Lawyers fight to halt Ohio execution condemned as human experimentation

Lawyers acting for a prisoner on death row in Ohio were scrambling to delay his scheduled execution tomorrow morning using a new method of lethal injection that is widely used to put down pets. The procedure has never been tried out on humans and is tantamount, critics say, to human experimentation. Barring last-minute appeals and stays of execution, Kenneth Biros, 51, will be put to death using a massive overdose of an anesthetic. It would be the first time that a single-drug lethal injection had been administered, in contrast to the triple-drug cocktail that has become the norm in the 37 American states that have death row prisoners. Opponents of the death penalty and lawyers involved in the Biros case have decried the move towards the single-drug method as over-hasty.