A desire to make certain condemned inmates die painlessly prompted changes made earlier this month to the protocols used by Ohio`s executioners to carry out lethal injections, according to the state prison system`s attorney.

“There are very few guarantees in life, but we certainly want to do everything we can to ensure that the person being executed does not suffer,” Gregory Trout, chief legal counsel for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction, said Wednesday.

But Trout also said that simply because the new procedures – including calling out an inmate`s name, shaking his shoulder and pinching him after he`s been given a powerful sedative – have been written down doesn`t mean they haven`t been used before in the death house at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.

The state`s execution team has checked to make sure the condemned inmate is truly unconscious in the past few executions before the final two drugs in the lethal three-drug cocktail used by the state are administered.

While the sedative, thiopental sodium, is supposed to render the condemned unconscious, death penalty critics say there`s a chance the inmate could remain conscious when the final two drugs begin to flow into his veins. The new protocols call for an extra dose of the sedative to be on hand in case the inmate remains conscious after the first dose.

The second drug, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes the inmate before the last drug, potassium chloride, induces a heart attack.

One thing that will definitely be new for convicted killer Daniel Wilson, who will be the first inmate to be executed under the new protocols if his scheduled June 3 execution goes forward, is having an execution team member check the equipment that carries the drugs into an inmate`s veins after the sedative is administered, Trout said.

“It`s all part of continuing to verify that there has not been a problem in the delivery of the drugs,” he said.

Last year Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge ruled that the state couldn`t guarantee that the sedative would knock out an inmate, who could suffer horribly as the other drugs took effect if he were still conscious. It was a violation, Burge said, of a state law requiring a “quick and painless” death.

Trout said there`s only been one instance in Ohio`s history of executions in which an inmate didn`t succumb quickly to the sedative – during the 2006 execution of Joseph Clark.

Execution team members had trouble finding veins on Clark, a former intravenous drug user, in which to insert the shunts that carry the lethal drugs into an inmate`s blood stream. Eventually execution team members settled on using only one shunt instead of the normal two, but that line failed and another line had to be established to finish the job.

Clark told officials during the execution that the drugs weren`t working.

“The concern, I suppose, was first manifested, and only manifested, in the execution of Joseph Clark when he spoke,” Trout said.

Death penalty critics have gone so far as to call for brainwave monitors to be attached to condemned inmates, but Trout said that`s not necessary and the protocols now being used by the execution team are enough.

“Evaluating consciousness is a pretty simple matter,” he said. “It`s not something that needs medical equipment.”

Alan Rossman, an assistant federal public defender who represents Wilson, said prison officials should be commended for taking the concerns of critics into account.

Wilson, who was sentenced to death for murdering Carol Lutz by locking her in the trunk of her car, puncturing the gas tank and setting the car ablaze in 1991, is among the death row inmates who have challenged how the state carries out its executions and the training of the people who handled the drugs and injections.

“It looks like they sat down to specifically address the concerns that were being litigated,” Rossman said.

Rossman said he and Wilson`s other attorneys are still evaluating how the new protocols will impact Wilson`s fight to stay alive. He said he has concerns over whether the execution team members meet the training and experience requirements set forth in the new protocols.

Trout said they do.

Wilson also is challenging whether he was properly sentenced to death and is awaiting a decision from Gov. Ted Strickland on clemency.

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

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