By AP/KWMU
St. Louis, MO – Missouri's Department of Corrections is defending its handling of an inmate executed early Wednesday.
Vernon Brown spent three hours strapped to a gurney in Missouri's death chamber as the U.S. Supreme Court weighed his eleventh-hour appeals. The Supreme Court eventually lifted its stay, and Brown was executed about 2:30 a.m.
Death penalty opponents decried the fact that Brown spent three hours strapped down, calling that inhumane and further proof that capital punishment is unnecessarily cruel.
But a spokesman for the prison system says Brown never complained of discomfort while strapped down, and he actually slept part of the time after taking a sedative he earlier had declined.
Brown was executed for the 1986 killing of nine-year-old Janet Perkins in St. Louis.