How death row inmate finally died after surviving 18 lethal injection attempts

A man on death row died of an unrelated condition after multiple attempts to execute him failed.

Romell Broom was convicted of multiple crimes including murder, rape, and kidnapping, and was sentenced to death in Ohio in 1985.

He would then spend the next 24 years in prison as the appeals process was exhausted, before his execution was eventually scheduled for September 15, 2009.

This would be carried out by lethal injection, a commonly used method of execution in the state.

However, executioners tried for two hours to locate a vein through which they could administer the poison, but failed to locate one.

Executioners tried to insert the IV lines into 18 different locations on Broom's arms and legs, with one attempt even striking bone inside his body.

The attempt was made using lethal injection, but failed (Paul Harris/Getty Images)

Eventually, staff were forced to abort the execution, which would be postponed until a future date.

Following the botched attempt, Broom appealed the death sentence that had been passed on him under the law of double jeopardy in Ohio.

This is a prohibition on endangering someone's life on two occasions, so if someone's life was placed in danger then they couldn't then have another attempt at execution, and it went all the way to Ohio's Supreme Court.

On March 16 2016, seven years after the fumbled execution, the court voted 4-3 to reject his appeal and authorize a second execution attempt.

Justice Judith Lanzinger argued in a statement from the majority votes that the attempt didn't count as a failed execution as inserting the IV was only a 'preliminary step', and the execution would have started 'when the lethal drug enters the IV line'.

His appeal went all the way to Ohio's Supreme Court, where it was ultimately rejected (Getty Stock)

They argued that 'because the attempt did not pro­ceed to the point of injec­tion of a lethal drug into the IV line, jeop­ardy never attached', meaning that the law of double-jeopardy did not come into play in this instance.

So, a second execution date was set for June 17 2020, 35 years after Broom was first sentenced.

Then on April 14 that year, Governor Mike DeWine put out a reprieve for Broom due to execution drugs being unavailable, and it was then again postponed to March 16 2022, a whopping 37 years after his sentence.

But this third execution attempt would never be carried out as Broom would go on to die before the scheduled date.

He died at Franklin Medical Center in Columbus, Ohio, on December 28 2020.

In the end the cause of his death after multiple botched and postponed execution attempts was Covid-19, as the pandemic was sweeping across the world at that time, including in Ohio.