Missouri to execute inmate using drugs from secret supplier
Source: Guardian
Missouri to execute inmate using drugs from secret supplier
Lawyers worry unregulated drugs could cause 'excrutiating pain' as state moves to circumvent EU boycott on execution drugs
Ed Pilkington in New York
theguardian.com, Tuesday 19 November 2013 16.01 EST
Missouri is due to execute a multiple murderer just after midnight in which the state will for the first time use a lethal dose of pentobarbital obtained from a secret compounding pharmacy.
Barring last minute intervention by the courts, at 12.01am on Wednesday Joseph Paul Franklin, 63, will die for a spate of seven murders of black and Jewish people carried out between 1977 and 1980. He is suspected in as many as 20. Though there are no doubts about Franklins guilt, or the heinousness of the racist killings in which he engaged, the procedure is controversial by dint of its protocol.
In order to keep the identity of the pharmacy that has supplied the drugs a secret, the Missouri corrections department has listed the company as a member of its execution team, thereby extending to it the right to anonymity. States across the US are becoming increasingly secretive in their methods of execution as a means of circumventing a stringent boycott on medical drugs used in lethal injections. The boycott, led by the European Union, has drastically staunched the flow of medicines to the extent that some states have been forced to delay scheduled executions.
Franklins lawyers have protested that the use of pentobarbital obtained from a secret supplier could cause him an excruciatingly painful execution. In court documents, they say that compounded drugs are all but unregulated, and their ingredients come from an unsavoury network of grey market suppliers whose unknown products subject the end-user to severe risks.
Read more: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/19/missouri-execute-inmate-death-penalty-boycott
warrant46
(2,205 posts)BlueJazz
(25,348 posts)You assholes: 1.Some of us don't want the Death Penalty and 2. We're not cruel Animals who like to see suffering.
idwiyo
(5,113 posts)Blue_Tires
(55,445 posts)idwiyo
(5,113 posts)Without the licence it would be totally illegal of course, but these state approved killings must go on, legality be damned!
KamaAina
(78,249 posts)after all, they're going to die anyway, amirite?
struggle4progress
(118,034 posts)nomorenomore08
(13,324 posts)to the death penalty. I'm not cheering on this guy's execution - that would be hypocritical - but I don't think the world will be any poorer for his loss.
marble falls
(56,358 posts)applied equally.
nomorenomore08
(13,324 posts)But otherwise you're absolutely right. Capital punishment is ultimately rooted in the visceral desire for revenge, more so than any enlightened notion of "justice."