"Foreign Companies Eye U.S. Market for Lethal Injection Drugs," appears at the Atlantic. Bonner, Letter From Europe appeared in the New York Times earlier this week.
Denmark hasn't had a civilian execution since 1882 and the country banned capital punishment in 1933, except for war crimes, and that exception was removed from the law in 1978.
But next Tuesday, Texas plans to use a drug supplied by a Danish pharmaceutical company, Lundbeck, in the scheduled execution of Cleve Foster, a former Army sergeant convicted for the murder of a 30-year-old woman he had met in a bar. (Foster has always maintained his innocence.)
The Lundbeck drug has already been used for three executions in Oklahoma and one in Ohio, and other states have purchased the drug.
Even though the European Union bans capital punishment, the Danish company is not the only European corporation to supply drugs to American death penalty states. A British company, Dream Pharma, has sold sodium thiopental, an anesthetic, to several states and it has been used in four executions in recent months, in Georgia and Arizona. German and Austrian pharmaceutical companies are also looking at the American capital punishment market.
Lethal injection was first proposed by a New York doctor in the 19th century, who argued it was cheaper than hanging. It has now been adopted by the 33 states that have the death penalty, and is seen as a "more humane" approach than the electric chair or gas chamber. (Utah executed a man by a firing squad last year.)
The general procedure is for the condemned to be strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into the execution chamber. Witnesses observe through a window. The man's arms are swabbed with alcohol and two intravenous tubes are inserted, one in each arm. From another room, unseen by the condemned or the witnesses, the executioners first release sodium thiopental, a general anesthetic, into the tubes. (In surgery, 100 to 150 milligrams are used; for executions, as many as 5,000 milligrams.) This is followed by a muscle relaxant, which paralyzes the diaphragm and lungs, thus making it impossible for the condemned man to breathe. Finally, potassium chloride may be injected, causing death by cardiac arrest.
The scramble for foreign-suppliers of lethal injection drugs, and the surrounding controversy, has arisen because the American company that manufactured sodium thiopental, Hospira, ceased production at its plant in North Carolina last year.
He is writing a book about a death penalty case, Anatomy of Injustice. It's scheduled to be published by Knopf in 2012.
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