Fla. Lawmakers Consider OK of Lethal Injection

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. —  With Florida’s electric chair under legal attack, state lawmakers convened in special session Wednesday to consider legislation giving condemned inmates the option of lethal injection.

Executions in Florida came to a halt when the U.S. Supreme Court agreed in November to review whether the state’s electric chair amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. Switching to injections would allow Republican Gov. Jeb Bush to resume signing death warrants.

Lethal injection was expected to have wide support in the GOP-controlled Legislature. However, the governor has said he wouldn’t consider a new method of execution without an accompanying effort to speed up death appeals so that inmates can be executed within five years of sentencing. The Legislature is expected to take up that issue too during the three-day special session.

Of 38 states with capital punishment, only four require death by electrocution.

The Supreme Court agreed to the review after flames erupted from the headpiece of one inmate and another condemned man suffered a nosebleed in the electric chair.