29 January 2019 :

Citing a federal court’s concerns that Ohio’s lethal-injection process is unnecessarily torturous, newly inaugurated Governor Mike DeWine has granted a reprieve to Warren Keith Henness, scheduled to be executed on February 13, 2019. The Governor rescheduled the execution for September 12, 2019. In granting the reprieve, DeWine also directed the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to review Ohio’s possible alternative drugs to carry out lethal-injection executions. On January 22, federal magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued an opinion likening Ohio’s current three-drug execution process to a combination of waterboarding and chemical fire. Judge Mertz wrote: “If Ohio executes Warren Henness under its present protocol, it will almost certainly subject him to severe pain and needless suffering. Reading the plain language of the Eighth Amendment, that should be enough to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.” Nonetheless, Merz allowed the execution to go forward, saying the U.S. Supreme Court’s controversial 2015 ruling in the lethal-injection case Glossip v. Gross prevented him from granting a stay. Glossip requires a prisoner who challenges an execution protocol to provide an alternative method that is “available, feasible and can be readily implemented,” a standard Mertz said that Henness was unable to meet. Merz’s ruling described several problems with the use of midazolam, the first drug in Ohio’s lethal-injection protocol. He said that — contrary to the evidence available to the Court at the time of Glossip — midazolam does not render the prisoner sufficiently unconscious to block the painful effects of the second drug, a paralytic, and the third drug, potassium chloride, which he said would feel “as though fire was being poured” through the prisoner’s veins. He also noted that 24 of 28 available autopsies from midazolam executions showed the prisoner experienced pulmonary edema, or fluid in the lungs, which he said was “painful, both physically and emotionally, inducing a sense of drowning and the attendant panic and terror, much as would occur with the torture tactic known as waterboarding.”