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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...