Deborah Denno quoted in Vocativ about a motion filed last week by the attorneys of death row inmate Willie Trottie claiming there’s a risk their client will suffer excruciating pain on the gurney due to the source of the Texas’s supply of pentobarbital, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But Fordham law professor Deborah Denno, an expert on lethal injection, says you only have to go back to 2012 to find problems with pentobarbital on the executioner’s table. That’s when convicted murderer Eric Robert, who killed a prison guard in a failed escape attempt, was executed using compounded pentobarbital in South Dakota. “Witnesses said he gasped heavily and that his skin turned a purplish hue,” Denno says. “Using a compounded drug is going to be accompanied by risk—as are all compounded drugs that any of us use on a daily basis, particularly one used in secrecy.” Pentobarbital was also the first of three drugs administered to Michael Wilson during a botched execution in Oklahoma this January. Wilson’s final words: “I feel my whole body burning.”
In an article about lethal injection published in the Georgetown Law Journal earlier this year, Denno wrote, “As death-penalty states turn to increasingly non-traditional sources of drugs…they face overwhelming criticism and legal challenges. In response, they have intensified their efforts to obscure information regarding the development and implementation of their lethal injection protocols.” Denno wrote that the procedures were surrounded by “risk and confusion,” and the only constant appeared to be execution states’ desire for secrecy. “Amidst the chaos of drug shortages, changing protocols, legal challenges, and botched executions, states are unwavering in their desire to conceal this disturbing reality from the public.”
Read the entire Vocativ article.