Oct 8, 2014 1 min read

PITTSBURGH (AP) — A federal judge has stayed the death warrant for a Pittsburgh-area immigration lawyer in the fatal April 2000 shootings of five ethnic minorities. A sixth victim, an Indian man left paralyzed, eventually died from his wounds in 2007.

Gov. Tom Corbett signed the warrant Monday because 49-year-old Richard Baumhammers, of Mount Lebanon, exhausted his state court appeals. Baumhammers killed his Jewish neighbor, two men in an Indian grocery, two Asian men at a Chinese restaurant, and a black man at a karate school.

The judge stayed the warrant pending a federal court appeal.

Baumhammers’ execution might have been jeopardized anyway because the state Department of Corrections has been having difficulty buying lethal injection drugs since anti-death penalty activists began trying to publicize the companies which supply the drugs.