LAS VEGAS (AP) – A convicted murderer fighting a possible execution date in June, making him the first person killed in Nevada in 15 years, is asking the state to consider the shooting group an option. the United States.
Lawyers for Zane Michael Floyd say he does not want to die and challenge the state plan to use a proposed lethal injection of three drugs, which led to court challenges that delayed the execution of another convicted murderer twice who later killed his own life in prison. .
“This is not a delaying tactic,” Brad Levenson, a federal public defender representing Floyd, said Monday.
But a challenge to the state enforcement protocol requires the defense to offer an alternative method, and Levenson said shots fired at the brain stem would be “the most humane way.”
“Execution by a firing squad … causes a faster and less painful death than lethal injection,” prosecutors said in court Friday.
Nevada once allowed shooting groups, but state law now requires the use of lethal injection in death sentences.
Three U.S. states – Mississippi, Oklahoma and Utah – and the U.S. military are allowing the death penalty with gunfire. The last time this method was used in the United States was in Utah in 2010.
Floyd’s attorneys are asking a federal judge in Las Vegas to prevent Floyd from being killed until prison officials “devise a new procedure or procedures to carry out a legal execution.”
Levenson said he and attorney David Anthony are fighting several cases in state and federal courts, with the possibility that Floyd’s death could be determined for the week of June 7. Prosecutors will seek an execution order at a trial next month.
The 45-year-old was convicted in 2000 of killing four people with a shotgun in a Las Vegas supermarket in 1999 and seriously injuring a fifth person.
Floyd appears to have exhausted his federal appeals last year, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear his case. Floyd wants a chance to seek mercy at a June 22 meeting of the Nevada State Pardons Board, Levenson said.
Floyd’s lawyers argue that a combination of three drugs the state wants to use – the sedative diazepam, the powerful synthetic painkiller fentanyl and a paralyzed, cisatracurium – amounts to cruel and unusual punishment in violation of its constitutional rights.
Anthony made similar arguments on behalf of Scott Raymond Dozier before stopping Nevada’s last scheduled execution in 2017 and 2018. Dozier killed himself in prison in January 2019.
A judge blocked the first appointment after ruling that the paralyzing agent could cause painful suffocation while Dozier was aware of it but was unable to move.
Pharmaceutical companies that manufactured the three medicines stopped the second appointment with arguments not to use their products in a performance.
Floyd would be the first person to be executed in Nevada since 2006, when Daryl Mack asked to be killed for his conviction in a 1988 rape and murder in Reno.
Nevada has 72 men being executed, a State Department spokesman said.