Citing concern over the protocol for lethal injection, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds has delayed the scheduled execution of Elijah Page. Rounds announced the reprieve at a news conference approximately four hours before the 10 p.m. CDT time set for the execution.
Rounds said he was delaying the execution until at least July 1, 2007, to give the South Dakota Legislature time to review and possibly change South Dakota's capital punishment statutes. The announcement came as a surprise as Rounds had previously indicated he would not intervene. Page, who pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for the brutal March 2000 death of Chester Poage, withdrew all his appeals earlier this year and requested his death sentence be carried out. It would have been the first execution in South Dakota in 59 years.
Both Rounds and South Dakota Attorney General Larry Long, who also spoke at the press conference, said the problem is that South Dakota law calls for two drugs to be used in lethal injection. The 36 other states that use lethal injection for execution and the federal government use a three-drug protocol, Long said. South Dakota officials responsible for the execution were familiar with the latter but had not trained with the statutorily mandated approach, Round said.
Rounds said he asked Long's office to review and evaluate whether using the three drug protocol to execute Page would comply with state law. Following that review and conferences with Long, Rounds decided late Tuesday afternoon to postpone the execution for fear it might be illegal.
South Dakota law requires administering "a lethal quantity of an ultra-short-acting barbiturate in combination with a chemical paralytic agent" until the convict is pronounced dead by a licensed physician. That statute was enacted in 1984 and Page's execution would have been the first since the statute was adopted.
Article comments
1 - RJ Elliott
Uh, the Governor only discovered this "issue" FOUR HOURS before the man was to be put to death? Either he's an incompetent Governor, or this was a cruel, planned non-event utilized solely to boost his re-election chances by getting more anti-death penalty voters to support him for re-election in November...
2 - pleasexcusetheinterruption12
Is being anti-death penalty popular in SD?????
3 - RJ Elliott
Perhaps not overall, but you can bet anti-death penalty types are viewing Governor Rounds a lot more favorably today than they were a couple days ago...and most pro-death penalty people will shrug this news off under the assumption that this clown will simply be put to death next year instead...
4 - RJ Elliott
That's how politics works...you turn an enemy into an ally without pissing off your existing allies...you use a human being as a political football in order to win an election...(just like Bill Clinton flew back to Arkansas to personally oversee the execution of a retard when he was running for President in 1992...)...it's disgusting, but this sort of cynical crap happens all the time...