The Arizona Supreme Court on Tuesday approved death warrants for two death-row prisoners, clearing the way for their executions.
Eric King, 47, is scheduled for execution March 29 for a 1989 crime spree in which he and an accomplice robbed a Phoenix convenience store.
King shot and killed the clerk, Ron Barman, and a security guard, Richard Butts, with Butts' pistol before making off with about $72.
Daniel Wayne Cook, 49, who received two death sentences, will be executed April 5.
He was convicted of murdering two men in Lake Havasu City in 1987.
After stealing money from Carlos Froyan Cruz Ramos, a restaurant co-worker and roommate, Cook and a third roommate tied Cruz Ramos to a chair, beat him, burned him with cigarettes and sodomized him for hours before crushing his throat with a pipe. When another restaurant employee, Kevin Swaney, came to the apartment, Cook sodomized and strangled him as well.
Cook's execution has already been postponed several times as state courts considered whether his post-traumatic stress disorder warranted a new trial and whether the state of Arizona had properly obtained the drugs that will be used in his execution.
Both men are party to a federal lawsuit that challenges the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to confiscate stores of the drug sodium thiopental, one of three needed for execution by lethal injection.
The thiopental was obtained from Great Britain.
Drugs from the same source were used in the state's execution of Jeffrey Landrigan in October.
Read more: http://www.azcentral.com/community/pinal/articles/2011/02/08/20110208arizona-execution-daniel-cook-supreme-court.html#ixzz1E4uozmV2