New Statesman, of the U.K., post, "US prisons, foiled by an EU boycott, are turning to untested drugs in executions," by Ian Steadman. It's also available in the New Republic. Here's the beginning:
Pentobarbital and sodium thiopental are anaesthetics, used around the world by doctors and vets on all kinds of patients in a variety of cases. They are also used to render prisoners unconscious in the ten US states that use lethal injection to execute their condemned.
That is, as long as they can obtain the drug. Since pharmaceutical company Hospira stopped manufacturing sodium thiopental in early 2011, there hasn’t been a domestic producer of either drug within the US. American prisons rely on either one of the drugs as the first of the three used in the standard cocktail given to those due to be executed - the others being pancuronium bromide, which paralyses all of the muscles in the body, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
A couple of years later, and prisons have started to use up the stockpiles, bought from before production ceased. The result is the rise of new, untested drugs in execution cocktails.
"Chilling Testimony From Death Row Executioners Exposes How Rotten Our System Really is," by Laura Dimon at PolicyMic. There are infographics in the report, which brings together some excellent journalistic work.
At some point for Fred Allen, something snapped. He’d done one too many. He broke.
Years had gone by, but he could still picture the eyes of every inmate he'd helped tie down, restrain with multiple straps so that the execution team could slide needles into his veins, enabling deadly chemicals to surge through his body.
The chilling Sound Portraits radio documentary from 2000, "Witness to an Execution," won a Peabody Award that year, and there is no question why. It's unnerving, eye-opening, and massively instrumental in illustrating the process, the nuances, and the anatomy of an execution — something we're far too unfamiliar with.
And:
Often, when we think about the capital punishment, we think about the person getting executed (was he a monster?), we might think about his lawyers, and we most certainly think about the victim and the victim's family. Will they watch the execution? Do they want to?
But we rarely think about the people who have to carry out the process itself. It's no wonder Jeffrey Toobin opened his recent New Yorker piece with, "Pity the modern executioner. The Supreme Court has burdened him with obligations that reflect considerable ambivalence about his profession."
Earlier reporting on lethal injection issues begins with news from Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma. Related posts are in the international and lethal injection category indexes.
Comments