Ohio ran out of pentobarbital in September, according to JoEllen Smith, spokeswoman for the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. More than a decade later, DNA evidence confirmed McGuire's guilt, and he acknowledged that he was responsible in a letter to Gov. John Kasich granted the convicted killer a stay of execution pending a review of possible organ donation to his family members. Death penalty states scramble for lethal injection drugs 
 
 The combination has never before been used in a U.S. execution. McGuire, 53, who was convicted of raping and stabbing to death a pregnant woman in 1989, was moved to Ohio's death house at 10 a.m. on Wednesday and was scheduled to meet with family and friends. In November, Kasich, a Republican, granted a death row inmate an eight-month reprieve to let the prison system study his request to donate a kidney to his sister and his heart to his mother. John Kasich turned down two requests from Dennis McGuire because the inmate could not identify a family member that would benefit from his organs, according to documents originally obtained by the Associated Press. In response to that shortage, the department amended its execution policy to allow for the use of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller, she said. McGuire's lawyers had argued the execution should be scrapped because it could cause a painful and terrifying phenomenon called "air hunger" before death, but a federal judge ruled against them earlier this week.
– Dennis McGuire was put to death today with a two-drug combination previously untested in the US, and at more than 15 minutes, it was one of the longest executions in Ohio since the state resumed capital punishment in 1999. McGuire, whose lawyers had attempted to delay his execution by arguing that he would likely feel "terror" following the lethal injection, appeared to gasp a few times as he died, making several loud snorting or snoring sounds, the AP reports. Before his execution, he told his sobbing adult children, "I'm going to heaven, I'll see you there when you come." McGuire had sought a reprieve by offering to become an organ donor, but was rejected because he couldn't identify a family member who would receive his organs, according to documents obtained by the AP. McGuire, who raped and murdered a pregnant woman in 1989, was executed with the untested combination of the sedative midozolam and the painkiller hydropmorphone because of a shortage of the execution drug pentobarbital, NBC reports. His lawyers had contended "that he will suffocate to death in agony and terror. The state disagrees," the director of UC Berkeley's Death Penalty Clinic told CNN before the execution. (One Wyoming state senator, concerned about the shortage of execution drugs, is trying to bring back firing squads as an alternative.)