That's the title of a must-read recap of the current status of the scramble for LI drugs by departments of corrections, by Gregg Zoroya in USA Today. It's subtitled, "Capital punishment in the USA is in decline as states wrestle to find drugs for lethal injections."
Here's the beginning:
Prison guards meet in the desert to hand off chemicals for executions. A corrections boss loaded with cash travels to a pharmacy in another state to buy lethal sedatives. States across the country refuse to identify the drugs they use to put the condemned to death.
This is the curious state of capital punishment in America today.
Manufacturers are cutting off supplies of lethal injection drugs because of opposition to the death penalty, and prison officials are scrambling to make up the deficit — sharing drugs, buying them from under-regulated pharmacies or using drug combinations never employed before in putting someone to death.
At the same time, growing numbers of states are ending capital punishment altogether. Others are delaying executions until they have a better understanding of what chemicals work best. And the media report blow-by-blow details of prisoners gasping, snorting or crying out during improvised lethal injection, taking seemingly forever to die.
The last major multi-jurisdictional news article on the topic is at the list. Related posts are in the lethal injection category index.
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