The Herald, Sharon, Pa.

Local News

October 29, 2009

UPDATE: Attorney general challenges Biros execution delay

By Patrick Cooley

MERCER COUNTY AREA — The Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a motion Tuesday seeking to lift a stay of execution of the man convicted of killing and cutting to pieces a 22-year-old Brookfield woman in 1991, and then scattering her body throughout Trumbull and Mercer counties.

Kenneth Biros, 51, was scheduled to be executed on Dec. 8, but a U.S. District Court judge in Cincinnati delayed the action indefinitely on Oct. 19 in response to the botched execution of Romell Broom in September. The attorney general’s motion argues that the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore Biros’ attorneys do not have a case for a stay of execution.

Broom, convicted of raping and murdering a 14 year-old girl in 1984, was supposed to be executed in Lucasville, but the execution team failed to find a usable vein in which to inject the lethal cocktail after two hours of trying.

Meanwhile, Ohio Governor Ted Strickland has delayed the executions of two other convicted murderers, Lawrence Reynolds Jr. and Darryl Durr, until the spring to give the state time to review its lethal injection procedures.

“(Lethal injection) has worked 32 out of 33 times,” Trumbull County Prosecutor Dennis Watkins said. “The law of the United States is very clear that you just go ahead and do the execution. If you were to go in for surgery and they couldn’t find the vein... then you would go back another day.”

Biros was scheduled to be executed in 2007, but the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a delay on all Ohio executions, while it reviewed the constitutionality of lethal injection.

Ohio has put to death 32 convicted felons by lethal injection since it started using the procedure in 1999.

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