Ohio halts executions until 2017 after failing to get lethal injection drugs

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”.

“It seems that in those states that authorize assisted suicide, there has been no impediment to securing drugs and, as time marches onward, victims wonder why they must continue to wait for justice”, O’Brien wrote in an email to the Reuters news agency.

This delay follows a previous decision from January 2015 to suspend the executions of seven inmates “while searching for an adequate supply of drugs that complies with [Ohio’s] new execution protocol”.

Ohio said in early January that it would add thiopental sodium, a drug the state used for lethal injections from 1999-2011.

Sky News has been following the case of Richard Glossip, the Oklahoma death row inmate who has come within hours of being put to death three times before winning a stay of execution.

The first inmate scheduled to die under the revised schedule is Akron killer Ronald Phillips, who was convicted of the rape and beating death of a three-year-old girl in 1993. However, the Food and Drug Administration said it was illegal for states to import drugs for executions. His date was bumped to January 12, 2017.

Since then, Ohio has had ongoing difficulty purchasing different drugs with state officials even looking to foreign sources.

Other states are also running into problems purchasing drugs for lethal injection cocktails.

States with the death penalty have faced widespread shortages of execution drugs in recent years as American drugmakers have withdrawn from making the substances and European companies have blocked sales to USA prisons. Ohio raised the issue again with the FDA earlier this month, asserting the state believes it can obtain a lethal-injection drug from overseas without violating any laws.

A growing number of death row inmates are now filing complaints saying that certain lethal drugs could cause inmates to suffer cruel and inhumane punishment, barred under the US Constitution.