Ohio executed a convicted child murderer Wednesday, ending a three-year pause on its death penalty and a lawsuit over a controversial execution drug.
Ronald Phillips, previously convicted of the 1993 rape and murder of 3-year-old Sheila Marie Evans, was put to death at 10:43 a.m. Wednesday morning, ABC reports. He apologized to the family of his victim a few minutes before the execution.
"Sheila Marie didn't deserve what I did to her," he said. "I'm sorry you had to live so long with my actions."
Phillips's execution ends a 3.5 year period without the use of the death penalty in Ohio. Ohio Gov. John Kasich (R.) had previously announced he would skip the opening day of the Ohio State Fair to monitor the execution.
Ohio's death penalty pause began when it found itself unable to source pentobarbitol, a sedative which it previously used as part of its three-drug cocktail for lethal injection. Pentobarbitol is meant to put the person to be executed into a coma, meaning that he or she will not feel pain.
Ohio executed convicted killer Dennis McGuire in 2014 by substituting pentobarbitol with midazolam, a controversial drug which has been associated with a number of botched executions. McGuire took 25 minutes to die, far longer than expected, a sign that many took as indicative of another midazolam failure.
After McGuire's death, Phillips joined fellow death row inmates Gary Otte and Raymond Tibbetts in seeking to block their executions on the grounds that the use of midazolam violated the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment." Phillips also sought separately to appeal his death penalty sentence on the ground that he was just 19 at the time of the crime.
The three convicts had chased their case all the way to the Supreme Court. But on Tuesday evening, the court denied both of Phillips's requests for stay, as well as his and his co-plaintiff's attempts to appeal a lower court ruling upholding their death sentences.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the denial of appeal, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. She argued that the lower court failed to heed the standards for lethal injection passing Eighth Amendment muster under Glossip v. Gross, the 2015 Supreme Court case which upheld the standard that lethal injection is unconstitutional when there is "substantial risk of severe pain" and "an alternative method of execution [is] is sufficient available."
"I dissent again from this Court’s failure to step in when significant issues of life and death are present," Sotomayor wrote.
Otte's execution is currently scheduled for September 13, and Tibbetts's for October 18. Ohio has 27 executions scheduled through 2020.