Death row inmate: No worries about painful execution

LAS VEGAS - A Nevada death row inmate told a judge Thursday that he’s not really concerned about pain and suffering, he just wants his execution carried out.

With federal public defenders and his attorney calling for prison officials to make public their plan for his lethal injection, Scott Raymond Dozier, 46, declared again before Clark County District Court Judge Jennifer Togliatti that his mind is made up.

“If they tell me, ‘Listen, there’s a good chance it’s going to be a real miserable experience for those two hours before you actually expire,’ I’m still going to do it,” Dozier said. “I’m not going to waver on this.”

Dozier, who was convicted of murder in both Nevada and Arizona, would become the first person put to death in Nevada in 11 years.

The judge reset Dozier’s execution from mid-October to an unspecified day the week of Nov. 13 at Nevada State Prison in Ely, and said she’ll set a schedule next week to hear arguments about whether Nevada officials have to tell what drugs will be used, how and where they’ll be obtained, and how they’ll be administered.

In documents filed Tuesday, federal public defenders and Dozier attorney Thomas Ericsson cited recent “botched” executions that used a lethal three-drug combination in Arizona, Florida, Ohio and Oklahoma.

They posed what they called 22 unanswered questions about the Nevada process, including dosages, their use in previous executions and the qualifications of execution team members.

The defense attorneys suggested that a prisons plan to use a two-drug intravenous combination of the sedative midazolam and the opioid pain medication hydromorphone won’t work properly.

They said Dozier might be left “alive and suffocating” with ineffective anesthesia under an “obsolete execution protocol” that administrators would be powerless to stop.

They also suggested the state might violate state and federal laws to obtain the drugs “outside … lawful channels.”

“We just want to have transparency so the court knows that the order it’s going to be signing is enforceable and that it can be done in a lawful manner,” Assistant Federal Public Defender David Anthony told Togliatti, who has signed Dozier’s death warrants.

“When it’s done in secrecy, it has ended in disaster,” Anthony said outside court. “That’s the concern.”

For his part, Dozier told the judge he didn’t want his execution delayed longer than necessary.

“Just to be abundantly clear, I feel that theoretically, if the state is killing someone, that those things probably should be available to the public,” he said of the information sought by his lawyers.