The state of Ohio on Monday postponed all scheduled executions until at least 2017 due to recent difficulties in obtaining the drugs needed to perform lethal injections, officials said.
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Earlier this year, Ohio announced that it would delay the executions of seven death row inmates while searching for an adequate supply of drugs that complies with its new execution protocol.
The result is 25 inmates with execution dates beginning in January 2017 and now scheduled through August 2019.
The department said in a statement that “over the past few years it has become exceedingly hard to secure those drugs because of severe supply and distribution restrictions”. The procedure took 26 minutes, through which he reportedly gasped and snorted in what his lawyer later called a “failed, agonizing experiment by the state of Ohio”.
The death row inmate next marked for execution, Ronald R. Phillips – who raped and beat a 3-year-old girl to death in 1993 – was set to die on January 12. His date was bumped to January 12, 2017.
The rescheduling of dates are created to provide DRC additional time to secure the required drugs.
McGuire was the first USA death row inmate to be executed with a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone. Agency spokeswoman JoEllen Smith said the executions are being pushed back because the state was having difficulty getting lethal-injection drugs.
Ohio, like many states, was forced to find new execution drugs after European-based manufacturers banned USA prisons from using their drugs in executions – among them, Danish-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital.
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One of those drugs, sodium thiopental, is no longer manufactured by FDA-approved companies and the other, pentobarbital, has been put off limits for executions by drug makers.
