"States scramble for a new lethal injection cocktail," is today's Fort Wayne News-Sentinel editorial. Here's the beginning:
It is appropriate to seek more human execution methods.
The drug Brevital, according to Par Pharmaceutical, the company that makes it, is “intended to be used as an anesthetic in life-sustaining procedures.” The state does intend to use it as an anesthetic, but with one important difference: Those to whom it is given aren’t supposed to wake up. Brevital is to be part of an untested cocktail the state wants to use to execute condemned prisoners.
Par wants the state to give up those plans because the intended use is “inconsistent with its medical indications” as approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. Indiana says it isn’t going to give the drug back because it will produce “a state of deep, painless unconsciousness” as part of a “three-step protocol intended to carry out an execution in a humane manner.”
And so it goes with “humaneness,” the latest flash point in the death penalty debate.
Related posts are in the lethal injection category index.
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