New Jersey Civil Rights News

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.