Deborah Denno was quoted in a New Yorker piece about Pfizer’s decision to restrict distribution of its drugs for lethal injections. Denno was cited for her research related to the Supreme Court case Baze v. Rees, which upheld the constitutionality of a particular method of lethal injection used for capital punishment.
The legal scholar Deborah Denno has documented more than three hundred lawsuits filed in the six years following the Baze decision that have cited the case in challenging lethal injection as a method of execution. Most of them were unsuccessful, but they reveal that twenty states, rather than maintaining protocols substantially similar to Kentucky’s, made “unfettered substitutions” in “desperate attempts to adhere to their execution schedules” as a result of drug shortages. Those substitutions meant that inmates were guinea pigs for new forms of lethal injection. Drug companies, for their part, didn’t want their drugs used in executions, and tried maneuvers, many without success, to prevent that use.