By Alabama Public Radio
Tuscaloosa AL – U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson has refused to stop the May 3 execution of Aaron Lee Jones, calling the legal challenge "dilatory." Jones was trying to block his execution by challenging the constitutionality of Alabama's use of lethal injection, saying it poses an unjustifiable risk of extreme pain. Judge Thompson ruled Jones didn't file suit until four years after Alabama switched from the electric chair to lethal injection. "Jones could have filed suit and discovered the alleged risks involved with lethal injection as a method of execution well before now," Thompson wrote.
Thompson wrote that Jones' suit came nearly 28 years after he was first convicted. No word yet on whether the decision would be appealed. Jones along with Arthur Lee Giles are on death row for the 1978 shooting and stabbing of three children, their parents, and their grandmother in Blount County. The parents, Willene and Carl Nelson, died. Jones was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death first in 1979 and then in a retrial in 1982. Jones, 54, and Giles, 47, are among the longest-serving inmates on Alabama's death row at Holman Prison. Only two out of the 199 inmates on death row have been there longer, according to Department of Corrections records.
For a list of Alabama's death row inmaes ... http://www.doc.alabama.gov/deathrow.asp