WASHINGTON -- Daniel Wayne Cook sexually assaulted, tortured and killed two men, a jury agreed. He’s dead now, executed last August in an Arizona prison.

But Cook’s name lives on, as part of a lawsuit challenging the Food and Drug Administration’s allowing importation of a drug used in executions by injection.

Death row inmates in California and several other states are now carrying on the challenge first filed under Cook’s name, though of course none will be present Monday when a top appellate court debates the case that’s one of many attacking lethal injection.

“They’re trying to conduct this war on as many fronts as possible,” said Kent Scheidegger, legal director for the Sacramento-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a nonprofit public interest law group. “I think this one is important for the way the inmates went after the death penalty by suing the FDA.”

Scheidegger, a death penalty supporter, filed a friend-of-the-court brief that prompted additional questions from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. A three-member appellate panel of the court will hear oral arguments Monday in the lethal injection drug case.

The inmates argue that the FDA acted improperly in 2010 when it allowed some state prison systems to import foreign-made sodium thiopental for use in executing prisoners. Though states have since been substituting other drugs for the fast-acting sedative, the legal challenge continues with the potential to reach even beyond the death penalty realm.

“This case is not about halting executions, but about ensuring that illegal drugs are not used in carrying out otherwise legal executions,” attorney Eric A. Shumsky, who represents the death row inmates, said Friday.

In turn, the appeal being heard Monday is only part of a much broader set of challenges to how executions occur in the 35 states that, along with the federal government, currently use lethal injection. Some of these larger issues have reached the Supreme Court, and others may get there eventually.

In a 2008 Kentucky case involving convicted cop killers Ralph Baze and Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., the Supreme Court upheld the state’s use of a three-drug lethal injection combination that included sodium thiopental. Baze and Bowling, sentenced to death for murdering two Powell County deputy sheriffs, had unsuccessfully argued that the three-drug injection amounted to cruel and unusual punishment because of the risk for errors.

As states shift to other drugs, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit death penalty information and research group, they now face “quite a few challenges” questioning other elements, like where the drugs come from.

“Every aspect of California’s lethal injection protocol is being litigated,” said Terry Thornton, spokeswoman for the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation.

In the three-drug protocol long employed by many states, sodium thiopental induces general anesthesia. Another drug paralyzes the condemned inmate, and the third stops the heart.

A domestic manufacturer stopped producing sodium thiopental in 2009, prompting states, including Idaho, Kentucky, Missouri and Texas, to switch to a different drug protocol. California, Tennessee and Arizona decided, at least initially, to import the sedative.