Though Kentucky's attorney general has called for a restart to executions, Franklin County Circuit Judge Phillip Shepherd, whose order first blocked the state’s lethal injections in 2010, wrote in a ruling Wednesday that he would hold off on deciding on the ban, the Associated Press reports.
Shepherd noted that the governor had commuted the death sentence of the case's original plaintiff and that there may be constitutional questions about the new regulations that have to be settled. Kentucky prison officials have carried out three executions since 1976, and none since 2008. There are about two dozen inmates on the state’s death row. Kentucky Attorney General Russell Coleman, who took office in January, has argued that executions should resume, for victims’ families, who “deserve the justice that was lawfully delivered by a jury.”