Kenneth Biros stay of execution granted by US District Ct Judge Gregory Frost

US District Court Judge Gregory Frost today granted Ohio death row inmate Kenneth Biros' request for a stay of his January 23 execution date.

How does this comport with the US 6th Circuit Ct of Appeals lifting of a stay of execution for Jeffrey Lundgren, the 6th's upholding of a stay of execution for Jerome Henderson - and the district court's subsequent denial of a stay for John Spirko despite the discrepency?  Judge Frost's latest attempt to decipher the actions of the US 6th Circuit Ct of Appeals in litigation surrounding questions over Ohio's lethal injection protocol, in order to issue a coherent ruling in an emergency situation, is in today's ruling here (11-page pdf).

Excerpt from today's ruling:

...Faced with two different orders by two different panels reaching two different conclusions, this Court is left with the task of determining what the law of this case is.  Because neither order provides any reasoning for its outcome, this Court can only conclude that the law of the case is that this Court should evaluate individually and on a case-by-case basis each motion for a preliminary injunction that comes before it.  In other words, there is apparently no substantive law of the case as to all intervening plaintiffs here because there is no apparent consistency to the appellate decisions that have arisen from this litigation.

...given the evidence that Jeffrey Hil first produced and that is now part of the record, as well as additional, more recent anecdotal evidence that Biros has produced regarding the suspension of executions in Florida and a finding by the Northern District of California that California's three-drug protocol violates the Eighth Amendment, the Court concludes that Biros at the very least has demonstrated a stronger liklihood of success on the merits than some of the plaintiffs who preceded him.  This supports an injunction.

     The limited record before this Court now includes a growing body of evidence calling Ohio's lethal injection protocol increasingly into question. ...

More information on Kenneth Biros - whose January 23 execution date should still be considered serious despite today's ruling - is here.

Earlier post on Judge Frost's Dec. 6 denial of a stay of execution for John Spirko (scheduled for April 17) is here.

Earlier post on the Jerome Henderson stay of execution upheld w/o explanation by the US 6th Circuit Ct on Dec. 4 is here.

Earlier posts on stay of execution lifted w/o explanation by the US 6th Circuit on the eve of the Oct. 24 Jeffrey Lundgren execution here, here, and here.