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California's death penalty has been in limbo since 2006, when a federal judge stayed the execution of Michael Morales, who was sentenced to death for the brutal 1981 murder and rape of 17-year-old Terri Winchell. The judge was fearful lest the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol would cause Morales undue pain. Since then, a number of states have switched to a one-drug protocol. Why hasn't California? The answer could be that Gov. Jerry Brown and Attorney General Kamala Harris don't want the death penalty to work. Brown and Harris are personally opposed to the death penalty, but when they campaigned...

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.