ELYRIA — The lethal injection process used by Ohio to execute condemned inmates is not only humane, there’s also little chance a prisoner would remain conscious after being injected with the first drug, a sedative, a state expert testified Tuesday.

“The likelihood of that happening is negligible,” said Mark Dershwitz, an anesthesiologist at the University of Massachusetts, during the second day of hearings before county Common Pleas Judge James Burge.

Burge plans to rule whether Ohio’s lethal injection process follows a state law requiring a quick and painless death, and if it violates the Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment in the cases of accused killers Ruben Rivera and Ronald McCloud.

The pair could face the death penalty if convicted in separate murders in Lorain.

Dershwitz’s testimony, presented via a video hookup, came a day after another anesthesiologist, Mark Heath, said the state’s current method isn’t used to euthanize dogs and cats and shouldn’t be used to execute humans.

Dershwitz testified that the state uses a three-drug cocktail that starts with the administration of the sedative, followed by a saline drip.

The amount of the sedative used in the process, Dershwitz said, is powerful enough that it would knock out a typical person for about two hours and cause that person to stop breathing and die without medical help.

“I believe a large dose of (the sedative), properly administered, would result in the death of the inmate,” Dershwitz said.

The second drug paralyzes the inmate and also stops them from breathing. The saline drip is then used to flush the tubing again before the final drug — which stops the inmate’s heart — is injected.

Dershwitz said that if the sedative is properly administered, there’s virtually no chance that the inmate would feel the second drug stop them from breathing. Even if the prisoner were still conscious, he would feel “air hunger,” but not necessarily pain, Dershwitz said.

“It would be extremely uncomfortable, but it would not be painful in the usual sense,” he said.

If the inmate were still conscious, the third drug would cause a “substantial amount of pain” as it stops the heart, Dershwitz said. But he said once the drug took effect, the inmate quickly would lose consciousness.

The second and third drugs, while not necessary to kill the inmate, speed up the process, Dershwitz said, which could be easier on a prisoner’s family.

Dershwitz also told Kreig Brusnahan, one of Rivera’s attorneys, that he thought the chances of a mechanical or other error — such as a leak in the tubing that carries the drugs to the condemned inmate — that would leave the inmate capable of feeling pain were “extremely implausible.”

After Dershwitz finished testifying, Jeff Gamso, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Ohio chapter, who represents both McCloud and Rivera, asked Burge for permission to have the three members of the state’s execution team with medical training testify in the hearing.

The training, experience and skills of those members — two of whom are trained emergency medical technicians — have been called into question by critics of the lethal injection process.

Burge denied the request, and Gamso criticized the state after the hearing for refusing to divulge the training of the third member of the execution team. The state has said the third team member has a medical background.

“We may not have the best-qualified people doing it,” he said.

Even if the team is highly skilled and trained and working with the best equipment, there’s no guarantee that something wouldn’t go wrong and an inmate could experience pain during their execution, Gamso said.

“With technology, with all the bells and whistles and well-trained people who put it all together, things can go wrong,” he said.

Greg Trout, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said the state and the people who carry out executions work hard to make sure everything goes smoothly.

“It’s a difficult duty that the law imposed on us that we take extremely seriously and our employees work to perform it with dignity and compassion,” Trout said.

Burge said that before he issues a ruling, he will hold a hearing later this month to discuss the testimony of Dershwitz and Heath with all the parties involved.

Contact Brad Dicken at 329-7147 or bdicken@chroniclet.com.

 

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