Deborah Denno comments to the Texas Tribune on how Texas and other states that use lethal injection have been scrambling to find a substitute for sodium thiopental since the only American producer of it, Illinois-based Hospira Inc., announced in January it would stop selling the drug.
Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School and a national expert on death penalty issues, said the Texas decision was not about making executions more humane but was meant to make the process more feasible. And she said there could be unexpected consequences of using the new protocol. “This lemming-effect has created a decades-long pattern of lethal injection botches in which department of corrections try to remain one step ahead of lawsuits.”
Read the entire Texas Tribune story.