United States:Alabama has modified its lethal injection procedure to take account of fears that it could be painful, and plans to go ahead with an execution scheduled for Thursday, Governor Bob Riley said yesterday.
The execution would be the first in the US since the Supreme Court agreed to consider a case from two condemned men in Kentucky who argue that death by lethal injection could be unconstitutional because prisoners may remain conscious while painful drugs are administered. The court last week halted an execution in Virginia and two other states have postponed executions planned for next month in what death penalty opponents welcomed as a de facto moratorium on the use of the lethal injection.
A spokesman for Alabama's department of corrections told The Irish Timesthat the new safeguards were designed to ensure that the condemned man is rendered unconscious by the first of three drugs administered during execution. A few minutes after the drug, a barbiturate, is injected, a member of the execution team will speak the prisoner's name, brush a finger across his eyelashes and pinch his arm.
If there is no reaction, it will be assumed that the prisoner is unconscious and the other drugs, which paralyse and stop the heart, will be administered.
Daniel Siebert, who was sentenced to death for four murders committed on the same night in 1986, is suffering from terminal cancer but Mr Riley said yesterday that the man's illness was no reason to halt his execution.
Siebert's legal team is expected to appeal for a stay of Thursday's execution.