Lawyers fight to halt Ohio execution condemned as human experimentation.

I am sure we all remember the story of Romell Broom:

A death row inmate has been given a week’s reprieve after executioners were unable to find a vein to administer a lethal injection.

Convicted killer Romell Broom even tried to help, by turning on his side and flexing his fingers to make his veins stand out, as the victim’s family looked on from behind a screen.

But after two hours, officials at Lucasville prison in Ohio gave up and took the condemned man, who began to sob at one point, back to his cell.

State governor Ted Strickland ordered a week’s reprieve for the 53-year-old former heroin addict.

Well, now the state of Ohio are determined to get it right when it comes to the execution of Kenneth Biros, although the method they propose using is controversial in the extreme, as Ohio are proposing using a technique normally reserved for the putting down of pets.

Barring last-minute appeals and stays of execution, Kenneth Biros, 51, will be put to death using a massive overdose of an anaesthetic. It would be the first time that a single-drug lethal injection had been administered, in contrast to the triple-drug cocktail that has become the norm in the 37 American states that have death row prisoners.

Opponents of the death penalty and lawyers involved in the Biros case have decried the move towards the single-drug method as over-hasty.

Tim Sweeney, Biros's lawyer, said: "This truly is experimentation and a more careful look needs to be taken by the courts before this new method can be used."

Ohio has moved to this method despite the fact that no doctor can be found to vouch for this new technique.

Charles Wille, a state prosecutor, told Associated Press: "Somebody has to be first. This plan is consistent with a long history of states attempting to take a very difficult social responsibility and make it less difficult."

Richard Dieter, head of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington, said that it was only because of the extraordinary nature of executions in the US that Ohio would be permitted to test out a new method on humans. "In other countries or in any medical field there would be all kinds of restrictions about doing things to experiment on human beings. It would never be allowed."

Under the Nuremberg Code, which stemmed from Nazi medical experiments, doctors must abide by strict rules relating to human experimentation, including that any test must be voluntary and for the social good. But executions are not covered by the code.

Amnesty International are arguing that this amounts to human experimentation, and it's hard to argue with that when one hears arguments along the lines of, "Someone has to be first."

The death penalty is, to me, simply a barbaric thing for any society to carry out. But Ohio is taking that barbarity to new heights, by literally experimenting on human beings regarding new - untested - ways to kill them.

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Tags: Ohio, Kenneth Biros, Romell Broom, death penalty, execution