Deborah Denno comments to Agence France-Presse about American death-penalty states struggling to find alternatives to a drug once used for lethal injections and the resulting slowdown in the number of executions.
Seen as the ideal alternative, pentobarbital however may create new obstacles, said Deborah Denno, a lethal injection expert, pointing out that Oklahoma bought the drug in Denmark.
But she said that there is a controversy in Denmark, which, like all of the countries in the European Union, doesn’t practice the death penalty.
“The bottom line is that states are pretty much pressed up against the wall with this, they have nowhere to turn and every time they try to go someplace, they’re encountering difficulties and the major difficulty, it seems even in the pentobarbital case, is that in one way or another, the US is depending on anti-death penalty countries as sources for these drugs,” said Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York.
The entire story ran in Agence France-Presse on January 27, 2011.
