30 January 2017 :

House Judiciary B Committee on Thursday approved HB 638 to explicitly legalize the drugs Mississippi currently plans to use to execute death row inmates. The bill also calls for other methods of execution — including the gas chamber, the firing squad and the electric chair — as backups, given court challenges of those drugs. House Bill 638 moves to the House for more debate. The state has faced repeated court challenges and lawsuits in which death row inmates claim they will experience pain during their executions and that the state cannot effectively sedate them beforehand. No executions have been carried out in the state since 2012.