Deborah Denno quoted in a Global Post story about how a small, unknown, Indian pharmaceutical company in Mumbai, Kayem Pharmaceuticals and its owner, Navneet Verma, 54, decided to stop sending the drug to the US — a move that has made it more difficult to carry out executions.
Lethal injections have become the execution method of choice since 1977, when the Oklahoma legislature first adopted this approach, according to an article in the Georgetown Law Journal by Deborah W. Denno, an expert on the death penalty and a law professor at Fordham University in New York.
“For the last four or five years, departments of corrections have had trouble getting lethal injection drugs and it has forced them to change their lethal injection protocols,” says Denno. “It has caused a lot of problems because many [alternative]lethal injections protocols are based simply on using drugs that are available. They try to use new kinds of drugs and experiment with them — it greatly increases the risk that they could harm someone.”