Florida prison officials have killed a condemned prisoner for the ninth time this year, setting a new state record, with two more executions scheduled for later this month. On Thursday evening, Edward Zakrzewski was strapped to a gurney, covered with a white sheet and injected with a lethal three-drug cocktail. His killing came a day after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his final appeal for a stay of execution.
Meanwhile, Tennessee’s state Supreme Court has ruled that a death row prisoner can be put to death without deactivating an implanted device that regulates his heartbeat. Sixty-eight-year-old Robert Black suffers from chronic heart failure and dementia. His lawyers argued that the implanted device, which acts as both a pacemaker and a defibrillator, could deliver painful shocks to Black’s heart to try to revive him during his execution. He’s scheduled to die by lethal injection on August 5.
