On February 27, 2006, Willie Brown, a death-sentenced inmate of the Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina filed a lawsuit under 42 U.S.C. §1983 against the North Carolina Department of Correction in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina. Brown alleged that his constitutional rights were threatened by the defendants' lethal injection protocol, which he claimed would leave him improperly anesthetized and therefore able to feel the excrutiatingly painful burning sensation caused by the potassium chloride that would be injected into his veins. He also claimed that the protocol's use of pancuronium bromide would leave him paralyzed, which would cause him to suffocate to death while conscious and leave him unable to alert the executioners that the anesthesia had been insufficient. For these reasons, he asked the court to enjoin the defendants from utilizing their current lethal injection protocol during his execution.

On April 7, 2006, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of North Carolina (Judge Malcom J. Howard) denied the plaintiff's motion for a preliminary injunction and ruled that the plaintiff's execution should proceed as scheduled on April 21, 2006, but the Court conditioned this on the defendants' compliance with the Court's order that medically trained personnel must be present at the execution in order to ensure that Brown would be in all respects unconscious prior to and at the time of the administration of any pancuronium bromide or potassium chloride. The court further ordered that if Brown were to exhibit any effects of consciousness at any time during the execution, the medical personnel were to immediately provide appropriate medical care so as to ensure that he was immediately returned to an unconscious state. Brown v. Beck, No. 06-3018, 2006 WL 3914717 (E.D.N.C. Apr. 7, 2006)

The plaintiff appealed this ruling, and on April 20, 2006, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit (Judges Michael J. Luttig and William Byrd Traxler, Jr.) affirmed the District Court's order without opinion and denied the plaintiff's motion for preliminary injunction. Brown v. Beck, 445 F.3d 752 (4th Cir. 2006).

Willie Brown was executed on April 21, 2006 by lethal injection. On May 16, 2006, the District Court (Judge Howard) dismissed the lawsuit as moot.

Kristen Sagar - 09/10/2007


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