Pharma firms must put in place execution drug controls as US states push ahead with new ‘cocktail’

Two pharmaceutical companies, one of which describes itself as “one of the biggest…in the UK,” are facing urgent calls to put in place new controls on drugs which could be used in executions.

Akorn, headquartered in Illinois, produces midazolam, a sedative which is currently being used by Florida and Ohio to carry out lethal injections.

Teva, a global company which “suppl[ies] more packs of medicines to the NHS than anyone else,” produces two paralytic agents – rocuronium bromide and vecuronium bromide – which are used by Virginia and Florida respectively as part of their three-drug execution ‘cocktails.’

Although it is not certain that any US state has yet procured the relevant drugs from either of the companies, both have so far failed to put in place distribution controls which would prevent this from happening. This failure stands in contrast to the other US manufacturers of the drugs in question, which have taken simple and effective steps to prevent their medicines being used to fuel executions.

Florida is today [Wednesday] due to carry out its fifth execution using midazolam as part of a three-drug cocktail that was first used on William Happ in October last year; Happ reportedly took twice as long to die as is normal.

Problems with the previously-untested lethal injection drug have been widespread – when Ohio first used midazolam as part of a two-drug combination in January, eyewitnesses reported that the prisoner took nearly half an hour to die.

Just last week, Virginia joined Florida and Ohio, announcing that it too would make midazolam one of the drugs available for use in executions.

Legal charity Reprieve has raised with both Akorn and Teva the need for them to move urgently to put in place effective controls in order to ensure they do not become involved in the death penalty process, but has yet to receive a satisfactory response.

Teva has previously acted to put in place controls on an anaesthetic, propofol, after it emerged that executioners were planning to use it to kill, but has yet to take the same positive action on the two paralysing agents.

Maya Foa, Director of Reprieve’s Death Penalty team said: “Executioners are increasingly turning to these new drugs in order to kill. If Akorn and Teva fail to take swift, decisive action, they face the very real threat of becoming the go-to suppliers of execution drugs across the USA. If Teva and Akorn wish to preserve their reputation as responsible pharmaceutical companies, they must ensure their drugs can only be used to save lives, not end them in executions.”

Source: Reprieve, Feb. 26, 2014

The last breaths of America's machinery of death

When the history of the long, slow decline of capital punishment in America is written, a footnote must be reserved for the Apothecary Shoppe of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Do not be deceived by the name. Quaint and cosy it may sound, but until this month the company was the unofficial supplier of the drug used in executions by neighbouring Missouri.

The arrangement resembled something out of The French Connection rather than preparation for the ultimate punishment that the state can mete out to one of its citizens. An official from Missouri's Department of Corrections (by such euphemisms are prison services known in the US) would secretly travel to Tulsa. There he would pay $11,000 in cash for a specially commissioned version of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate. The official would then carry the stuff by hand back across the state line to Missouri, to be injected into the condemned man.

Three times this happened last year – and the same thing was to have happened for this Wednesday's scheduled execution of Michael Taylor, convicted of raping and murdering a schoolgirl in 1989 while under the influence of crack cocaine. But on 10 February, the Missouri legislature held a hearing on the state's execution protocol, and the department's shifty little drug-running operation with Tulsa became public.

Taylor's lawyers, who since 2006 has been fighting the death sentence on the grounds that lethal injection violated the US constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment", brought a new action against the Apothecary Shoppe, claiming it was not certified to do business in Missouri. The company thereupon announced it would not supply the drug for the execution after all.

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Source: The Independent, Feb. 23, 2014

Europe’s moral stand has U.S. states running out of execution drugs, complicating capital punishment

Screen shot from "Dead Man Walking"

BRUSSELS (AP) — There’s one big reason the United States has a dearth of execution drugs so acute that some states are considering solutions such as firing squads and gas chambers: Europe won’t allow the drugs to be exported because of its fierce hostility to capital punishment.

The phenomenon started nine years ago when the EU banned the export of products used for execution, citing its goal to be the “leading institutional actor and largest donor to the fight against the death penalty.” But beefed up European rules mean the results are being most strongly felt in the United States now, with shortages becoming chronic and gruesome executions making headlines.

In Ohio last month, Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die after a previously untested mix of chemicals began flowing into his body, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney. On Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson’s last words were: “I feel my whole body burning.”

The dilemma again grabbed national attention this week when an Oklahoma pharmacy agreed Monday to refrain from supplying an execution drug to the Missouri Department of Corrections for an upcoming lethal injection. Death row inmate Michael Taylor’s had argued in a lawsuit that recent executions involving the drug pentobarbital would likely cause “inhumane pain” — and, ahead of a hearing set for Tuesday, The Apothecary Shoppe said it would not provide the drug.

EU nations are notorious for disagreeing on just about everything when it comes to common policy, but they all strongly — and proudly — agree on one thing: abolishing capital punishment.

Europe saw totalitarian regimes abuse the death penalty as recently as the 20th century, and public opinion across the bloc is therefore staunchly opposed to it.

The EU’s uncompromising stance has set off a cat-and-mouse game, with U.S. corrections departments devising new ways to carry out lethal injections only to hit updated export restrictions within months.

“Our political task is to push for an abolition of the death penalty, not facilitate its procedure,” said Barba Lochbihler, chairwoman of the European Parliament’s subcommittee on human rights.

Europe’s tough stance has caused U.S. states to start experimenting with new drug mixtures, even though convicts’ lawyers and activists argue they increase the risk of painful prolonged death and may violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In an upcoming execution in Louisiana, the state is set to follow Ohio’s example in using the untested drug cocktail used in McGuire’s execution. It changed its execution protocol last week to use Ohio’s two-drug combination because it could no longer procure pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.

The execution was scheduled for February, but was stayed pending a federal judge’s examination in April regarding whether the state can proceed with the plan to execute Christopher Sepulvado, convicted in the 1992 killing of his 6-year-old stepson.

In 2010, Louisiana switched from the established three-drug protocol to a one-drug pentobarbital lethal injection, but eventually that drug also became unavailable because of European pressure.

“The lethal injection that they are using now in certain states has never been tested, verified, let alone been approved for executions,” said Maya Foa of Reprieve, a London-based charity fighting the death penalty. “This amounts to using humans as guinea pigs. No doctor would ever do that.”

Ohio prosecutors counter that condemned inmates are not entitled to a pain-free execution under the Constitution.

Even if the effect of the two drugs used by Ohio “presents some inherent risk of discomfort, that does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment,” Christopher Conomy, an assistant Ohio attorney general, argued in court documents last month.

The U.S. execution dilemma goes back to 2005, when the EU restricted exports of goods “for the purpose of capital punishment or for the purpose of torture.” That ban includes items such as electric chairs and lethal injection systems.

The drug shortage then started biting in 2010 when Hospira Inc., the sole U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, a sedative that is part of the normal three-drug mixture, stopped production. A few months later, Hospira dropped plans to produce it in Italy because the government there asked for guarantees that it would never be used in executions.

States in 2011 switched to pentobarbital, but Denmark-based Lundbeck Inc., the drug’s only U.S.-licensed maker, faced a public backlash and quickly said it would put the medication off-limits for capital punishment through a tightly controlled distribution system.

Fearing for their reputation, the companies never wanted to see their drugs used in executions.

As U.S. authorities started looking for other sources, Britain went ahead and restricted exports of sodium thiopental and other drugs at the end of 2010.

“This move underlines this government’s … moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances,” Business Secretary Vince Cable said then.

Germany’s government also urged pharmaceutical companies to stop exports, and the country’s three firms selling sodium thiopental promised not to sell to U.S. prison authorities.

The EU then updated its export regulation in late 2011 to ban the sale of eight drugs — including pentobarbital and sodium thiopental — if the purpose is to use them in lethal injections.

That produced a flurry of action in the United States. In May 2012 Missouri announced it would switch to using the anesthetic propofol, infamous for its role in Michael Jackson’s overdose death. But propofol, too, was manufactured in Europe, by Germany’s Fresenius Kabi.

Missouri’s plan prompted an outcry across Europe and the EU threatened to restrict propofol exports. That in turn provoked a medical outcry in the U.S. because propofol is used in about 95 percent of surgical procedures requiring an anesthetic, according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists.

Pharmaceutical companies around the globe have been loath to see their drugs used in executions because the market is tiny and promises close to no financial gain, while potentially exposing them to costly bad PR.

In the United States, there is a variety of reason no U.S. manufacturer will supply execution drugs, from the desire to avoid lawsuits to the makers’ own opposition to the use of such drugs in capital punishment.

Fresenius Kabi, whose slogan is “caring for life,” swiftly moved to introduce a stringent distribution control to prevent sales to U.S. prisons. Another manufacturer, Germany’s B. Braun, immediately followed suit.

In October 2012 Missouri Governor Jay Nixon expressed indignation, saying state and federal court systems, not European politicians, should decide death penalty policy. Still, a month later he backtracked and halted what was to have been the first U.S. execution using propofol.

Missouri and other states have since also resorted to custom-made batches of drugs, while refusing to divulge which pharmacy produced them — as in the case being heard Tuesday.

The secrecy has led to new lawsuits, not least after safety concerns over such drugs arose in 2012 after contaminated injections from a Massachusetts facility caused a meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people and sickened hundreds.

An attorney for McGuire’s family supported the European position.

“I think it’s right for the (pharmaceutical) companies to draw a line when people are using the drugs for the wrong purposes,” said Jon Paul Rion.

In principle, there are a number of painkillers, sedatives and paralyzing agents that can kill if administered in high doses. But switching drugs will invite new lawsuits and could involve drawn-out bureaucratic or legislative delays — in addition to doubts about how quickly and mercifully these drugs can kill.

“Such botched executions go some way to debunking the myth that lethal injection is a humane way to kill someone,” said Reprieve’s Foa.

When Europeans criticize the U.S., they frequently cite the inequality of health care and the continued use of capital punishment.

Europe has seen autocratic or totalitarian regimes corrupting justice throughout the 20th century with people being executed for political reasons or without fair trial, resulting in strong opposition to the death penalty after World War II.

Western Germany forbade capital punishment after the war, just as Italy did. France, which gave the world the word guillotine, decapitated only a few people after WW II amid increasing public opposition.

“There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed,” French Literature Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus wrote in 1957 in an influential essay.

France’s last execution now dates back almost 40 years. In Eastern Europe, the death penalty was abolished after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An international AP poll in 2007 found that about 70 percent of those surveyed in the U.S. favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. In Germany, Italy and Spain only about 30 percent did so.

Overall, experts say Europe’s judicial system is more oriented toward rehabilitation, not punishment. That is also reflected in drastically lower incarceration rates: Across the EU, about 130 people per 100,000 inhabitants are behind bars compared to 920 in the U.S, according to EU and U.S. Justice Department figures.

The death penalty has been abolished or suspended in all developed economies, except for the U.S. and Japan. Execution rankings have routinely shown the U.S. in the unusual company of China, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

Vietnam has faced a similar dilemma to the United States, finding it difficult to import execution drugs from Europe since it switched from firing squads to lethal injection in 2011 on humanitarian grounds.

The anti-capital punishment camp has also gained ground in the U.S.

The number of U.S. executions has declined in recent years — from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year. Some states have abolished the death penalty, and those that carry on find executions increasingly difficult to conduct because of the drug scarcity and doubts about how well they work.

Public support for capital punishment also appears to be retreating. Last year, 60 percent of Americans polled said they favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, the lowest level measured since 1972, according to Gallup.

To counter the drug shortages lawmakers in some death penalty states — Missouri, Virginia and Wyoming — are now considering bringing back execution methods such as firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

There are still about 3,000 inmates on death row.

AP writers Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

Source: The Associated Press, Juergen Baetz (http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz), Feb 18, 2014

US considers reviving old-fashioned executions

Utah's contraption for executions by firing squad

Most states abandoned those execution methods a generation ago

St Louis: With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about their effectiveness, lawmakers in some death penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

Most states abandoned those execution methods more than a generation ago in a bid to make capital punishment more palatable to the public and to a judicial system worried about inflicting cruel and unusual punishments that violate the Constitution.

But to some elected officials, the drug shortages and recent legal challenges are beginning to make lethal injection seem too vulnerable to complications.

“This isn’t an attempt to time-warp back into the 1850s or the wild, wild West or anything like that,” said Missouri state Rep Rick Brattin, who this month proposed making firing squads an option for executions. “It’s just that I foresee a problem, and I’m trying to come up with a solution that will be the most humane yet most economical for our state.”

Brattin, a Republican, said questions about the injection drugs are sure to end up in court, delaying executions and forcing states to examine alternatives. It’s not fair, he said, for relatives of murder victims to wait years, even decades, to see justice served while lawmakers and judges debate execution methods.

Like Brattin, a Wyoming lawmaker this month offered a bill allowing the firing squad. Missouri’s attorney general and a state lawmaker have raised the notion of rebuilding the state’s gas chamber. And a Virginia lawmaker wants to make electrocution an option if lethal-injection drugs aren’t available.

If adopted, those measures could return states to the more harrowing imagery of previous decades, when inmates were hanged, electrocuted or shot to death by marksmen.

States began moving to lethal injection in the 1980s in the belief that powerful sedatives and heart-stopping drugs would replace the violent spectacles with a more clinical affair while limiting, if not eliminating, an inmate’s pain.

The total number of US executions has declined in recent years — from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year. Some states have turned away from the death penalty entirely. Many have cases tied up in court. And those that carry on with executions find them increasingly difficult to conduct because of the scarcity of drugs and doubts about how well they work.

In recent years, European drug makers have stopped selling the lethal chemicals to prisons because they do not want their products used to kill.

At least two recent executions are also raising concerns about the drugs’ effectiveness. Last week, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die by injection, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney with his mouth opening and closing. And on Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson’s final words were, “I feel my whole body burning.”

Missouri threw out its three-drug lethal injection procedure after it could no longer obtain the drugs. State officials altered the method in 2012 to use propofol, which was found in the system of pop star Michael Jackson after he died of an overdose in 2009.

Oregon Gas Chamber

The anti-death penalty European Union threatened to impose export limits on propofol if it were used in an execution, jeopardizing the supply of a common anesthetic needed by hospitals across the nation. In October, Gov Jay Nixon stayed the execution of serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin and ordered the Missouri Department of Corrections to find a new drug.

Days later, the state announced it had switched to a form of pentobarbital made by a compounding pharmacy. Like other states, Missouri has refused to divulge where the drug comes from or who makes it.

Missouri has carried out two executions using pentobarbital - Franklin in November and Allen Nicklasson in December. Neither inmate showed outward signs of suffering, but the secrecy of the process resulted in a lawsuit and a legislative inquiry.

Michael Campbell, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St Louis, said some lawmakers simply don’t believe convicted murderers deserve any mercy.

“Many of these politicians are trying to tap into a more populist theme that those who do terrible things deserve to have terrible things happen to them,” Campbell said.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington, D.C., cautioned that there could be a backlash.

“These ideas would jeopardize the death penalty because, I think, the public reaction would be revulsion, at least from many quarters,” Dieter said.

Some states already provide alternatives to lethal injection. Condemned prisoners may choose the electric chair in eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. An inmate named Robert Gleason Jr was the most recent to die by electrocution, in Virginia in January 2013.

Arizona, Missouri and Wyoming allow for gas-chamber executions. Missouri no longer has a gas chamber, but Attorney General Chris Koster, a Democrat, and Missouri state Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican, last year suggested possibility rebuilding one. So far, there is no bill to do so.

Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington state still allow inmates to choose hanging. The last hanging in the US was Billy Bailey in Delaware in 1996. Two prisoners in Washington state have chosen to be hanged since the 1990s — Westley Allan Dodd in 1993 and Charles Rodman Campbell in 1994.

Firing squads typically consisting of five sharpshooters with rifles, one of which is loaded with a blank so the shooters do not know for sure who fired the fatal bullet. They have been used mostly for military executions.

Since the end of the Civil War, there have been three civilian firing squad executions in the US, all in Utah. Gary Gilmore uttered his famous final words, “Let’s do it” on Jan. 18, 1977, before his execution, which ended what amounted to a 17-year national moratorium on the death penalty. Convicted killers John Albert Taylor in 1996 and Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010 were also put to death by firing squad.

Utah is phasing out its use, but the firing squad remains an option there for inmates sentenced prior to May 3, 2004.

Oklahoma maintains the firing squad as an option, but only if lethal injection and electrocution are deemed unconstitutional.

In Wyoming, Republican state Sen. Bruce Burns said death by firing squad would be far less expensive than building a gas chamber. Wyoming has only one inmate on death row, 68-year-old convicted killer Dale Wayne Eaton. The state has not executed anyone in 22 years.

Jackson Miller, a Republican in the Virginia House of Delegates, is sponsoring a bill that would allow for electrocution if lethal injection drugs are not available.

Source: The Associated Press, January 28, 2014

Prisons Have Begun Treating The Death Penalty Like a Science Experiment

Unintended consequences of a boycott

Pentobarbital and sodium thiopental are anaesthetics, used around the world by doctors and vets on all kinds of patients in a variety of cases. They are also used to render prisoners unconscious in the ten U.S. states that use lethal injection to execute their condemned.

That is, as long as they can obtain the drug. Since pharmaceutical company Hospira stopped manufacturing sodium thiopental in early 2011, there hasn’t been a domestic producer of either drug within the U.S. American prisons rely on either one of the drugs as the first of the three used in the standard cocktail given to those due to be executed—the others being pancuronium bromide, which paralyses all of the muscles in the body, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

A couple of years later, and prisons have started to use up the stockpiles, bought from before production ceased. The result is the rise of new, untested drugs in execution cocktails. Here’s the Guardian from yesterday:

On Thursday, the state of Ohio is scheduled to inject Dennis McGuire, 53, with two drugs: first, the sedative midazolam; then, the painkiller hydromorphone. When it is over, McGuire, who was convicted of the 1989 rape and murder of Joy Stewart, will be dead—which is Ohio’s goal. But the procedure is untried and untested; the drugs that the state will employ have never been used in a death chamber. And experts have warned in legal proceedings that if the process goes wrong, McGuire will not just peacefully drift away, but will be awake, struggling and failing to pull enough air into his lungs, until the drug overdose that will kill him takes hold.

"McGuire will experience the agony and terror of air hunger as he struggles to breathe for five minutes after defendants intravenously inject him with the execution drugs," his lawyers have said in court documents.

But on Monday a federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, ruled that McGuire's execution could go ahead. Judge Gregory Frost found that there was insufficient evidence to show a substantial risk of severe pain for the condemned man and said that “Ohio is free to innovate and to evolve its procedures for administering capital punishment.”

An Ohio state prosecutor, addressing the court, said: "You're not entitled to a pain-free execution.”

That last point is contentious—much of the motivation for making sure that executions are calm and painless is to avoid accusations that they might constitute a “cruel and unusual punishment,” as prohibited by the Eighth Amendment. Lethal injection is used specifically because it is seen as less painful than historical forms of execution, such as beheading, electrocution, or firing squad.

Yet the pretense of kindness relies on there being no struggle from the condemned prisoner. While there is no sure way of knowing the pain that someone experiences when getting the sodium thiopental/pancurium bromide/potassium chloride cocktail, there are several cases of prisoners appearing to be in severe pain. A typical lethal injection death should be completed within seven minutes. Often that time is exceeded, sometimes by one or two hours, and throughout the execution the prisoner can be twitching, shaking, blinking, or appearing to try to speak.

Click here to read the full article

Source: New Republic, January 15, 2014

Ohio inmate "not entitled to a pain-free execution"

Ohio's state execution team is finalising plans to dispatch a convicted murderer and rapist on death row using a never-before-tried combination of two drugs which defence lawyers say threatens to leave him writhing in agony from "air hunger" before he loses consciousness and expires.

The way was cleared for the execution of Dennis McGuire, 53, when a federal judge in Columbus ruled on Monday (local time) that concerns about how the new cocktail would work were not enough to issue a stay even as he acknowledged that it amounted nonetheless to a death chamber "experiment" by the state.

Ohio and other death penalty states have been struggling to keep executions going because supplies of pentobarbital traditionally used in a three-drug mix have all passed their sell-by dates thanks to its Danish manufacturer prohibiting its sale to US prison services. The European Union has also threatened to restrict sales of Propofol, a leading anaesthetic used in hospitals, were US death chambers to use it instead.

In Wyoming, state Senator Bruce Burns, a Republican, said he was tabling proposals to replace death by lethal injection with the firing squad in his state because of the drug shortage crisis. Using marksmen to empty death row would be preferable, he said, than the alternative - building a gas chamber.

Controversy is also raging in Oklahoma following what appears to have been the botched execution last week of Michael Lee Wilson based on his last words uttered after the injection process had begun: "I feel my whole body burning." Exactly what went wrong is unclear because the state is not saying.

The two-drug formula that Ohio has turned to - the sedative midazolam followed by the painkiller hydromorphone - was to have been used for the first time late last year on another inmate, Ronald Phillips. His execution was postponed at the last minute because of uncertainty over whether his request that his organs be donated after death could legally be granted.

Thus McGuire, convicted of the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of Joy Stewart in western Ohio, is now set to be the guinea pig, barring any last-minute stay by the US Supreme Court or state governor.

In court filings earlier, defence lawyers had contended that "McGuire will experience the agony and terror of air hunger as he struggles to breathe for five minutes after defendants intravenously inject him with the execution drugs". They also suggested that because McGuire suffers from severe sleep apnea the risk of his struggling to fill his lungs for air before he passes out will be increased.

In his ruling on Monday, the US district judge Gregory Frost said he saw no convincing evidence of a "substantial risk" that McGuire would suffer the "severe pain" trying to fill his lungs on the death stretcher that would put his execution at odds with the constitutional prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment".

Almost in the same breath, however, he added that there is "absolutely no question that Ohio's current protocol presents an experiment in lethal injection processes... To pretend otherwise, or that either of the experts or this Court truly knows what the outcome of the experiment will be, would be disingenuous."

In its filings to the judge, the state's Attorney General's office did not deny the combination might cause discomfort but added: "You're not entitled to a pain-free execution".

Both the Governor, John Kasich, and the Ohio Parole Board have already rejected pleas for clemency for McGuire. Separately, his lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court to issue a stay on the grounds that the jury at his trial were insufficiently informed of the severe difficulties of his child hood.

In making his firing squad proposal, Wyoming's Senator said it was partly about money. "Frankly it's one of the cheapest [options] for the state."

Source: The New Zealand Herald, January 15, 2014

European boycott of death penalty drugs lowers rate of US executions

New Death Penalty Information Center report claims there were 39 executions this year – the lowest number since 1994.

The European-led boycott of medical drugs used by US corrections departments to execute prisoners is having such an impact that it has driven the number of executions to an almost all-time low, a leading authority on the death penalty has concluded.

The year-end report for 2013 from the Death Penalty Information Center, based in Washington, records that there were 39 executions this year – only the second time since 1994 that the number has fallen below 40. The report says a major factor behind the slump in judicial killings has been the difficulty states that still practice the death penalty are encountering in finding a consistent means of ending life.

California, Arkansas and North Carolina have all had effective moratoriums for the past seven years because they have failed to settle on a workable lethal injection protocol. Several other states are turning to untested drugs or to lethal medicines improvised in single batches by so-called “compounding pharmacies” that are not subject to federal regulations.

“The goal-posts keep shifting under the death penalty states,” said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center and lead author of the report. “As soon as they move to a new protocol, the boycott spreads.”

The European Commission imposed tough restrictions on the export of anaesthetics to US corrections departments in 2011, and amid the squeeze a succession of states has been running out of their primary lethal drugs supplies. As a result, Florida has turned to midazolam hydrochloride, a drug never before used in executions, provoking an outcry that it might be inflicting cruel and unusual punishment on condemned prisoners.

Click here to read the full article

Source: The Guardian, December 18, 2013

Missouri: State execution to resume after switch to other drug

A Missouri execution postponed last month amid debate over the state's choice of execution drug is set to take place Wednesday.

Allen Nicklasson was convicted in the 1994 slaying of Excelsior Springs businessman Richard Drummond, who stopped to help when a car used by Nicklasson and 2 others broke down on Interstate 70. Another man in the car, Dennis Skillicorn, was executed in 2009.

The execution is scheduled for 12:01 a.m. at the prison in Bonne Terre.

Nicklasson was supposed to be executed Oct. 23, when Missouri planned to use the anesthetic propofol for the 1st time. The plan drew concerns from the medical community because most of the drug is made in Europe, and the anti-death penalty European Union had threatened to limit export if propofol was used in an execution.

As a result, Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon halted the execution.

Days later, the Missouri Department of Corrections announced a switch to pentobarbital. Pentobarbital is a sedative used as an execution drug by 13 other states.

Nicklasson, Skillicorn and Tim DeGraffenreid were driving to Kansas City in August 1994, when their 1983 Chevrolet Caprice broke down on I-70 in mid-Missouri, soon after they burglarized a home and stole guns and money. Drummond, a technical support supervisor for AT&T, saw their stalled car and offered to drive the men to a pay phone.

Once in Drummond's company car, Skillicorn and Nicklasson held a gun to his head and ordered him to drive to a secluded wooded area. Nicklasson shot Drummond twice in the head. His remains were found 8 days later.

Source: Associated Press, December 8, 2013

Missouri courts, governor still weighing Franklin execution

The Missouri Supreme Court and Gov. Jay Nixon continued Monday to weigh requests to halt the execution of Joseph Paul Franklin, with time dwindling before the serial killer is scheduled to be put to death.

Franklin, 63, faces execution one minute after midnight on Wednesday. It would be the first in Missouri in nearly three years and the first ever using a single execution drug, the sedative pentobarbital.

Franklin was convicted of killing 42-year-old Gerald Gordon in a sniper attack outside a suburban St. Louis synagogue in 1977. It was one of as many as 20 killings committed by Franklin, a white supremacist who targeted blacks and Jews in a cross-country killing spree from 1977 to 1980. He was convicted of seven other murders — including the Aug. 20, 1980, slayings of David Martin and Ted Fields in Salt Lake City — but the Missouri case was the only one resulting in a death sentence.

Franklin declined multiple Associated Press interview requests but granted a lengthy interview to The Salt Lake Tribune available here.

It wasn’t clear when Nixon would rule on clemency. His spokesman, Scott Holste, said the governor did not yet have anything to announce. Meanwhile, Franklin’s attorney, Jennifer Herndon, said she was still awaiting a ruling from the Missouri Supreme Court.

Last month, Nixon stopped the execution of another convicted killer, Allen Nicklasson, over concerns about Missouri’s plan to use propofol as the lethal drug. The European Union had threatened to limit export if propofol was used in the execution, potentially creating a nationwide shortage of the popular anesthetic.

The Missouri Department of Corrections revised its protocol days later, changing to pentobarbital that will be made through a compounding pharmacy. Because the compounding pharmacy is part of the execution team, few details about it have been made public.

Herndon last week filed a motion for a stay of execution with the Missouri Supreme Court, citing concerns about how the drug is made and what could happen if it doesn’t work properly, potentially leaving the inmate in pain or brain-damaged but not dead.

Amid court cases and the shortage of execution drugs, Missouri has executed just two men in the past eight years — most recently Martin Link in February 2011.

Herndon said Franklin, a paranoid schizophrenic, now regrets his crimes, having had a change of heart after serving time alongside black inmates.

Franklin was in his mid-20s when he began drifting across America 36 years ago, robbing up to 16 banks to fund his travels.

He bombed a synagogue in Chattanooga, Tenn., in July 1977. No one was hurt, but the killings began soon after that, many of them sniper shootings. Franklin has claimed as many as 20 victims.

He had a particular dislike for interracial couples — several of his victims were black men and the white women with them.

He arrived in suburban St. Louis and picked out Brith Sholom Kneseth Israel synagogue from the Yellow Pages. On Oct. 8, 1977, a bar mitzvah ended and guests were on the parking lot when Franklin opened fire from a grassy area nearby, killing Gordon.

Franklin got away and committed a string of other killings in several other states. He was caught after killing Martin and Fields, two young black men who had just finished jogging with two teenage white girls in Salt Lake City’s Liberty Park on Aug. 20, 1980. Years later, in federal prison, he admitted to the St. Louis County killing. He was sentenced to death in 1997.

In addition to the killings, Franklin has admitted shooting and wounding civil rights leader Vernon Jordan and Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flynt.

Flynt, paralyzed from the waist down since the shooting in 1978, has also sued to stop the execution, telling The Associated Press he does not believe it is a deterrent.

Source: Associated Press, November 18, 2013

Secretive scramble for lethal injection drugs prompts concern

Missouri intends to carry out an execution Wednesday with drugs supplied by a pharmacy the state will not name, highlighting the growing lengths prisons are going to in order to buy lethal ingredients.

Campaigners have said that new lethal injection methods — being used after pharmaceutical firms refused to sell execution states their products — are unethical, unconstitutional and could amount to torture.

Moreover, as more drug-makers refuse to be part of the execution game, state officials are hiding the trail of their drug purchases — in some cases refusing to divulge the suppliers’ names or making purchases through petty cash and via seemingly defunct hospitals in order to disguise the paper trail.

“If you mask executions in a shroud of secrecy, vital oversight is lost,” Maya Foa, death penalty director for Reprieve, told Al Jazeera. “There is a risk that bad drugs could be used — and journalists, lawyers and the public would have no means of knowing what exactly is being injected into the prisoner.”

The scramble for drugs comes amid a backdrop of a drop in overall support for executions. According to a Gallup poll published last month, the number of Americans in favor of the death penalty is at its lowest point in over 40 years, with a 60 percent approval rating. It is down from a high of 80 percent in 1994.

In all, some 32 states currently have death penalty policies. Last week alone saw Florida and Texas proceed with the execution of convicted murderers. Ohio was scheduled to put a convicted child killer, Ronald Phillips, to death last Thursday, but a last-minute decision to stay the execution was made so that medical experts can assess whether or not his non-vital organs or tissues can be donated to his mother or possibly others.

But finding the means to carry out the ultimate sentence has become harder for execution states.

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Source: Al Jazeera, November 18, 2013

USA: The Lethal Injection Debacle

Our European allies are imposing economic sanctions. Multinational pharmaceutical companies are threatening our supply of vital drugs. At the same time, medical practitioners have been drawn into an area that is foreign to them.

How did the U.S. get itself into this position? Blame the death penalty.

In an attempt to carry out long-scheduled executions, states have been embarrassing themselves in a frenetic scramble to secure execution drugs from wherever they can find them.

Increasingly, they are resorting to secrecy and backup execution protocols necessitated by drug shortages instead of treating those condemned to death with the dignity appropriate to any human life.

A short list of recent developments illustrates the debacle that encompasses today's practice of lethal injection:

--In an attempt to obtain execution drugs, many states turned to a tiny overseas distributor called "Dream Pharma," located in the back of a driving school in London. The drugs were seized by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, and the United Kingdom quickly took measures to prevent further exports.

-Ohio has changed its execution protocol 5 times in recent years. Its latest proposal is to use a 2nd-tier backup procedure, involving a combination of drugs never before applied in an execution.

--Florida also instituted an un-tried combination of drugs, different from Ohio's. Florida begins with the injection of midazolam, identified as a sedative rather than an anesthetic. The next drug paralyzes the inmate so no pain can be observed; it then injects an extremely painful liquid salt, potassium chloride. If the midazolam does not anesthetize the inmate effectively, the execution will be excruciating - though no one but the inmate will notice.

--A few months ago, Texas announced its lethal injection drugs were reaching their expiration date. Shortly before its next scheduled execution, the state suddenly found a new source for the drug it had been using (pentobarbital): a compounding pharmacy in Houston, unregulated by the Food and Drug Administration. Once the source became public, the pharmacy demanded the return of the drugs, but Texas declined. Last year, contaminated drugs from a compounding pharmacy killed 60 people.

--Missouri also announced it would introduce a new drug into the lethal injection process - propofol. When the German manufacturer responsible for almost all of the propofol used in the U.S. heard of this plan, it protested, indicating the entire supply of propofol for vital surgeries in the U.S. could be jeopardized. Missouri returned the drug and is now resorting to a compounding pharmacy, declaring them part of the state's "execution team."

Using drugs to kill people is not new.

As hangings began to appear distasteful, New York considered using lethal injections as far back as 1890. It chose a newer technology instead - the electric chair - to carry out executions.

Starting in 1976, when the Supreme Court allowed capital punishment to resume after a 4-year pause to allow states to draft more precise death penalty laws, states began investigating alternative approaches to carrying out the death penalty.

In Oklahoma a coroner suggested a 3-drug execution process, without stipulating who would oversee the procedure. Compared to the electric chair or the gas chamber, it seemed a more palatable means of taking human life.

Texas, in 1982, became the 1st state to carry out a lethal injection, using a 3-drug procedure.

Eventually, every death-penalty state and the federal government adopted lethal injection, and the U.S. Supreme Court gave its approval in 2008. Over 1,000 lethal-injection executions were carried out around the country before the present crisis emerged.

Although many lethal injections did not go as planned, the most embarrassing incident occurred in Ohio in 2009.

Romell Broom was strapped to the gurney and prodded with IV needles for nearly 2 hours before the governor called a halt to the failed proceedings. Ohio recognized that changes had to be made, and it became the 1st state in the country to use a single-drug (sodium thiopental) in executions.

The sole supplier of sodium thiopental to the U.S. was an Illinois-based company named Hospira, Inc.

In 2010 Hospira announced it objected to the use of its drug in executions and eventually ceased production altogether, citing objections to the death penalty by Italian workers who manufactured the drug.

Since all states were using thiopental, they were forced to change their execution process.

After sources from overseas were cut off by a federal court ruling that imported drugs must be controlled by the Food and Drug Administration, most states turned to a drug called pentobarbital, which was widely used for anesthetic purposes in the U.S.

Although the supply at first seemed sufficient, the main manufacturer of pentobarbital - Lundbeck, Inc. of Denmark - issued a strong statement condemning the use of this drug in executions and promising to restrict its sale to prisons.

With no new supply, the existing quantities of pentobarbital began to expire. Many states searched for either alternative sources or alternative drugs to carry out executions.

Compounding pharmacies, which can prepare a single dose of a drug in response to a prescription, and which are not as well known as the large pharmaceutical companies, became a natural choice for execution drugs.

South Dakota was the first to use this source in 2012. Other more prolific execution states such as Texas, Ohio, Georgia, and Missouri also announced they would use compounding pharmacies.

However, these pharmacies are part of the medical profession, and states' efforts to involve the medical community have often been met with resistance.

States adopted various strategies in response. Missouri's included a pharmacy in its "execution team." Ohio added "Medical Team" to its execution protocol. But the growing difficulties in obtaining drugs from compounding pharmacies may spell future trouble in persisting with this medical model of taking lives.

The use of new drugs and new, unregulated sources is under attack in the courts, with the international community and the medical profession watching closely. Every change to a state execution procedure is challenged in court by those about to be executed. On the international front, the European Commission has imposed export controls on various drugs used in executions. Within the medical community, organizations such as the American Society of Anesthesiologists have issued statements warning of drugs being removed from the market because of their use in executions.

Congress is already considering FDA control over compounding pharmacies, following the string of deaths that occurred in 2012 from contaminated drugs produced by these pharmacies.

But with the death penalty already declining in public support and use, the lethal injection crisis may be one more indicator that capital punishment no longer comports with our evolving standards of decency.

Source: Richard Dieter is Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, thecrimereport.org, November 12, 2013

USA: Death Penalty Delayed But Not Denied By Drug Problems

California Execution Chamber

Like many states, Missouri is struggling to obtain the drugs it normally uses to carry out the death penalty.

Last month, Democratic Gov. Jay Nixon stayed an execution under pressure from the medical community and the European Union, which threatened to hold up supplies of propofol, the anesthetic the state intended to use.

Missouri's Department of Corrections decided to take matters into its own hands. With another execution scheduled for Nov. 20, the department announced it would be using a different drug and adding a compounding pharmacy to its "execution team."

Other states are pursuing similar courses. Texas and Florida have also recently turned to new suppliers and new protocols. Ohio has an execution scheduled for Thursday, using an untested combination of drugs.

All of it is a response to the most recent form of resistance to capital punishment - legal and logistical challenges to the lethal injection regimens that have been utilized by most states.

It doesn't signal the end of the death penalty, says Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, but it does reveal a new front in the long-running battle.

"Everybody uses specific issues about lethal injections to have a conversation about how they feel about putting people to death," Zimring says. "In that sense, even though you think you're having a conversation about drugs and means, you're really having a conversation about ends and hostility to state execution."

Reverse Boycotts

Most states have done away with firing squads, gas chambers and the electric chair. 5 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled that the 3-drug protocol that most states used for executions passed constitutional muster.

But legal challenges to lethal injections have continued to proliferate since then, a part of every capital defense attorney's playbook.

Some of the drugs of choice were manufactured in European countries that are officially opposed to the death penalty. State departments of correction kept attempting to find new suppliers of sedatives, and then running into new obstacles.

After sodium pentobarbital became a drug of choice in 2009, for example, there was an uproar in Denmark because the product was made by Lundbeck, a Danish pharmaceutical company. In 2011, the company announced it would no longer ship the drug to American prisons.

There have been other such cases. It's like a reverse boycott, with companies refusing to sell their product to end-users they don't like.

"You don't have a lot of manufacturers of the drugs," says Deborah Denno, an expert on lethal injections at Fordham Law School. "You have a situation where the companies that were supplying the drugs, when they are revealed and realize their drugs are going to be used for executions, they don't want to have anything to do with it."

New Means To Prevent

Now, there are concerns that the new methods states are trying out could cause pain and lingering deaths. There are certain to be more legal challenges and more pressure brought to bear on manufacturers.

All of this is just the latest proxy battle abolitionists are waging against the death penalty itself, says Robert Blecker, author of the new book The Death of Punishment, a defense of capital punishment.

He says it's in keeping with other debates in recent years, such as concerns about racial disparities and claims that the death penalty is simply too expensive to be worth keeping on the books.

"The argument of the moment is the lethal injection argument - we can't do it perfectly and risk a painful death, so we can't do it at all," says Blecker, a professor at New York Law School. "Of course, the irony is that it's the abolitionists who are making it difficult, threatening to boycott European companies that supply the pharmaceuticals that would kill without any doubt."

Any method that states select is going to be subject to litigation, Blecker says, but he argues there's no chance problems with lethal injections will lead to a universal moratorium on executions.

Still, he concedes that the latest debate "could contribute to the weariness of those who support the death penalty in principle, but worry because there are so many obstacles."

Zimring, the Berkeley law professor, agrees. When he published his book The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment nine years ago, he says, prisoners on death row in Texas were 27 times as likely to actually be executed as those in California.

Today, he says, the difference is more like 50 times.

Not Going Away

Last month, Gallup released a poll that showed U.S. support for the death penalty had dropped to 60 %, the lowest registered since 1972.

But that's still a big majority in favor. And, although the number of executions carried out has dropped by more than half since reaching a peak in 1999, there are still dozens of killers put to death each year.

"This is a country that wants the death penalty," Denno says, "but there's enormous stigma."

States are running into almost-unending hurdles when it comes to carrying out executions, says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. For some, the cumulative effect has been the creation of de facto moratoriums.

Arkansas hasn't carried out an execution since 2005, largely due to problems with lethal injections.

"Our system is completely broken," Arkansas Attorney General Dustin McDaniel told National Journal. "I can no more flap my arms and fly across the state than I can carry out an execution."

But some states are continuing to execute prisoners, despite the challenges.

"You bring these challenges in Texas against a new drug, and the executions don't get delayed a day," Dieter says.

Source: NPR, November 13, 2013

Nebraska researches "Death Penalty" drug

Nebraska will be looking at a number of options to maintain the death penalty.

Nebraska has been blocked from carrying out executions, because it cannot get adequate supplies of sodium thiopental, the drug the state would use as an anesthetic. No longer produced domestically, the drug has become increasingly difficult to obtain from European manufacturers who have been blocked from selling it for use in executions.

Missouri has announced it will change its death penalty protocol after it became difficult to receive propofol, an anesthetic used in its 3-drug protocol. The state now will use the sedative pentobarbital and is considering a switch to a 1-drug protocol.

Attorney General Jon Bruning says Nebraska will be review the move by other states toward a 1-drug protocol to carry out lethal injection, rather than the 3-drug method now on the books.

"Certainly, that's under discussion. The governor and I have had conversations and will continue to have conversations. That's one of the options," Bruning says. "We both believe that the men on death row deserve the penalties that have been meted out by the courts and judges."

Some states, such as Texas and Ohio, have begun using compounding pharmacies to prepare the needed drugs, which would avoid difficulties in buying from manufacturers under pressure by death penalty opponents to not sell drugs for use in executions.

Oklahoma was the 1st state to use a 1-drug protocol, using pentobarbital for an execution.

Bruning says his office has been reviewing the changes made by other states.

"We have had reviews of what a number of states are doing. There's of course the 3-drug protocol we use. There's a 1-drug protocol. There are various options and I think if you were to see any sort of change in the protocol it would give Corrections a number of different options. We don't (want to) hamstring ourselves with 1 option," Bruning says.

Nebraska has some sodium thiopental on hand, but it expires in December. It has become increasingly difficult to get for use in executions.

The legislature could change the state execution protocol or changes could be made to the regulations used by the state Department of Correctional Services.

The state switched to lethal injection after a 2009 Nebraska Supreme Court ruling declared the electric chair to be cruel and unusual punishment. Nebraska last carried out an execution in 1997. 11 prisoners now reside on death row.

Source: Nebraska Radio Network, October 28, 2013

No Drugs, No Executions: The End of the Death Penalty

Death Penalty Barbie doll

Florida's new drug of choice replaced pentobarbital, a barbiturate the state used for years as part of its three-drug lethal cocktail until de facto boycotts by foreign drug manufacturers exhausted its supply. Midazolam hydrochloride, marketed as Versed, was chosen not because of its effectiveness but because of its availability, a decision legal experts say calls into question Florida's commitment to the Eighth Amendment's promise of no infliction of cruel or unusual punishment.

Florida is just one of several states scrambling to update or refine its capital-punishment protocol amid a sudden shortfall of its lethal injection drugs, resulting in an unprecedented inconsistency in the way inmates are executed in the United States. Even as a steady majority continues supporting the death penalty, the difficulty in obtaining new lethal drugs, associated legal hurdles, and a gaping void of better execution alternatives has left capital punishment in America with an uncertain future.

Distilling the amount of pain Happ endured is nearly impossible because the second drug in Florida's three-drug cocktail, vecuronium bromide, acts as a paralytic agent. Its purpose is largely cosmetic, effectively masking how much pain the subject may be enduring.

"We don't even know if the new drug (midazolam) is working or not," said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Everything is a bit of an experiment with a human subject. If this were ordinary medicine, that would not be allowed, but this is the death penalty and that's how it goes."

In a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott last month describing the changes to its lethal-injection protocol, Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Mike Crews wrote that "the procedure has been reviewed and is compatible with evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society, the concepts of the dignity of man, and advances in science, research, pharmacology, and technology. He added: "The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering. The foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a human and dignified death."

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Source: National Journal, Dustin Volz, October 28, 2013

Missouri Gov. Nixon received health concerns over execution drug

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. -- Health care workers, medical groups and even a few patients pressured Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon before he halted what would have been the first execution with the anesthetic propofol.

The anticipated use of propofol in administering the death penalty fueled concerns that the anti-death penalty European Union could limit its export. Before he halted a planned October execution, Nixon's office received several dozen letters and messages asking him to put off the execution and to order development of a new death penalty protocol.

Nixon's office provided The Associated Press with correspondence it received before the decision. Many messages to the governor took little position on the death penalty and instead focused on propofol. The state Department of Corrections announced Tuesday executions now will use the sedative pentobarbital, which the Death Penalty Information Center says is used by 13 states.

The Missouri State Medical Association said in a letter to Nixon that propofol is a "critically important medicine" that the American Society of Anesthesiologists estimates is used in 95 percent of surgical procedures requiring an anesthetic. The medical association said tens of millions of Americans benefit annually from it.

"We are compelled to express our concern that the state's planned use of propofol in lethal injections ... could well result in a catastrophic nationwide shortage of the single-most safe and effective anesthetic available to physicians and their patients," executive vice president Tom Holloway wrote.

The Missouri Society of Anesthesiologists also registered concerns about using propofol, and the medical school dean at Washington University in St. Louis said 1,242 physicians at the school performed 871,771 procedures and 53,733 surgeries last year and that nearly all requiring anesthesia used propofol. The dean said in his Oct. 7 letter there are not acceptable substitutes if propofol no longer was available.

Roughly 85 percent of the U.S. supply of propofol is made in Europe by the German company Fresenius Kabi. The EU bans trade in goods that can be used for executions and was reviewing whether to make propofol subject to the rule.

Markus Loning, human rights commissioner for the German federal government, wrote a Sept. 30 letter urging Nixon to refrain from using the drug. Loning said turning to propofol for an execution would "almost certainly lead to strict export controls. Subsequently there would also be a severe shortage of Propofol in the United States for medical purposes."

Nixon, who supports the death penalty, halted the scheduled Oct. 23 execution of Allen Nicklasson using propofol. Missouri's next execution is scheduled in November for Joseph Franklin, who was convicted of the 1977 sniper shooting of Gerald Gordon as a crowd dispersed from a bar mitzvah in suburban St. Louis. Two others were injured. Franklin has said he tried to start a race war by traveling the country shooting people, and when he confessed in 1994, he was serving several life sentences in a federal prison for the killing of two black joggers in Salt Lake City and an interracial couple in Wisconsin and the bombing of a synagogue in Tennessee.

The governor said he considered public health and public safety in his decision.

"Public safety obviously means that we're going to continue to move forward to carry out the necessary responsibilities of the ultimate punishment," Nixon said. "When the public health side came in here and you saw a growing concern about the ability to effectively administer what's been a useful medication for many folks in surgery, it became apparent to me that we needed to change."

Missouri's planned use of propofol also attracted attention elsewhere. Several messages voicing concerns were written by people identifying themselves as anesthesiologists and nurses from Minnesota.

Others who contacted Nixon said they had received propofol in medical procedures.

Ed LaTour, of St. Peters, said using the drug for an execution seems an easy way out for someone who caused pain and suffering. He has been operated on 13 times and has received propofol.

"Simply put, the use of Propofol is the best drug ever invented for surgery and having it used on me so many times, I promise you, is the best way to go for surgery of any kind," LaTour wrote.

Source: Associated Press, October 27, 2013

ACLU sues to lift secrecy over Missouri execution team

After a Post-Dispatch investigation seven years ago revealed the identity of Missouri’s lead executioner, exposing a history including public discipline from the state medical board and false statements in court, the Legislature took action.

It enacted a law to ban any person from “knowingly disclosing the identity of a current or former member of an execution team.’’

The Department of Corrections announced on Tuesday it was adding a compounding pharmacy to the execution team and invoked the 2007 law protecting the pharmacy’s workers from disclosure.

On Wednesday, the American Civil Liberties Union of Missouri sued in U.S. District Court in St. Louis to try to overturn the law so “we can post documents that identify execution team members on our website without fear of violating any statutes,” said its legal director, Tony Rothert. Under the law, an executioner whose identity was revealed could file a lawsuit and recover actual and punitive damages from the person who revealed the name.

Missouri has long struggled to find executioners and execution drugs with spotless histories. Most medical professionals and drug companies avoid being associated with taking lives.

ACLU sued the state this month for records of the state’s inventory of propofol, an anesthetic the state had planned to use in lethal injections to execute murderers Allen Nicklasson on Oct. 23 and Joseph Paul Franklin on Nov. 20.

The records showed the supplier of some of the propofol, Morris & Dickson, of Shreveport, La., had pleaded with the state nearly a year ago to return vials the company had shipped to Missouri in violation of its agreement with the manufacturer, Fresenius Kabi, of Germany, not to provide the drug for capital punishment.

The state finally returned the drug after the ACLU put the records on its web site. But it still had propofol manufactured by Hospira in stock from another supplier, Mercer Medical of suburban Seattle.

Then Hospira said it wanted its propofol back, too, because it had not authorized the sale to Mercer Medical. On Oct. 11, Gov. Jay Nixon postponed the Nicklasson execution and ordered the department to develop a new protocol. On Tuesday, the state announced it would use pentobarbital, commonly used to euthanize pets.

Source: St Louis Post-Dispatch, October 24, 2013