"Our View: Secret drug," is the title of a Joplin Globe editorial.
Some Missouri legislators are now calling for the return of the firing squad. Those are the kind of bills that draw attention and make our state the target of ridicule throughout the nation. They also generally are a waste of taxpayers’ time.
But there is a discussion that needs to take place about the death penalty, and that’s whether Missourians are OK with the secrecy that now surrounds the drug being used to carry it out.
And:
As pharmaceutical companies take steps to prevent the use of the products in executions, the shortage of willing drug suppliers has Missouri and other states turning to different types of drugs. Missouri is now using pentobarbital, a drug commonly used to euthanize animals. Smulls was the third Missouri death-row prisoner to be executed with the drug. Missouri buys its pentobarbital from an unnamed compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma. Oklahoma also keeps the source of its pentobarbital a secret.
Because of the secrecy and restricted public oversight, we expect every execution in the state to be challenged. It’s what prompted the bill calling for firing squads.
Transparency, in our view, must be present at all levels of government, but especially when it comes to carrying out death sentences.
Andrew Cohen's latest at the Atlantic is, "Missouri Executed This Man While His Appeal Was Pending in Court." Here's the beginning.
It is 2014, not 1964 or 1914, and yet on Wednesday night a black man in Missouri, a black man convicted by an all-white jury, was executed before his federal appeals had been exhausted. He was executed just moments after reportedly being hauled away by prison guards while he was in the middle of a telephone call discussing his appeals with one of his attorneys. He was executed even though state officials knew that the justices of the United States Supreme Court still were considering his request for relief.
Asked repeatedly not to execute Smulls while appeals were pending, state officials failed even to respond to emails from defense attorneys that night while corrections officials went ahead with the execution. Smulls thus was pronounced dead four minutes before the Supreme Court denied his final stay request. This was not an accident or some bureaucratic misunderstanding and did not come as a surprise to Smulls’ lawyers. They say it was the third straight execution in Missouri in which corrections officials went ahead with lethal injection before the courts were through with the condemned man's appeals.
Just last month, for example, Missouri officials similarly executed a man named Allen Nicklasson before his appeals were concluded. That timing of that execution prompted a federal appeals court judge, 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Kermit Bye, to declare that he was “alarmed” that Missouri proceeded with its execution “before this court had even finished voting on Nicklasson's request for a stay. In my near fourteen years on the bench, this is the first time I can recall this happening.
Earlier coverage of the Missouri execution begins at the link.
You can also read more of Andrew Cohen at the Atlantic.
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