U.S. News and World Report quotes Professor Robert Weisberg on how challenges to execution methods could delay executions in California. 

As states deal with a nationwide shortage of execution drugs, California proposed Friday to allow corrections officials to choose one of four types of powerful barbiturates to execute prisoners on death row, depending on which one is available.

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The single drug would replace the series of three drugs that were last used when Clarence Ray Allen was executed in 2006, strapped to a gurney in the old gas chamber of San Quentin State Prison.

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However, law professor Robert Weisberg, co-director of the Stanford Criminal Justice Center, expects many more years of complex legal challenges before anyone is executed in California.

“The lawyers who are going to litigate these things are going to demand Nobel Prize detail on the differences between these drugs, and if there’s any difference, why are we letting a warden make the decision,” he said.