DaytonDailyNews.com

Christopher Newton was pronounced dead at 11:53 a.m. May 24, after receiving a lethal injection at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility — the Lucasville "death house."

Mr. Newton received the death penalty for the brutal murder of his cellmate at Mansfield Correctional Institute — whom he strangled and stomped to death.

Mr. Newton had been serving a sentence of 5 to 15 years for attempted aggravated burglary at the time of the murder. Two years earlier, he had told a mental-health worker he would kill someone in prison so he could spend the rest of his life there.

Mr. Newton ordered his lawyer to "not advocate on his behalf in favor of a sentence less than death."

A spokesman for Gov. Ted Strickland said the Newton execution procedure "worked exactly the way it's supposed to."

According to media accounts, the execution had been set for 10 a.m. Lethal injections typically take 20 minutes from beginning to end — with the inmates declared dead about eight minutes after the injections begin.

It is a three-step process. The condemned prisoner first is supposed to be rendered unconscious with a heavy dose of barbiturate of the kind administered to surgical patients. Then a paralyzing agent is injected into his bloodstream, rendering him incapable of breathing. This is followed by an injection of potassium chloride, which causes massive cramping of the heart — which then stops beating.

Ohio executions are performed by paramedics, who insert the needles and start the intravenous lines. (Physicians don't participate other than to declare when death has occurred.) With the Newton execution, the medical team attempted about 10 times over 90 minutes, without success, to get a shunt in place so they could administer the lethal chemicals.

The problem evidently was Mr. Newton's size (he weighed about 265 pounds) and he was a prior drug user, which may have made it difficult to find a vein. The process took so long that Mr. Newton had to be unstrapped from the gurney so he could use the restroom.

Prison officials and the governor weren't happy about these complications, which they say they had attempted to plan for when they made recent amendments to the state's lethal injection protocol.

A year ago, procedures were changed because an Ohio execution team experienced a similar problem. It took the paramedics more than 90 minutes to complete the execution of Joseph Lewis Clark. After an extended delay and several failed attempts to insert a needle, Mr. Clark struggled and shouted, "It don't work. It don't work. They're not working."

Prison officials then drew the curtain, preventing the media and other witnesses from seeing what occurred next. The state corrections director said this was done to take pressure off the execution team. When the curtain reopened, Mr. Clark appeared to be asleep and the execution was completed.

And, so, execution staffs now are instructed to take their time, to remove the "artificial self-imposed time barrier resulting in enormous pressure on the execution team members," to complete "the process in a professional and dignified manner for all parties."

State officials, thus, have substituted self-imposed coolness for self-imposed expediency. And, in the process, they have drawn another curtain to mask a still deeply flawed execution process.

The main objection to lethal injections is not just that things can and do go wrong. Rather, the problem is that the protocol used in Ohio and across the nation appears to be a medical farce: A growing body of evidence reveals that the three-step chemical regimen was adopted without basic research. There is no professional, clinical or ethical oversight of the execution process. As a result, according to a just released study from the University of Miami's medical school, no one can say with certainty whether sedated prisoners are put to death humanely, or whether they are paralyzed but aware as they are chemically asphyxiated.

Some may believe condemned prisoners who committed horrifying crimes deserve no better. But Ohio deserves better — and so do the prison system employees asked to do the state's dirty work.

And Gov. Strickland should not pretend the system is working as it is supposed to.