Ohio’s prisons agency said Monday it won’t resume executions until 2017 because of continuing troubles finding lethal-injection drugs.
The year-long delay marks the latest setback for state officials, who have already postponed executions for almost two years as European pharmaceutical companies have stopped lethal-injection drug sales on moral and legal grounds.
The first inmate set to die under the revised schedule is Akron killer Ronald Phillips, convicted of the 1993 rape and beating death of a 3-year-old girl. His execution, now set for Jan. 12, 2017, had previously been scheduled to take Jan. 21 of next year.
Many of the 24 other inmates on death row also had their execution dates postponed, some by more than three years.
The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said in a statement that its need to extra time to procure supplies of sodium thiopental and pentobarbital, Ohio’s execution drugs of choice, from overseas or from small-scale drug manufacturers called compounding pharmacies.
Executions have been on hold in Ohio since January 2014, when murderer Dennis McGuire took an unexpectedly long 25 minutes to die from a previously untried two-drug cocktail of midazolam and hydromorphone.
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