New execution method unlikely to gain traction in California

An Ohio murderer put to death with the nation's first single-drug lethal injection died swiftly Tuesday, inaugurating an execution method some analysts consider more humane than the three-drug procedure used in California and 33 other states.

But the method used in Ohio is unlikely to gain traction in California, experts say, because of procedural hurdles and persistent concerns about how the drugs -- whatever their number -- are administered to the condemned.

Kenneth Biros, 51, who killed and dismembered a woman in 1991, died nine minutes after being injected with a massive dose of sodium thiopental, a powerful barbiturate that puts its subjects into a sleep so deep they stop breathing. Ohio prisons director Terry Collins described the execution as problem-free.