A condemned US inmate's execution was cancelled after prison officials in California could not find a doctor or nurse willing to administer the lethal injection.

Prison officials notified a federal appeals court that they could not comply with a judge's order to have a licensed medical expert give Michael Morales a fatal overdose of barbiturates.

Morales, 46, will come off death row in San Quentin Prison across the bay from San Francisco. The warrant ordering Morales be put to death expires the end of Tuesday.

A hearing will be held in several months to review the lethal injection process and address concerns it might cause unconstitutional pain to prisoners put to death that way.

"We are really relieved to see we will now have a careful review of the issues," ACLU attorney Natasha Minsker said while confirming the Morales execution has been cancelled.

A ruling by US District Judge Jeremy Fogel specified that a licensed medical expert had to inject the fatal dose of sedatives into Morales if the death penalty was to be meted out as planned on Tuesday night.

The planned early-morning execution of Morales had been postponed after doctors required for the lethal-injection procedure refused to take part based on moral concerns.

Lawyers for Morales petitioned Fogel to stop the execution on the grounds prison officials were hastily improvising an execution that could be unconstitutionally painful for Morales.

Fogel denied the request on Tuesday afternoon.

"Despite the many twists and turns that have brought it to this point, including the disconnect between the expectations articulated in the orders of this court and the court of appeals and the anesthesiologists retained by (the prison), the court nonetheless recognizes and respects the importance to the state of proceeding with the execution," Fogel wrote in his ruling.

The judge specified that the fatal dose had to be administered in a way that left "no reasonable doubt" that it was relatively painless.

The situation rekindled debate about the death penalty and made San Quentin Prison's death chamber an arena for a moral clash between the medical creed of protecting life and voter-backed capital punishment.

"What is being asked of us now is ethically unacceptable," the original anesthesiologists said in a written statement delivered to the press by officials at San Quentin, across the bay from San Francisco.

The warrant authorizing Morales to be put to death as punishment for rape and murder expires at the end of Tuesday, and would have to be re-issued by the original California trial judge.

That judge has gone on record urging that Morales be spared death because of what appeared to be dubious testimony against Morales by a jailhouse informant.

Morales, 46, was convicted of the 1981 rape and murder of 17-year-old Terri Winchell in the city of Lodi, in northern California.

Morales is to be the first death row inmate in the state of California executed under the new procedure.

California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger refused two requests to use his power to change Morales' sentence to life in prison with no chance of parole. US courts turned down all the inmate's appeals.

Morales strangled Winchell with a belt, pounded her head with a hammer, dragged her into a vineyard and raped her, Schwarzenegger recounted while explaining his decision to refuse clemency.

Morales then stabbed Winchell in the chest before leaving her to die, according to the case against him.

Morales would have been the third condemned California prisoner executed in as many months and the 14th to be put to death since capital punishment was reinstated in 1978.

Copyright © 2006 AFP

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