A state House committee on Thursday approved legislation to explicitly legalize the drugs Mississippi currently plans to use to execute death row inmates. The bill also calls for other methods of execution — including the gas chamber, the firing squad and the electric chair — as backups, given court challenges of those drugs. Passed by the House Judiciary B Committee, House Bill 638 moves to the House for more debate. In part because of this litigation and because the state hasn't been able to acquire the execution drugs it once used, no executions have been carried out since 2012. Mississippi now plans to replace pentobarbital with a sedative, midazolam, but lawyers say it doesn't reliably render a person unconscious.

Source: ABC News January 26, 2017 16:54 UTC