Drug Administration, which has long maintained that it has nothing to do with drugs used in executions, has quietly helped Arizona and California obtain a scarce type of anesthetic so the states could continue putting inmates to death. The shortage of sodium thiopental has disrupted executions around the country. But newly released documents show the FDA helped import it from Britain. Most state prison systems use sodium thiopental to put inmates to sleep before administering pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. But the drug has been in short supply since last...

It's been five years since California executed a condemned inmate, a delay largely caused by a dispute over methods of lethal injection. Since then, 26 condemned inmates have died as a result of natural causes or suicide, state figures show. That's a much higher death rate than previous years, likely because condemned inmates are getting old as their appeals . . .

(CNN) -- An Oklahoma death row inmate received a drug commonly used to euthanize animals Thursday because of a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental, the drug usually used as the sedative in its three-drug execution cocktail. John David Duty was convicted and sentenced to die for strangling his 22-year-old cellmate, Curtis Wise, with shoe laces in 2001. At the time, he was serving three life sentences for rape, robbery and shooting with intent to kill from a 1978 conviction.

NASHVILLE - A prison warden will brush a hand over an inmate's eyelashes and gently shake the inmate to check for consciousness under a new lethal injection procedure that became necessary after a judge ruled the old one was unconstitutional, the attorney general said Wednesday. Chancellor Claudia Bonnyman ruled last week that Tennessee's process "allows for death by suffocation while conscious," in an appeal filed by inmate Stephen Michael West, who was convicted of two murders in 1986. Now it will be up to the warden to make sure the condemned inmate is unconscious, including calling out the person's name....

NASHVILLE - A Davidson County judge ruled Friday that the state's lethal injection method is unconstitutional, paving the way for a delay in the execution of death row inmate Stephen Michael West. A final decision on the issue will be made by the state Supreme Court, which technically must issue a stay for the execution to be delayed. Sharon Curtis-Flair, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general, said an appeal is likely. Chancellor Claudia Bonnyman ruled that West's lawyers showed that Tennessee's lethal injection procedure "allows for death by suffocation while conscious."

The state of Oklahoma is planning to execute death row inmates with drugs intended for use on animals. Lawmakers want to switch away from the only brand of anaesthetic that has been used in the US for lethal injections because there is not enough to go around. The replacement is likely to attract controversy because it is currently used by vets to anesthetise animals for operations. Other states are watching closely and may well follow suit, but such a move is likely to face a challenge from human rights groups to ensure that it is safe to use.

The state of Arizona executed a convicted murderer on Tuesday night despite objections from attorneys that the state would use a non-approved drug from overseas for the lethal injection. Just hours before Jeffrey Landrigan's death, the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to lift a stay issued by a federal judge to halt the execution. "There is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe," the Supreme Court said Due to a U.S. shortage, the state turned to a non-FDA approved drug. It was later revealed that the source was the U.K., although...

State obtains new supply of lethal injection drug SAN FRANCISCO—Prison officials obtained a drug essential to the lethal injection process the day after canceling California's first execution in nearly five years partly due to a shortage of that very drug, a court filing stated Wednesday. The state Attorney General's office told U.S. District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel it obtained 12 grams of sodium thiopental last Thursday, the same day Albert Greenwood Brown was to be executed. But the execution was called off the day before when the Attorney General's office said a state Supreme Court ruling and its apparent drug...

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) -- Some executions in the U.S. have been put on hold because of a shortage of one of the drugs used in lethal injections from coast to coast. Several of the 35 states that rely on lethal injection are either scrambling to find sodium thiopental - an anesthetic that renders the condemned inmate unconscious - or considering using another drug. But both routes are strewn with legal or ethical roadblocks. The shortage delayed an Oklahoma execution last month and led Kentucky's governor to postpone the signing of death warrants for two inmates. Arizona is trying to get...

OK, the story is all over the Old Media edifice: forty-one-year-old Teresa Lewis has become "the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years." Every news outlet from TV and cable, to newspapers, to radio, to the Internet is using this line, this "the first woman to be executed in the U.S. in five years" line. They are all playing the same narrative. So, here's the question I have. How exactly can anyone be the "first" anything "in five years"? Doesn't the whole "in five years" presuppose that someone else came first? See, the one "five years"...

Barring intervention from the governor or Supreme Court, the state of Virginia plans to execute a woman later this month for the first time in nearly a century. Teresa Lewis, a 41-year-old grandmother with such a low IQ that she's classified as borderline mentally retarded, is set to die by lethal injection on Sept. 23. She'll be the state's first female prisoner put to death in 98 years. Lewis pleaded guilty to hiring two men to murder her husband and stepson in their trailer in Virginia's rural Pittsylvania county in 2002, in order to collect life insurance money. She took...

A death row inmate convicted of the 1985 torture and murder of a pizza deliveryman in Glendale asked a court Monday to strike down the state's newly revised execution procedures as illegal and likely to inflict excruciating pain if used on any of California's 700-plus condemned prisoners. The lawsuit filed by Mitchell Sims, 50, alleges that the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation rushed through revisions of the lethal injection procedures and deliberately sought to shut the public out of the process. Corrections officials approved the changes one day before a May 1 deadline and sent them to the Office...

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- An Ohio man said he was "heartily sorry" before he was executed Tuesday for the murders of five children in a 1992 Cincinnati apartment fire he set in an attempt to destroy evidence of a burglary. William Garner, 37, died by lethal injection at 10:38 a.m. at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility....

LUCASVILLE, Ohio (AP) -- Ohio executed a hitchhiker Thursday who admitted to killing one motorist who gave him a ride and shooting two others during a three-week string of shootings that terrorized the Cincinnati area in 1983. Michael Beuke, 48, died by lethal injection at 10:53 a.m. EDT at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville, about 90 minutes after the Ohio Supreme Court turned down his final appeal.....

The state released its revised lethal injection guidelines Tuesday, inching one step closer to resuming executions in California, beginning with Stockton's Michael Angelo Morales. The changes follow a June public hearing when death penalty foes from around the world converged on Sacramento to speak out against the procedure. They also mailed in more than 8,000 letters addressing the protocol. The public now has until Jan. 20 to comment on the changes. The 25-page document indicates small revisions, from defining a "chaplain" and the "lethal injection room" to clarifying that the curtains remain open in the execution chamber until after the...

Ohio executed a killer Tuesday by performing the nation's first lethal injection using a single drug, a supposedly less painful method than previous executions that required three drugs. Kenneth Biros was pronounced dead at 11:47 a.m. Tuesday, about 10 minutes after one dose of thiopental sodium began flowing into his veins at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. The U.S. Supreme Court had rejected his final appeal about two hours before. Experts predicted the thiopental sodium would take longer to kill the 51-year-old Biros than the convention three-drug cocktail, but the 10 minutes it apparently took him to die...

Maj Nidal Malik Hasan could become the first person to be sentenced to death by a military court in almost 50 years. The US Armed Forces has a death penalty – lethal injection – but there have been no executions since 1961 when an army private, John Bennett, was hanged for rape and attempted murder. The military can also impose a sentence of life imprisonment without parole and there are nine men on its death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. A "convening authority", a high-ranking officer, will decide whether the government will seek the death penalty. If so, it has...

LUCASVILLE, Ohio — A man who went on a 1992 Christmas holiday killing spree that left six people dead, including an 18-year-old mother gunned down at a pay phone, was executed Tuesday, the state's second execution in two weeks and the 1,000th lethal injection in the U.S. since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976.

Cincinnati, OH (AHN) - The Ohio Supreme Court and the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals have ruled against staying the execution of an inmate because he is obese. The two courts upheld an earlier ruling of the U.S. The double murder convict argued that lethal injection might not be properly administered to him and might be painful and slow because his physical condition will make it difficult to find a vein where the lethal drug will be injected.

WASHINGTON – Supreme Court justices indicated Monday they are deeply divided over a challenge to the way most states execute prisoners by lethal injection, which critics say creates an avoidable risk of excruciating pain. With executions in the United States halted since late September, the court heard arguments in a case from Kentucky that calls into question the mix of three drugs used in most executions. Justice Antonin Scalia was among several conservatives on the court who suggested he would uphold Kentucky's method of execution and allow capital punishment to resume. States have been careful to adopt procedures that do...

China's executioners are planning to increase the use of lethal injections in order to make executions "more humane", a senior court official told the state media yesterday. Jiang Xingchang, vice-president of the supreme court, told the China Daily that lethal injections would eventually be used in all intermediate people's courts, instead of relying on firing squads. Lethal injections have already been used throughout China, particularly in high-profile cases such as the execution of gangsters and corrupt government officials. Human Rights Watch in China said that there were 1,770 known executions carried out in China in 2005, more than 80% of...

The Supreme Court will hear a case Monday that examines what is cruel and unusual punishment.When a state panel recommended in April that Tennessee abandon the three chemicals used in executions across the nation in favor of the single drug usually used in animal euthanasia, the state's corrections commissioner said no. Though the move would have simplified executions and eliminated the possibility of excruciating pain, the commissioner, George Little, said Tennessee should not be "out at the forefront" of a decision with "political ramifications." Little's decision helps illuminate one of the questions lurking behind the year's most eagerly anticipated death...

November 2, 2007 -- THE Supreme Court on Tuesday effectively halted U.S. executions via lethal injection until it can rule on a challenge to the constitutionality of a particular execution "cocktail." This is just the latest example of the whittling away of the death penalty - the courts have already cut executions by over a third since 1999.

Huntsville, Texas (AP) -- The nation's busiest death penalty state executed another inmate Tuesday night, hours after the Supreme Court said it would review whether the lethal injection method most states use is cruel and unusual. Michael Richard, 49, was put to death for the 1986 shooting of Marguerite Lucille Dixon, a 53-year-old nurse and mother of seven. Richard had been released from his second prison term eight weeks before Dixon was raped and killed inside her home. Asked if he'd like to make a final statement, Richard said, "I'd like my family to take care of each other. I...

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court on Tuesday agreed to consider the constitutionality of lethal injections in a case that could affect the way inmates are executed around the country. The high court will hear a challenge from two inmates on death row in Kentucky — Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr. — who sued Kentucky in 2004, claiming lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Baze has been scheduled for execution Tuesday night, but the Kentucky Supreme Court halted the proceedings earlier this month. The U.S. Supreme Court has previously made it easier for death row inmates to...

Gov. Charlie Crist on Wednesday signed his first death warrant since taking office in January, ending a temporary halt on lethal injections that was imposed because of a botched execution last year. Mark Dean Schwab, 38, is scheduled to be executed Nov. 15, Crist said. Schwab was sentenced to death in 1992 for the kidnapping, rape and murder of 11-year-old Junny Rios-Martinez of Cocoa. He targeted the boy after seeing his picture in a newspaper. In December, then-Gov. Jeb Bush suspended all Florida executions after a medical examiner said that prison officials botched the insertion of the needles when convicted...

R obert Vinyard has been in jail and in prison for crimes related to stalking. Now he's in the state hospital for insane criminals. None of those institutions stopped him from stalking the woman he's hounded, harassed and threatened for nearly three decades. Vinyard, 52, has been stalking the same woman since 1979. They met while students at the University of Colorado. She befriended him because she felt sorry for him. They were never intimate partners. But he became obsessed with her. Two years ago, Vinyard was found by a judge to be not guilty by reason of insanity on...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California said on Tuesday it would revise its lethal injection procedure to ensure "a dignified end of life" for condemned inmates as it seeks to overcome a U.S. judge's objections to the procedure. In December, Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled the "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed" and gave the nation's most-populous state a chance to revise how it metes out its ultimate punishment. Lawyers for a condemned California inmate had argued that lethal injection was "cruel and unusual" punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution. With the fate of...

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) - Thirty years ago, Oklahoma Medical Examiner Dr. A. Jay Chapman marched into the Oklahoma Statehouse and dictated the formula for a cocktail of three drugs to a lawmaker looking for a more humane way to execute the condemned. As Chapman spoke, Rep. Bill Wiseman scribbled on a legal yellow pad. That afternoon, Wiseman introduced the bill that made Oklahoma the first state to adopt lethal injection. Chapman's method has since been taken up by 37 states in all, the federal government and the U.S. military and has been used to execute 900 U.S. prisoners. But...

DEATH PENALTY opponents will say anything, no matter how unbelievable, to stop an execution during the appeals process. There is no claim too bogus for some lawyers and activists -- and apparently no claim too bogus for some medical journals. Last month, a second medical journal printed an article that suggestesd lethal injection may routinely subject death-row inmates to agonizing pain before they die. In California, the three-drug lethal-injection protocol starts with 12.5 times the amount of sodium pentothal needed to begin invasive surgery, and is followed by lethal doses of two other drugs. The protocol is designed not to...

Inmates executed by lethal injection may in some cases die by "chemical asphyxiation" while conscious but unable to move, according to a new analysis of California and North Carolina executions released Monday. The study appearing in the online edition of PLoS Medicine -- a San Francisco-based medical journal -- was authored by the same team of doctors and death penalty opponents who raised similar concerns about the procedure in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2005. That earlier study, which said sub-potent amounts of the anesthetic sodium pentothal were found in the corpses of executed inmates, helped to propel...

LUCASVILLE, Ohio - The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the execution of a man who had been scheduled to die Tuesday for killing a woman in 1991 and scattering her remains across two states. Inmate Kenneth Biros ? and the family of the victim, Tami Engstrom ? had waited for the decision more than six hours past his 10 a.m. scheduled execution time at Ohio's death house. The justices' one-sentence decision agreed with two lower courts that delayed the execution so he could continue arguing that Ohio's method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court...

'We can't understand why this has been put off this long,' victim's mother says. LIVINGSTON (TX) — Condemned Texas prisoner Ronald Chambers describes himself as "loaded with patience." Now in his fourth decade behind bars, Chambers' patience hasn't wavered, but time finally may be running out for Texas' longest-serving death row prisoner. It's been more than 11,300 days since Chambers arrived on death row on Jan. 8, 1976. Since then, 381 of his fellow prisoners have been executed. He's set to join them this week. "I knew it was coming," Chambers, 52, said of the letter he recently received notifying...

State officials said Tuesday they would submit revised lethal injection procedures to a federal judge by May 15 in an attempt to revive California's death penalty. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled last month that the state's execution protocol was unconstitutional because it could result in condemned inmates feeling excruciating or unnecessary pain. But he gave the state the opportunity to try to fix the procedures. Fogel said executioners were poorly trained, worked in dim, cramped quarters and failed to properly mix the lethal, three-drug cocktail used to kill condemned inmates. The judge said there was substantial evidence that the...

A federal judge ruled Friday that California's lethal injection methods are unconstitutional but can be fixed if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is willing to cooperate. The records of previous executions expose "actions and failures to act" that have created a risk of cruel and unusual punishment, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose wrote in a 17-page opinion. "This is intolerable" under the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment, Fogel declared. There will be no executions in California while the case is pending. "It sounds like the judge is saying, 'You've made progress, but you're not there yet,' " Stanford law professor...

MIAMI, Dec. 15 -- Executions by lethal injection were suspended in Florida and ordered revamped in California on Friday, as the chemical method once billed as a more humane way of killing the condemned came under mounting scrutiny over the pain it may cause. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) ordered the suspension in Florida after a botched execution in which it took 34 minutes and a second injection to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz. A state medical examiner said that needles used to carry the poison had passed through the prisoner's veins and delivered the three-chemical mix into the tissues...

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge who imposed a moratorium on executions in California ruled Friday that the state's method of lethal injection is unconstitutional because it violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. California's "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed," U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel said. Fogel said the case raised the question of whether a three-drug cocktail administered by the San Quentin State Prison is so painful that it "offends" the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Fogel said he was compelled "to answer that question in the affirmative." Fogel's...