Deborah Denno comments to the Washington Post on the execution of Dennis McGuire, which drew widespread media attention, was the latest example of an ongoing issue: Lethal injection, the primary method of execution in the U.S., has been fraught in recent years with drug shortages and a host of related problems.
“In 2014, we have a far riskier, more haphazard lethal injection procedure than we ever have had throughout the country,” said Deborah W. Denno, a death penalty expert and a professor at Fordham Law School.
So many states switched to using pentobarbital, the drug that has cropped up the most often in executions carried out since 2011. But Lundbeck, the Danish company that had supplied the drug, protested the use of pentobarbital in executions and said it would no longer ship it to prisons in U.S. states that use lethal injection.
That’s “where the real scrambling begins,” Denno said. States have tried to find other ways to carry out executions.
Some, like Ohio, ran out of pentobarbital and had to figure out other drugs to use. Others have had to look elsewhere for the drugs, only to be rebuffed. A German company behind propofol, the anesthetic known to many after Michael Jackson’s death, said in 2012 it wouldn’t allow it to be sold for use in an execution. Missouri had planned to use propofol in an execution, which would have been a first, but that was halted last fall.
The European objections stem from the European Union’s opposition to the death penalty, which means Europe is effectively responsible for the shortage of execution drugs. As a result, states are experimenting, Denno said.
“Despite all the litigation that has occurred…lethal injection has never been riskier or more problematic than it has been within the last four or five years, because of the drug shortages,” Denno said.
Read the entire Washington Post story.