Death-penalty opponents decry inmate's wait

ST. LOUIS -- Death-penalty opponents objected to an inmate's three hours strapped to a gurney before his execution, saying the wait adds grist to their claims that death by injection is inhumane.

The state Department of Corrections defended its treatment of Vernon Brown, saying the inmate never complained of discomfort and actually slept part of the time after taking a sedative he earlier had declined.

"He was sentenced to death, not torture," Margaret Phillips of the Eastern Missouri Coalition to Abolish Death Penalty said of Vernon Brown's death. "Everything about it is unsettling. The fact that lethal injection might be painful, with or without the delay, is cause for immense distress. There was no good outcome."

Brown, 51, was secured to the gurney in the death chamber at a prison in Bonne Terre, south of St. Louis, about 11:30 p.m. Tuesday, 31 minutes before his scheduled execution.

Temporary stay

But U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas issued a temporary stay five minutes before the injections were to begin. Brown remained immobilized until the high court, by a 5-4 vote, gave the go-ahead about two hours later for the sentence to be carried out.

Brown, who while strapped down accepted a sedative and remained attached to an intravenous line, got the first of three injections at 2:32 a.m. Wednesday and was declared dead three minutes later.

John Fougere, a spokesman for Missouri's prison system, said the Department of Corrections was following its protocol on keeping Brown on the gurney, having been advised by the Supreme Court to "remain in the ready position" during the stay it pressed was only temporary.

"We did make sure the offender was not in any physical pain. He told us he was not," Fougere said, noting that Brown fell asleep shortly after taking the sedative about 1 a.m. The inmate was awakened shortly after the Supreme Court lifted the stay about 2:10 a.m.

'Standby mode'

Though some suggested that perhaps Brown could have been taken to his holding cell near the death chamber as his 11th-hour appeals were meted out, Fougere said that "when we were having thoughts about how long this would go, [the Supreme Court] assured us they were still working on it and to be on standby mode."

Fougere said that in his eight years with the Department of Corrections, "I don't believe there's been a time the offender has been on the gurney this amount of time."

Among other things, Brown's attorneys had argued that the drugs used in lethal injection could cause excessive pain, citing a recent article in The Lancet medical journal with research "showing the three-chemical process used by some states to carry out lethal injections has the possibility of causing unnecessary cruelty and suffering."

"What you saw this morning was part of a process that just doesn't work," said Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. "There's no nice way of doing it, and there are problems inherent with it.

Brown's execution "is part of a continuum of disturbing things that take place," she said.

Brown was put to death for the 1986 slaying of 9-year-old Janet Perkins, the St. Louis fourth-grader that Brown enticed into his home, bound with a coat hangar in his basement and strangled with a rope while his stepsons were locked in their bedroom. Her body was found the next day wrapped in trash bags in an alley behind Brown's house.

Brown also had been sentenced to death in the 1985 death of 19-year-old Synetta Ford, whom Brown stabbed and eventually strangled with a curling iron cord.

Fougere said the Department of Corrections would analyze Brown's execution, as it does after any death sentence is carried out.

"We do a complete debriefing on every aspect to see if we handled every situation in the right way, and this one is no different," he said.

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On the Net:

Missouri Department of Corrections, http://www.corrections.state.mo.us

Missourians to Abolish the Death Penalty, http://www.moabolition.org

National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, http://www.ncadp.org