"Shortage of key drugs may suspend death penalty in Missouri," is the title of today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial.
Missouri's bizarre recent history with its capital punishment procedures got more bizarre this week. A federal appeals court in St. Louis said Tuesday that there was no reason for it to rule on a challenge to the state's lethal injection protocol because the Department of Corrections could no longer obtain one of the three drugs specified in the protocol.
"The DOC is unable to carry out the challenged protocol as written, and it appears unlikely it ever will," wrote a three-judge panel of the 8th U.S. Court of Appeals.
Does that mean capital punishment is over in the state of Missouri? Probably not. The court noted that George A. Lombardi, the director of the Department of Corrections, has the authority to rewrite the execution protocol to allow the state to substitute a different drug in its lethal injection procedures.
Some of the 33 states that still have the death penalty are using a substitute drug in the three-drug sequence used in nearly all U.S. executions since the early 1980s. One state, Ohio, has used the substitute in a one-drug procedure. But now the substitute is hard to find, too.
And:
Among Missouri's 47 condemned men, the most immediate beneficiary of the drug shortages is Michael Tisius, 31, who faces an Aug. 3 execution date for the murders of two Randolph County jailers in 2000. His execution almost surely will be stayed.
This would be an ideal time for Missouri to follow the lead of 17 other states and forego capital punishment. It's expensive and serves no deterrent effect. Its administration is always arbitrary and capricious. Missouri so botched its procedures in the mid-2000s that a federal judge suspended executions until the state fixed the problems. Only two men have been executed since 2005.
Enough already.
Earlier coverage of Missouri lethal injection issues begins at the link.
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