Missouri to execute inmate using drugs from secret supplier

[Judi Lynn]

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 Franklin’s 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.

Franklin’s 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]

1. Only in amerika

[BlueJazz]

2. I can hear the Repugs now: So what if it causes a severe painful death ?? SO WHAT?

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]

3. I am guessing it's coming from China. :puke:

[Blue_Tires]

4. I'm guessing "secret" means "illegal"

[idwiyo]

8. Wouldn't be much surprised either. Nembutal is fairly easy to synthesise even at home.

Without the licence it would be totally illegal of course, but these state approved killings must go on, legality be damned!

[KamaAina]

5. Maybe they could find the one in Mass. that shipped drugs contaminated with mold

after all, they're going to die anyway, amirite?

[struggle4progress]

6. Oh, Missouri! if ya gotta sneak around to get drugs, mebbe ya oughta admit ya gotta problem

[nomorenomore08]

7. I have to admit I'm conflicted. A case like this tests my otherwise pretty solid opposition

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]

9. I know your pain. But finding an exception only illustrates that the death penalty can't be ....

applied equally.

[nomorenomore08]

10. It's not even my pain. More like society's collective pain, when atrocities like Franklin's happen.

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."