Deborah Denno comments to NBC News about how death penalty states, suddenly faced with a shortage of drugs for executions, are increasingly turning to loosely regulated compounding pharmacies for the lethal dose — raising concerns about safety and secrecy.
“We don’t know quite what they’re getting,” said Deborah W. Denno, a professor at Fordham University law school who has written extensively about the death penalty. “It’s not being tested or approved in the way that it typically would be.”Denno said she was unaware of any “botched” lethal injections using drugs from compounding pharmacies. But just because an execution looks normal doesn’t mean something hasn’t gone wrong, such as inmates not getting enough sedative, she said.
Denno said that executions are far from the basic purposes of compounding pharmacies, like mixing a special version of a prescription because a patient is allergic to a particular chemical.
“If I get a face cream and a compounding pharmacy leaves out an ingredient, maybe I can get a rash,” she said. “When we’re talking about somebody being executed, not sedated properly, the drug is creating more pain for them.”