Ohio Killer Executed With New Lethal Drug Combo

A condemned Ohio inmate appeared to gasp several times and took more than 15 minutes to die Thursday as he was executed with a combination of drugs never before tried in the U.S.

Death row inmate Dennis McGuire made several loud snorting or snoring sounds during one of the longest executions since Ohio resumed capital punishment in 1999.

Ohio officials used intravenous doses of two drugs, the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone, to put McGuire to death for the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of a pregnant woman, Joy Stewart.

McGuire's adult children sobbed a few feet away in a witness room as they looked on at the state death house in Lucasville in southern Ohio.

McGuire thanked Stewart's family for a letter he apparently received from them referring to "kind words" he said meant a lot. "I'm going to heaven, I'll see you there when you come," he said.

In attempting to halt his execution, McGuire's attorneys argued he was at substantial risk of a medical phenomenon known as air hunger, causing him to experience "agony and terror" as he strained to catch his breath.

The state had adopted the new execution method after supplies of the state's previous drug dried up.

McGuire opened and shut his left hand as if waving to his daughter, son and daughter-in-law. More than a minute later he raised himself up, looked in the direction of his family and said, "I love you. I love you."

McGuire was still for almost five minutes, then emitted a loud snort, as if snoring, and continued to make that sound over the next several minutes. He also opened and shut his mouth several times without making a sound as his stomach rose and fell.

"Oh my God," his daughter, Amber McGuire, said as she observed her father's final moments.

A coughing sound was Dennis McGuire's last apparent movement, at 10:43 a.m. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes later.

Previous executions with the former execution drugs took much less time, and typically did not include the types of snorts and gasps that McGuire uttered.

State attorneys had disputed claims that McGuire would experience terror as he was put to death with the new method. A federal judge sided with the state but acknowledged the new method was an experiment. At the request of McGuire's lawyers, Judge Gregory Frost ordered the state to photograph and then preserve the drugs' packaging boxes and vials and the syringes used in the execution.

McGuire, 53, was sentenced to death for killing Stewart in Preble County in western Ohio. The newlywed was eight months pregnant at the time.

Stewart's slaying went unsolved for 10 months until McGuire, jailed on an unrelated assault and hoping to improve his legal situation, told investigators he had information about the woman's Feb. 12, 1989, death. His attempts to blame the crime on his brother-in-law quickly unraveled and soon he was accused of being the Joy Stewart's killer, according to prosecutors.

More than a decade later, DNA evidence confirmed McGuire's guilt, and he acknowledged that he was responsible in a letter to Gov. John Kasich last month.

"One can scarcely conceive of a sequence of crimes more shocking to the conscience or to moral sensibilities than the senseless kidnapping and rape of a young, pregnant woman followed by her murder," Preble County prosecutors said in a filing with the state parole board last month.

His attorneys argued McGuire was mentally, physically and sexually abused as a child and has impaired brain function that makes him prone to act impulsively.

"Dennis was at risk from the moment he was born," the lawyers said in a parole board filing. "The lack of proper nutrition, chaotic home environment, abuse, lack of positive supervision and lack of positive role models all affected Dennis' brain development."

Documents obtained by The Associated Press show McGuire unsuccessfully sought a reprieve in recent weeks to try to become an organ donor. In November, Kasich granted a death row inmate an eight-month reprieve to let the prison system study his request to donate a kidney to his sister and his heart to his mother.

Kasich said McGuire couldn't identify a family member who would receive his organs, as required under prison policy.

Wyo. lawmaker proposes firing squads for executions

A Wyoming lawmaker is pushing to allow use of firing squads to execute condemned state inmates if constitutional problems or other issues ever prevented the state from using lethal injections.

Sen. Bruce Burns, R-Sheridan, said Monday that state law currently calls for using a gas chamber if lethal injection is unavailable.

"The state of Wyoming doesn't have a gas chamber currently, an operating gas chamber, so the procedure and expense to build one would be impractical to me," said Burns, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"I consider, frankly, the gas chamber to be cruel and unusual, so I went with firing squad because they also have it in Utah," Burns said. He's introduced the bill for consideration in the legislative session that starts Feb. 10 in Cheyenne.

"One of the reasons I chose firing squad as opposed to any other form of execution is because frankly it's one of the cheapest for the state," Burns said. "The expense of building a gas chamber I think would be prohibitive when you consider how many people would be executed by it, and even the cost of gallows."

Burns said his bill addressed the possibility that the state could have to find a substitute for using lethal injection because a number of states are running short of the chemicals used for lethal injections.

In Missouri, for example, the state auditor is undertaking a probe of the Missouri Department of Corrections over its use of a new death penalty drug. That state for years had used a three-drug blend to perform executions until pharmaceutical companies stopped selling those drugs to prisons.

Missouri has executed two inmates in recent months using the sedative pentobarbital and plans a third execution later this month. The drug comes from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma not licensed to do business in Missouri.

The pace of inmate executions is much slower in Wyoming, which has only one inmate on death row and last executed an inmate in 1992.

Inmate Dale Wayne Eaton, 68, is challenging the constitutionality of the death sentence he received in 2004 for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell of Billings, Mont. The Wyoming Supreme Court already has upheld Eaton's conviction, but a federal court has put the execution on hold for the past several years while it considers his appeal.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said Monday he believes Wyoming could face constitutional challenges if it tried to use the firing squad as its only method of execution.

Dieter said Utah has offered inmates the choice of being executed by firing squad but said the state is phasing out the punishment. He said mandating the use of the firing squad if lethal injection were unavailable, as Burns seeks to do, would be a different matter.

"That I think would raise concerns in the federal courts, perhaps the state courts, about whether and unusual, perhaps a cruel and unusual punishment is being inflicted," Dieter said. "I don't know how the ultimate ruling would come down, but I think there would be delays as that case got considered and it might even go up to the Supreme Court. This would be unusual. This is not what Utah has done."