COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — South Carolina’s latest execution should be halted so that lawyers for the condemned inmate can get more information about the drug used for lethal injection after the last prisoner put to death needed two massive doses of the sedative 11 minutes apart, the attorneys said in court papers.
An anesthesiologist who reviewed the autopsy records of Richard Moore, who was executed on Nov. 1, told the inmate’s lawyers that fluid found in the lungs make it appear that Moore “consciously experienced feelings of drowning and suffocation during the 23 minutes that it took to bring about his death.”
But another anesthesiologist who reviewed the records for the state said fluid is often found in the lungs of prisoners killed by lethal injection, and the accounts by witnesses and other evidence gave no indication Moore was conscious beyond 30 seconds after the pentobarbital was first administered…