Deborah Denno comments to the Cleveland Plain Dealer on Ohio’s new lethal injection process, which survived last-ditch court challenges and about which legal questions about the process remain. Kenneth Biros, 51, became the first person in the United States to be executed with a dose of just one drug, a sedative. The method runs counter to every other state that uses lethal injection and the three-drug concoction Ohio once used.
“Part of the challenge with the Biros execution is it went forward before he could develop his case,” said Fordham University law professor Deborah Denno.
“Other inmates will have time to challenge Ohio’s procedures and they might have different results in court,” she said.
Denno said both Ohio’s one-drug method and the backup plan — a muscular injection if a suitable vein can’t be found — do not match what the U.S. Supreme Court has said in an earlier Kentucky case is acceptable for capital punishment. Neither of Ohio’s methods had been tested on humans.
Read the entire Cleveland Plain Dealer story.