Richard Cooey was executed in Ohio

USA: SUPREME COURT ALLOWS DAVIS EXECUTION IN GEORGIA. OHIO EXECUTES RICHARD COOEY

October 14, 2008: the U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for Troy Davis to be put to death for killing a police officer, despite calls from his supporters to reconsider the case.
The court, without explanation, refused to hear his appeal even though seven of nine key prosecution witnesses have recanted their testimony since the 1991 trial.
The court granted Troy Davis a reprieve Sept. 23, less than two hours before his scheduled execution. But the justices declined to give his appeal a full-blown hearing, clearing the last hurdle toward his death by lethal injection.
Davis should find out soon when he will be put to death. It is the third time he’s faced the prospect of execution in little more than a year.
In July 2007, the state Board of Pardons and Paroles had halted Davis’ execution less than 24 hours before it was to be carried out. Last month, after meeting again, the parole board denied Davis’ request for clemency.
The next step is for a Chatham County judge to set a time frame during which Davis’ execution can be scheduled by the Department of Corrections.
Davis, 39, was sentenced to death, in Georgia, for the 1989 murder of 27-year-old Savannah police officer Mark MacPhail. But doubts about his guilt and a high-profile publicity campaign have won him the support of prominent advocates including former President Jimmy Carter and South Africa Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Yesterday, an Ohio death row inmate was executed after the Supreme Court rejected his last-minute plea that he was too overweight to be put to death.
Richard Cooey, a 5-foot-7, 267-pound double murderer, argued his obesity made death by lethal injection inhumane. Cooey's attorneys have argued in numerous legal challenges that his weight problem would make it difficult for prison staff to find suitable veins to deliver the deadly chemicals, a problem that delayed previous executions in the state.
Cooey, 41, lost a final appeal earlier Tuesday when the U.S. Supreme Court turned down without comment his complaint that the state's protocol for lethal injection could cause an agonizing and painful death. Cooey wanted the state to use a single drug rather than a three-drug combination, and asked for a stay of execution pending a hearing on that motion.
The court on Monday denied a separate appeal based on Cooey's claim that his obesity was a bar to humane lethal injection. 
Cooey, was convicted for killing two University of Akron students in 1986.
Cooey was the first inmate executed in Ohio in more than a year, and the state's first since the end of the unofficial moratorium on executions that began last year while the U.S. Supreme Court reviewed Kentucky's lethal injection procedure. (Sources: Ap, Cnn, 15/10/2008)