"New Lethal Injections Could Cause Extreme Pain, Make Deaths 'Drag on' for Hours," is Molly Redden's report for Mother Jones. Here's the beginning of this must-read:
Next Thursday, executioners for the state of Ohio will inject convicted murderer Ronald Phillips with a combination of midazolam and hydromorphone—two drugs that have never before been used in a lethal injection. The two-drug cocktail may have its intended effect, and Phillips may slip into a state of amnesia before quietly dying. But hydromorphone, a powerful painkiller, is not designed to kill, and physicians have no idea how much hydromorphone it will take to end Phillips' life. It's possible that Phillips' execution will fail, or drag on for hours, his sedative wearing off as he vomits, seizes, or slowly suffocates.
A week later, on November 20, Missouri will perform a similar experiment on death row inmate Joseph Paul Franklin. Missouri will become the third state, after Texas and South Dakota, to inject an inmate with pentobarbital synthesized in a compounding pharmacy—a type of drug manufacturer that is not subject to Food and Drug Administration safety regulations. The pentobarbital may simply stop Franklin's heart, as intended. But if it is contaminated by tiny particles—as drugs manufactured by compounding pharmacies often are—the insides of Franklin's veins will feel as though they're being scraped with sandpaper as he dies, warns David Waisel, an associate professor of anesthesiology at Harvard Medical School.
Over the past several years, international drugmakers and the European Union have banned the sale of drugs for use in executions. This has made the components of the Supreme Court-approved three-drug cocktail that states traditionally used to kill inmates—composed of a sedative that left the inmate unable to feel pain, a second drug that works as a paralytic agent, and a third drug that stops his heart—progressively harder to obtain. To overcome this hurdle, Ohio will try to kill an inmate with a never-before-used combinations of drugs, and Missouri will become the third state to execute an inmate using drugs from an unregulated pharmacy. But as Missouri and Ohio's unprecedented executions approach, medical and legal experts say that they are hard put to predict how much pain these new drug protocols will inflict on death row inmates, or how long convicts may linger before the drugs finally kill them.
Earlier coverage of Missouri and Ohio lethal injection issues, at the links. You can also jump to recent national roundups of lethal injection issues.
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