Legal Research

A trial court judge in Ohio has ruled that the three-drug executioner's cocktail which the Supreme Court upheld in Baze v Rees may not be administered to Ohio Death Row inmates.  In April, the Supreme Court held that the three-drug cocktail did not per se violate the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.   In the wake of this decision, five executions in states using the cocktail have been carried out. 

Judge Burge, of the Lorain County Court of Common Pleas, based his decision not on the Eighth Amendment, but on state law, which requires "a lethal injection of a drug or combination of drugs of sufficient dosage to quickly and painlessly cause death."  The Judge found petitioners had shown that medical supply companies will not sell equipment necessary to measure depth of anesthesia for the purposes of carrying out lethal injections and that physicians will not participate in lethal injections.  In light of these compromising factors, the court enumerated the different ways the administration of the cocktail could go astray and concluded that it presented an unnecessary and arbitrary risk of the suffering forbidden by the Ohio statute.  Therefore, the judge ordered that a single large dose of barbiturates be administered in the place of the cocktail.  This single large dose is currently used for executions in California.