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| Florida Death Chamber |
The state corrections official who stands beside condemned inmates as they take their last breaths in Florida's death chamber recently pulled back the veil on what has largely been a very secretive execution process.
The testimony was given during a Feb. 11 hearing in a lawsuit involving Paul Howell, a death row inmate scheduled to die by lethal injection Feb. 26. Howell is appealing his execution; his lawyers say the first of the injected drugs, midazolam, isn't effective at preventing the pain of the subsequent drugs.
The Florida Supreme court specifically asked the circuit court in Leon County to determine the efficacy of the so called "consciousness check" given to inmates by the execution team leader.
Timothy Cannon, who is the assistant secretary of the Florida Department of Corrections and the team leader present at every execution, told a Leon County court that an additional inmate "consciousness check" is now given due to news media reports and other testimony stemming from the Oct. 15 execution of William Happ.
Happ was the first inmate to receive the new lethal injection drug trio. An Associated Press reporter who had covered executions using the old drug cocktail wrote that Happ acted differently during the execution than those executed before him.
It appeared Happ remained conscious longer and made more body movements after losing consciousness.
Cannon said in his testimony that during Happ's execution and the ones that came before it, he did two "consciousness checks" based on what he learned at training at the Federal Bureau of Prisons in Indiana — a "shake and shout," where he vigorously shakes the inmate's shoulders and calls his name loudly, and also strokes the inmate's eyelashes and eyelid.
Source: naplesnews.com, Feb. 19, 2014
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