Inmate Found Hanged in Cell After Execution Called Off

A twice-convicted murderer who had repeatedly said he wanted to die by lethal injection was found dead in his death-row prison cell in Nevada from an apparent hanging, officials said Saturday. Scott Raymond Dozier, 48, was found unresponsive in his solo cell at the state's maximum-security prison in Ely, Department of Corrections spokeswoman Brooke Santina tells the AP. Dozier's lawyer, Thomas Ericsson, declined to comment immediately. Dozier had said repeatedly he wanted to die rather than live the rest of his life in prison. Nevada officials said he tried to kill himself several times after two scheduled lethal injections were postponed.

Dozier gave up appeals for the death sentence he received in 2007 for separate killings of methamphetamine drug trade associates in 2002 in Phoenix and Las Vegas. "I've been very clear about my desire to be executed ... even if suffering is inevitable," Dozier said in a handwritten note to a state court judge who postponed his execution in November 2017 over concerns the untried drug regimen could leave him suffocating, conscious, and unable to move. But his bid to become the first Nevada inmate put to death since 2006 was called off twice amid court fights over a three-drug combination that had never been used in the US: the sedative midazolam, the powerful opioid fentanyl, and a muscle-paralyzing agent called cisatracurium. (Fentanyl is now the deadliest drug in the US.)

(More Nevada stories.)