MoreyUnit | Arizona Inmate Execution Date Sought

The Arizona Attorney General's Office has asked the state Supreme Court to set an execution date for a third death-row inmate who has exhausted his appeals.

Daniel Wayne Cook was sentenced to death for killing two men in Lake Havasu City in 1987. The court will consider the request in October or November. If a death warrant is issued, Cook, 49, will be put to death 35 days later.

On Sept. 21, the court issued a death warrant for Jeffrey Landrigan, 50, who killed a Phoenix man in 1989, but declined to issue a warrant for Richard Bible, who murdered a 9-year-old girl in Flagstaff in 1988.

Landrigan is set to be executed by lethal injection on Oct. 26. But because one of the three drugs used in Arizona's lethal-injection procedure, which is codified by state and federal court decisions, is in short supply, the Arizona Department of Corrections must inform the court by Friday whether it can obtain enough to carry out the execution.

Executions in Kentucky and Oklahoma have been postponed because of the shortage of thiopental, a barbiturate.

A spokesman for the Department of Corrections declined comment.

But Assistant Arizona Attorney General Kent Cattani told The Republic that he believed the Corrections Department had located a source for the drug. And he believes that the state will obtain enough to carry out as many as four executions by the end of the year.

Cattani also said that if the drug was not available, the state would try to change the lethal-injection protocol to use a drug other than thiopental.

That approach failed in Oklahoma. And the federal court order approving Arizona's execution protocol states that any change could be challenged.

"We will take a close look at any changes," said Dale Baich of the Federal Public Defender's Office.