After Court Ruling, States to Proceed With Executions

Mississippi will try to schedule the execution of Earl Wesley Berry, who kidnapped a woman and beat her to death after she left choir practice. And Alabama will seek to schedule the lethal injection of Thomas Arthur, who fatally shot a man through the eye as he slept.

Clay Crenshaw, chief of the capital litigation division in the Alabama attorney general's office, said a motion will be filed with the state Supreme Court to set an execution date. Shortly after the Supreme Court decided the Kentucky case, the attorney general asked the state's highest court to schedule executions in three other cases.

Crenshaw said challenges to the executions are likely to fall on deaf ears. "I think all nine justices basically say that based on what they've seen, there is no question that if the anesthesia goes in the bloodstream, the execution will be painless," he said. "The problem with their argument is there is just nothing to it."

Mississippi was awaiting the high court's decision to move forward with Berry's execution, said Jan Schaeffer, a spokeswoman for the state's attorney general. Texas, the state with the largest number of inmates on death row and stayed executions, said the discretion of rescheduling lethal injections is left to state district courts.

Tennessee corrections officials said stays on three executions set for December and January might soon be lifted by the state attorney general and the executions rescheduled. Oklahoma requested execution dates for Terry Lyn Short, who was convicted of killing a man in a fire, and Kevin Young, who was convicted of killing a man during a bungled robbery. Arkansas is reviewing the court's ruling before deciding how to proceed with three stayed executions.

In Florida, where the error-plagued execution of Angel Diaz took twice the normal time and led to a change in protocols, officials said no lethal injections have been scheduled. Diaz, the last man to be executed in the state, made facial expressions and gasped on his deathbed when he should have been unconscious, according to witnesses.

There were no scheduled executions in Ohio, officials said last week. The state changed its procedures after an execution in 2006, when Joseph Clark awoke in the middle of his lethal injection and said, "It don't work." As officials fumbled with attempts to deliver more anesthesia, he said, "Can you just give me something by mouth to end this?"