MISSOURI EXECUTION NOT BOTCHED

A single dose of pentobarbital snuffed out the life of Michael Worthigton, the rapist-killer of a 24-year-old college student

In 1995, Michael Worthington broke into the Lake St. Louis condo of Melinda 'Mindy' Griffin, 24, where he raped and strangled the college student to death. He was convicted of her murder in 1998 and sentenced to death, but endless appeals kept him from being executed for 16 years. On Tuesday his luck finally ran out.

His attorneys had filed a last minute appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court citing botched executions in Arizona, Oklahoma and Ohio and seeking information about the drug and the source of the lethal injection to be used by Missouri. That appeal was turned down and the execution went on as scheduled.

Last month, Joseph Wood died in an Arizona execution that lasted two hours and involved 15 injections each of midazolam and hydromorphone. In April, an Oklahoma execution lasted 43 minutes before the murderer died of an apparent heart attack. And in January, an execution in Ohio lasted for 26 minutes. Oklahoma and Ohio also used midazolam in their executions.

The execution of Worthington, 43, went off without a hitch. He was pronounced dead a few minutes after the injection of pentobarbital began. Missouri, like Texas and Georgia, had switched to administering only a single dose of pentobarbital in its executions, instead of using a cocktail of two or three different drugs.

You can bet the death penalty abolitionists were praying to God for a botched execution in which Worthington would suffer an agonizing death. This is one execution they can't point to in their fight against the death penalty. Boohoo, it really breaks me up to see them disappointed.

This was the seventh execution carried out by Missouri this year. At that rate the Show Me State could surpass the Lone Star State in the number of executions this year. That is bound to hurt the pride of us Texans.