Deborah Denno was quoted in a Vox piece about Pope Francis’s speech to Congress, in which he renewed his call for the United States to end its use of the death penalty. Her comments appear later in the article and relate to the drugs used in lethal injections.
The drug shortage began around 2010, when drug suppliers around the world, including in the US, began refusing to supply sodium thiopental for the injections — out of either opposition to the death penalty or concerns about having their products associated with executions. “The drugs were being cut off right and left,” Deborah Denno, a death penalty expert at Fordham University, said.
Hospira Inc. was the sole US-based supplier of sodium thiopental, according to Denno. But Hospira stopped producing the drug in 2011, after struggling to procure active ingredients for its production and fielding legal threats from authorities in Italy, where the death penalty is vehemently opposed.