The Justice Ministry has refused to disclose how it makes decisions to go ahead with executions.
A review of Mr. Bush's daily schedules, correspondence and other documents, obtained after requests made under public-information laws in Texas, underscores that he has devoted himself remarkably little to policy details -- including whether to go ahead with executions -- and instead spent most of his time wooing legislators, the public and the news media.
Going ahead with executions is "important shock therapy" in the struggle against the drug scourge in his country, he says.
Mr. Perry, a Republican, stood firm, saying the Supreme Court ruling in March had freed Texas to go ahead with the executions, starting with that of Mr. Medellín, one of six young men that a jury found had raped and strangled Elizabeth Peña, 16, and Jennifer Ertman, 15, in a park one night.
Ms Jahed's sentence had also been the focus of international concern, and the decision to go ahead with the execution appeared to show that the regime was taking a hard line stance towards foreign pressures on human rights issues.
But the two who accepted the job ducked out, saying that the possibility of having to intervene were Mr Morales to wake up or be in pain "would clearly be medically unethical".Hence Judge Fogel's second ruling: the state could go ahead with the execution, with a licensed medical professional administering a single, lethally large dose of the sedative.
In postponing the execution, Mr. Clinton recognized that it would be unconscionable for the United States, whose continued embrace of the death penalty is out of step with the rest of the civilized world, to go ahead with an execution amid the swirling uncertainty about the system's fairness.
In what could turn out to be a groundbreaking ruling, the panel said that Arizona could not go ahead with the execution unless it revealed details about the combination of two medical drugs with which it intended to kill Wood on the grounds that the prisoner had a first amendment right to access to government proceedings.
In court on Thursday, a lawyer for the Virginia attorney general's office said there was no evidence anything was wrong with the drugs and argued it was in the public interest, as well as the interest of the families of Prieto's victims, to go ahead with the execution at 9pm on Thursday.
Governor Mary Fallin's General Counsel pushed to go ahead with the execution after the doctor and pharmacist both said potassium acetate and potassium chloride were medically interchangeable.
