COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio’s efforts to restart executions, including a law shielding the source of its drugs, hit a new setback Thursday as a federal judge declared the state’s latest lethal injection process unconstitutional and delayed three executions, including one scheduled next month.
The ruling by Magistrate Judge Michael Merz in Dayton followed a weeklong hearing over the three-drug method Ohio planned to use Feb. 15 on death row inmate Ronald Phillips.
It was the latest in several delays over the years for Phillips, who in the past had his execution delayed by court rulings and by his request, ultimately denied, to donate organs to family members after his death.
The 43-year-old Phillips was sentenced to die for raping and killing his girlfriend’s 3-year-old daughter, Sheila Marie Evans, in 1993.
The judge agreed with attorneys for Phillips and two other condemned killers that the first drug in the process, the sedative midazolam, couldn’t pass a constitutional bar of causing ‘‘substantial risk of serious harm’’ previously set by the US Supreme Court.
The judge also barred the state from using the second and third drugs in the protocol that paralyzes inmates and stops their hearts.
Using those drugs is ‘‘completely inconsistent with the position’’ the state previously took when it announced it would no longer use them in executions, the judge said.
Lawyers for death row inmates successfully argued that a compounded dose of the anesthetic pentobarbital was ‘‘a sufficiently available alternative method’’ to satisfy the US Supreme Court’s constitutional test, the judge said.
Merz wrote that he recognizes yet another delay in executions does not serve the goal of crime deterrence through speedy executions.
‘‘However, when executions are routinely delayed decades in Ohio, it is very debatable how much loss in deterrence there is from waiting until a case can be tried on the merits,’’ Merz said.
The state appealed Thursday afternoon to the Sixth US Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati.
Associated Press
