Today's St. Louis Post-Dispatch publishes the editorial, "Greed, legalized corruption and the death penalty." Here's the beginning. It's a must-read for those following lethal injeciton issues.
It has been (another) strange week for capital punishment in the state of Missouri.
- On Monday, Gov. Jay Nixon said he wouldn’t bow to threats that the European Union would reduce shipments of the anesthetic drug propofol to hospitals in the United States unless Missouri returned 20 vials of propofol that it acquired by accident.
- On Wednesday, Mr. Nixon changed his mind and ordered the Department of Corrections to return the propofol — manufactured by Fresenius Kabi of Germany — to the distributor that accidentally sold it to the DOC.
- The corrections department hastened to add that it still had enough domestically produced propofol to carry out the scheduled execution of convicted murderer Allen Nicklasson on Oct. 23.
- Thus Missouri has enough propofol to kill someone while hospitals around the state (and the country) are scrambling — for reasons that will be discussed shortly — to find enough to keep people alive.
- A Fresenius Kabi spokesman said that while the firm was glad to have its propofol back, executing someone with propofol, regardless of where it was made, could still trigger EU sanctions. That would make the propofol shortage for hospitals even worse.
- Then Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., which manufactured Missouri’s remaining propofol (it took a very slow response to an ACLU Sunshine Law request to discover this) said it wanted its propofol back, too. The sale had been unauthorized, a Hospira statement said.
- On a ridiculous note, state Sen. Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia, who is planning to run for state attorney general in 2016, decided to out-gas chamber Chris Koster, the current attorney general. Mr. Koster, frustrated at legal challenges to lethal injection, said last month that the state might have to resort to the gas chamber. Me too, Mr. Schaefer wrote in Thursday’s Post-Dispatch.
Earlier coverage of Missouri lethal injection issues begins at the link.
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