Reuters posts,"Arizona and Texas scheduled to execute inmates by lethal injection," by David Schwartz and Karen Brooks. It's via the Chicago Tribune.
Arizona is set to execute on Wednesday an inmate convicted of strangling an elderly man 35 years ago and Texas is scheduled to put to death a man convicted of killing his parents and blowing up their house.
Both states plan to perform the lethal injections using pentobarbital, a barbiturate frequently used in executions that has become scarce as major manufacturers have refused to supply it for that purpose.
Some states, including Texas, have turned to other suppliers such as lightly regulated compounding pharmacies to secure drugs, raising the fears of death penalty opponents that use of the alternative drugs will lead to a botched execution.
Edward Harold Schad, 71, is set to be executed on Wednesday morning at an Arizona state prison and Michael Yowell, 43, after 6 p.m. local time at a Texas state prison.
Schad would be the first person executed in Arizona in 2013 and Yowell the 14th person executed in Texas this year. Overall, 28 people have been executed in the United States this year, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.
Today's Daily Texan publishes the editorial, "Texas shouldn't make shady deals for death penalty drugs." It's the student-published paper of the University of Texas at Austin. Here's the beginning:
Texas executes more people than any other state by a wide margin — more than the next five states on that list put together. On Wednesday, Texas will add another name to the list of inmates executed, that of Michael Yowell, 43, who will be put to death for murdering his parents and grandmother.
Yowell’s execution is significant because, as The Associated Press reported last week, the drug used to kill him will come from a controversial new supply provided not by a major pharmaceutical company but by a small compounding pharmacy outside of Houston, raising ethical questions about the drug’s quality and effectiveness. The drug, a widely-used sedative called pentobarbital, causes fatal respiratory arrest in high doses. Pentobarbital is used by several states in executions, usually as part of a three-drug cocktail.
The shortage that forced Texas to move to a compounding factory supplier has been a long time coming. In 2011, the Danish pharmaceutical company that had supplied Texas with pentobarbital announced that it would no longer sell it to anyone who used it to kill.
Then, the same thing happened with sodium thiopental, another part of the three-drug cocktail, and Texas and several other states abandoned the three-drug protocol in favor of a straight dose of pentobarbital.
Earlier coverage of the Arizona and Texas execution dates begins at the links.
To date there have been 28 executions in American death penalty states this year; a total of 1,348 post-Furman executions since 1977.
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