(Columbus)—The
Office of the Ohio Public Defender (OPD) yesterday filed a civil
rights lawsuit in the Federal Southern District Court of Ohio
challenging the constitutionality of Ohio’s lethal injection
protocol. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of two Ohio death row
inmates, Adremy Dennis and Richard W. Cooey, II.
Ohio’s lethal injection
protocol includes a short-term anesthetic and a paralyzing drug,
which could combine to leave an inmate conscious but paralyzed,
trapping him in a chemical tomb that hides the excruciatingly
painful effects of death by suffocation and heart attack.
Veterinarians forbid using the same combination of drugs for
euthanizing pets, in order to avoid inflicting pain on animals. At
bare minimum, the OPD argues that we as a civilized society should
not be executing human beings by using drugs veterinarians won’t
use to put pets to sleep.
In the lawsuit filed
yesterday, the OPD argues that the use of the paralyzing drug,
pancuronium bromide, is a violation of Dennis’ and Cooey’s
rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment under the
Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States
Constitution: "[Ohio’s] current method of lethal injection
can and will, in effect, cause them to be tortured to death. No
government within the United States can intentionally or
negligently use an arbitrary, cruel, and/or unreliable method of
execution."
The lawsuit goes on to
argue that Ohio’s "lethal injection protocol includes an
unreliable ultrashort-acting anesthetic that can and will leave
[Dennis and Cooey] conscious but trapped in a paralyzed body
wracked with the pain of suffocation and a heart attack. [The
State of Ohio] intend[s] to execute [Dennis and Cooey] with
unreliable and arbitrary drugs, administered by inadequately
trained personnel, who use inappropriate equipment and methods to
cause death by lethal injection."
Earlier this year, the
OPD filed a similar lawsuit on behalf of Lewis Williams and John
Glenn Roe. Due to then-existing technicalities, that lawsuit was
dismissed without any rulings on the facts, and both Williams and
Roe were executed. The OPD believes that the technical barriers to
challenging Ohio lethal injection methods were effectively lifted
by the United States Supreme Court’s decision on May 24, 2004 in
Nelson v. Campbell, where the Court allowed an Alabama
death-row inmate to use the civil rights statute to challenge
lethal injection procedures.
