1. The planned execution of convicted murder Kelly Gissendaner was postponed Monday night, for the second time, out of an "abudance of caution" regarding the execution's drugs. A Department of Corrections spokeswoman said the phenobarbital, made by a compounding pharmacy, "appeared cloudy" and the execution was called off. Officials said the drugs had earlier in the day been tested satisfactorily. Gissendaner was originally scheduled to be executed by lethal injection on Feb. 25, but an impending winter storm postponed it.
2. Georgia executes condemned inmates with a 5,000-milligram dose of pentobarbital, which state officials have said is 25 to 40 times greater than what's considered a lethal amount. The state has recently contracted a compounding pharmacy to supply the drug, though it was not immediately if that was the case with Monday's execution attempt.
3. Since 2011, the 32 states who use the death penalty have had to to revise their lethal injection cocktails, as what was formerly the key ingredient -- sodium thiopental, an aneshetic -- became unavailable through U.S. and European manufacutrers.
4. The state's lethal injeciton process has been previously challenged by death row inmate Warren Hill, whose lawyers targeted a law that kept secret the identities of Georgia's drug suppliers.
5. Legal challenges have multiplied nationwide charging that such new cocktails are unconstitutionally painful; and that secrecy laws such as Georgia's deny inmates due process. However, as one state Supreme Court justice countered: If the state is getting its supply of pentobarbital from a licensed compounding pharmacy, how can Hill show there is a risk? Hill was executed on Jan. 27.
6. Gissendaner's postponed execution is not the first time lethal injection has faced scrutiny in the last year. An Oklahoma execution in April 2014 went "disastrously wrong" after inmate Clayton Lockett was injected with a secret cocktail that witnesses said caused him to seize instead of rendering him unconscious. Lockett eventually died of a heart attack, 43 minutes after being injected. The second man scheduled to be executed in Oklahoma that night was granted a stay.
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