State spends 2 hours trying to execute man after 18 failed IV attempts, even striking bone with the needle. Court rules they can try again, but COVID got there first

Romell Broom passed away on December 28, 2020, while on Ohio’s death row. He died from what officials believe was COVID-19. He was 64 years old and had been waiting for his execution for over 30 years. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said his death was likely related to the virus, but they were still waiting for the final death certificate to confirm it.

Back in 1985, Broom was found guilty of kidnapping, raping, and killing a 14-year-old girl named Tryna Middleton in East Cleveland, as per Death Penalty Info. The crime happened on September 21, 1984, he grabbed her and forced her into his car while holding a knife. Her body was found just hours later. Police caught Broom three months after that when he tried to kidnap an 11-year-old girl named Melinda Grissom. Her mother stopped him, and people nearby wrote down his car’s license plate number.

Ohio tried to execute Broom on September 15, 2009. The prison team worked for more than two hours trying to put an IV needle into his body. Court papers say the team kept pulling the needles out and putting them back in at different angles to try to find a good vein. One time, they missed the vein completely and hit his bone. When they finally got a needle into a vein, it stopped working when they tried to push saline through it. Broom started crying. The governor finally stopped the execution and gave him one more week to live.

The court’s decision was pretty controversial

Broom said the state should not be allowed to try executing him a second time. He argued it would be cruel and also against the law that says you cannot punish someone twice for the same crime. In March 2016, Ohio’s top court said 4-3 that the state could go ahead and try again. 

One of the judges, Judith Lanzinger, said putting in the IV was just a step before the real execution starts. She said the actual execution only begins when the deadly drug goes into the IV line. Because that never happened, the court said it was okay to try again.

Not all the judges agreed with this decision. Judge William O’Neill said in his opinion, “Any fair reading of the record of the first execution attempt shows that Broom was actually tortured the first time. Now we embark on the task of doing it again.” Another judge, Judith French, said the decision was wrong. She wrote, “If the state cannot explain why the Broom execution went wrong, then the state cannot guarantee that the outcome will be different next time.”

Broom tried to take his case to the U.S. Supreme Court, but they refused to hear it in December 2016. Ohio set a new date to execute him on June 17, 2020. But in April 2020, Governor Mike DeWine pushed the date back because the state could not get the drugs they needed for the execution. They moved it to March 16, 2022. Broom died from COVID-19 before that date came. This reminds me of another case where a man who caught a child falling from a building faced a lawsuit from the mother. 

His lawyers, Timothy Sweeney and Adele Shank, said Broom lived the rest of his life “with the ever-increasing fear and distress that the same process would be used on him at his next execution date.” They said, “Let his passing in this way, and not in the execution chamber, be the final word on whether a second attempt should ever have been considered.” 

More than 124 prisoners in Ohio died from the virus during the pandemic. The case got attention alongside other controversial stories involving officials, including a Seattle police officer who killed a student after hitting her at high speed.