A circuit court in Miami has denied a condemned prisoner’s motion to vacate the death penalty in his case, finding that the prisoner, Manuel Valle, failed to show that a new drug used in the state’s lethal injection procedure would violate the ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Judge Jacqueline Hogan Scola found that the usage of the drug, pentobarbital, “does not create an objectively reasonable risk of suffering.”
Valle, 61, had been scheduled to die by lethal injection on Aug. 2 for the 1978 murder of Coral Gables police officer Luis Pena. He had asked the courts to block his execution, questioning among other things, the effectiveness of pentoarbital as an anesthetic to induce unconsciousness in humans.
