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R obert Vinyard has been in jail and in prison for crimes related to stalking. Now he's in the state hospital for insane criminals. None of those institutions stopped him from stalking the woman he's hounded, harassed and threatened for nearly three decades. Vinyard, 52, has been stalking the same woman since 1979. They met while students at the University of Colorado. She befriended him because she felt sorry for him. They were never intimate partners. But he became obsessed with her. Two years ago, Vinyard was found by a judge to be not guilty by reason of insanity on...

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - California said on Tuesday it would revise its lethal injection procedure to ensure "a dignified end of life" for condemned inmates as it seeks to overcome a U.S. judge's objections to the procedure. In December, Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose ruled the "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed" and gave the nation's most-populous state a chance to revise how it metes out its ultimate punishment. Lawyers for a condemned California inmate had argued that lethal injection was "cruel and unusual" punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution. With the fate of...

SANTA ROSA, Calif. (AP) - Thirty years ago, Oklahoma Medical Examiner Dr. A. Jay Chapman marched into the Oklahoma Statehouse and dictated the formula for a cocktail of three drugs to a lawmaker looking for a more humane way to execute the condemned. As Chapman spoke, Rep. Bill Wiseman scribbled on a legal yellow pad. That afternoon, Wiseman introduced the bill that made Oklahoma the first state to adopt lethal injection. Chapman's method has since been taken up by 37 states in all, the federal government and the U.S. military and has been used to execute 900 U.S. prisoners. But...

DEATH PENALTY opponents will say anything, no matter how unbelievable, to stop an execution during the appeals process. There is no claim too bogus for some lawyers and activists -- and apparently no claim too bogus for some medical journals. Last month, a second medical journal printed an article that suggestesd lethal injection may routinely subject death-row inmates to agonizing pain before they die. In California, the three-drug lethal-injection protocol starts with 12.5 times the amount of sodium pentothal needed to begin invasive surgery, and is followed by lethal doses of two other drugs. The protocol is designed not to...

Inmates executed by lethal injection may in some cases die by "chemical asphyxiation" while conscious but unable to move, according to a new analysis of California and North Carolina executions released Monday. The study appearing in the online edition of PLoS Medicine -- a San Francisco-based medical journal -- was authored by the same team of doctors and death penalty opponents who raised similar concerns about the procedure in the British medical journal The Lancet in 2005. That earlier study, which said sub-potent amounts of the anesthetic sodium pentothal were found in the corpses of executed inmates, helped to propel...

LUCASVILLE, Ohio - The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the execution of a man who had been scheduled to die Tuesday for killing a woman in 1991 and scattering her remains across two states. Inmate Kenneth Biros ? and the family of the victim, Tami Engstrom ? had waited for the decision more than six hours past his 10 a.m. scheduled execution time at Ohio's death house. The justices' one-sentence decision agreed with two lower courts that delayed the execution so he could continue arguing that Ohio's method of lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment. The 6th U.S. Circuit Court...

'We can't understand why this has been put off this long,' victim's mother says. LIVINGSTON (TX) — Condemned Texas prisoner Ronald Chambers describes himself as "loaded with patience." Now in his fourth decade behind bars, Chambers' patience hasn't wavered, but time finally may be running out for Texas' longest-serving death row prisoner. It's been more than 11,300 days since Chambers arrived on death row on Jan. 8, 1976. Since then, 381 of his fellow prisoners have been executed. He's set to join them this week. "I knew it was coming," Chambers, 52, said of the letter he recently received notifying...

State officials said Tuesday they would submit revised lethal injection procedures to a federal judge by May 15 in an attempt to revive California's death penalty. U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled last month that the state's execution protocol was unconstitutional because it could result in condemned inmates feeling excruciating or unnecessary pain. But he gave the state the opportunity to try to fix the procedures. Fogel said executioners were poorly trained, worked in dim, cramped quarters and failed to properly mix the lethal, three-drug cocktail used to kill condemned inmates. The judge said there was substantial evidence that the...

A federal judge ruled Friday that California's lethal injection methods are unconstitutional but can be fixed if Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger is willing to cooperate. The records of previous executions expose "actions and failures to act" that have created a risk of cruel and unusual punishment, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose wrote in a 17-page opinion. "This is intolerable" under the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment, Fogel declared. There will be no executions in California while the case is pending. "It sounds like the judge is saying, 'You've made progress, but you're not there yet,' " Stanford law professor...

MIAMI, Dec. 15 -- Executions by lethal injection were suspended in Florida and ordered revamped in California on Friday, as the chemical method once billed as a more humane way of killing the condemned came under mounting scrutiny over the pain it may cause. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) ordered the suspension in Florida after a botched execution in which it took 34 minutes and a second injection to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz. A state medical examiner said that needles used to carry the poison had passed through the prisoner's veins and delivered the three-chemical mix into the tissues...

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge who imposed a moratorium on executions in California ruled Friday that the state's method of lethal injection is unconstitutional because it violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. California's "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed," U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel said. Fogel said the case raised the question of whether a three-drug cocktail administered by the San Quentin State Prison is so painful that it "offends" the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Fogel said he was compelled "to answer that question in the affirmative." Fogel's...

Medical logs of past state executions showed that some patients might have been conscious during the lethal injection procedure because the sedatives were mixed by prison staffers with no medical background, an anesthesiologist testified Wednesday. Dr. Mark Heath of Columbia University also testified that records from San Quentin State Prison executions show that some of the drugs taken from the prison pharmacy that weren't used went missing. "For each execution, there's 15 vials missing," Heath said during the second day of court hearings challenging California's lethal injection method. He added, "There were errors in mixing drugs." The hearing was called...

RICHMOND, Va. -- A killer scheduled to be electrocuted Thursday may have chosen to die in the electric chair because he feared lethal injection, his attorney said.

Excerpt - ST. LOUIS — A federal judge on Monday halted executions in Missouri until the state makes sweeping changes to ensure that inmates do not suffer excruciating pain when they are put to death. U.S. District Judge Fernando Gaitan Jr. cited "numerous problems" with the state's lethal injections, including a lack of a written protocol setting drug levels and a dyslexic doctor who is in charge of mixing the three drugs used. ~ snip ~

DALLAS — A Naval chief petty officer home on leave from the Middle East was shot and killed by a carjacker just three days before he was to report back for duty. Kameron Pratt, scheduled to return after minor shoulder surgery, was shot by an unidentified carjacker who dragged him from his pickup truck at his parents' home in Dallas on Friday night. Pratt, 34, stumbled to the porch. His brother, Keanon, found him semiconscious, dialed 911 and performed CPR. Paramedics transported Pratt to the hospital but he died shortly after arrival. The chief petty officer had been savoring two...

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Supreme Court on Monday declined to decide whether a drug combination used to execute convicted murderers violated the U.S. Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment. The justices refused to hear the appeal by a Tennessee death row inmate who said one of the drugs may inflict inhumane pain and that 30 states, including his, have banned using it for the euthanasia of animals. The high court at the end of April heard arguments in a similar case from Florida on whether death row inmates can bring a last-minute challenge to the lethal injection method under...

The Supreme Court's refusal Monday to consider a second lethal injection case suggests the justices are not ready to decide whether the drugs amount to cruel and unusual punishment, legal experts said. The denial was issued without comment, leaving court watchers to speculate over justices' reasons for rejecting an appeal by a Tennessee death-row inmate who claims lethal injection is unconstitutional. "The Supreme Court is plainly not ready to step into the lethal injection controversy yet," said Eric M. Freedman, a Hofstra University law professor. "It's kind of a puzzle," said Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal...

NASHVILLE — Death row inmate Sedley Alley received a stay of execution Thursday from a federal judge. Alley was scheduled to be put to death by lethal injection on Wednesday for the 1985 rape and murder of 19-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Suzanne M. Collins at the Millington Naval Air Station outside Memphis. Federal Judge Aleta Traugher issued the stay because for Alley, who is challenging the state’s lethal injection procedure. A ruling on whether the drugs used in lethal injection violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment is pending in the U.S. Supreme Court.

SAN FRANCISCO - Federal court hearings on the constitutionality of California's three-drug execution cocktail were postponed Thursday as attorneys for a condemned inmate and state prosecutors haggle over pretrial issues. The case concerns Michael Morales, who is on death row for killing 17-year-old Terri Winchell of Stockton 25 years ago. As Morales' February 21 execution approached, his attorneys filed a lawsuit with U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel arguing that Morales might feel too much pain if the sedative he was given did not make him unconscious before two other drugs were administered - one to paralyze him and another to...

Supreme Court justices clashed on Wednesday over how states execute killers, with one court member saying current lethal-injection drugs would not be used on cats and dogs and a second arguing that executions do not have to be pain-free. The court blocked Florida, at the last minute, from executing Clarence Hill in January, as Hill lay on a gurney with IV lines in his arms. The justices took up his case with a lively and sometimes contentious discussion about the way states carry out capital punishment. The court's ruling will determine whether inmates can file last-minute civil rights challenges claiming...