The U.S. is facing a shortage of a drug widely used for lethal injections. With few options, states are turning to new drugs and compounding pharmacies, rather than overseas companies.
The move is raising safety concerns, and in some cases delaying executions. Other executions are proceeding, however, and advocates are asking whether the use of new drugs violates the inmates' Eighth Amendment protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
A Witness To Lethal Injection
In 1989, William Happ was sentenced to death for the murder and rape of 21-year-old Angie Crowley. For decades, Happ appealed and lost.
His death sentence remained, but the method of execution had changed since his conviction. Since 1924, Florida had used the electric chair to execute prisoners, but in 2000, facing pressure from the Supreme Court, the state switched to lethal injection.
More than a quarter century after Crowley's murder, Happ's execution date was finally set for Oct. 15, 2013. But the state had a problem: Supplies of pentobarbital, a drug commonly used for executions, were running low. As the execution date approached, the state ran out of the drug altogether.
So the Florida Department of Corrections decided to use a new drug -- a sedative called midazolam that had never been tested for execution. Nobody knew exactly how it would work.
Associated Press reporter Brendan Farrington was in the viewing room. "It's a very solemn, serious, quiet atmosphere. There's no talking," he tells All Things Considered host Arun Rath.
"They bring the witnesses in, and there's a screen across a long, rectangular window. And when they're ready to begin, the screen slowly rises," Farrington says. "The person conducting the execution will announce that the sentence is about to be carried out, tells this to the condemned, and asks if he has any last words."
Happ chose to speak, admitting to the crime and expressing shame for it. "[He said] he hopes God forgives him, and he realizes the family probably could not," Farrington says. "From there, the execution proceeds."
At 6 p.m. sharp, the execution began. Farrington had seen three other executions -- none of which used midazolam. In those cases, he says, the prisoners' eyes closed "fairly quickly, and once their eyes closed, they usually stay closed."
"While it wasn't dramatically different than previous executions, it did seem like it took him longer to lose consciousness," Farrington says. "In Happ's case, his eyes were still opening two, three, four minutes into the process. Once they closed, about 10 minutes in, his head started moving kinda just around, and there was some motion."
There's no way to know if Happ was in pain during his last moments. Some anesthesia experts have expressed concern that midazolam and other untested sedatives could fail to work properly during an execution. If that happened, condemned prisoners could die slowly or painfully, a violation of legal guidelines for executions.
Megan McCracken studies lethal injection drugs for the Death Penalty Clinic at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law.
"If the first drug does not in fact deeply anesthetize the prisoner," she says, "then he or she could be conscious and aware of being both paralyzed and able to experience pain and the experience of cardiac arrest."
In Search Of Drugs
NPR's Kathy Lohr has been covering the shortage of lethal injection drugs for years. She says the issue started when the drug companyHospira stopped making one of the most common drugs used in lethal injections, sodium thiopental. The anesthetic was used as part of a three-drug protocol.
"The company was the only maker of the drug in the United States," Lohr says. "But by 2011, the company stopped manufacturing it. In part, it really wanted to distance itself from executions."
The move caused a shortage, she says, "which basically led states to search for the drug wherever they could find it."
Some states began trading between themselves. Once the supply either runs out or expires, states are forced to come up with new protocols, find new drugs, or simply postpone the execution.
Missouri recently canceled an execution because it had planned to use propofol, a widely used anesthetic in U.S. hospitals. The drug is manufactured in Europe by the German company Fresenius Kabi. That potentially could have caused larger problems.
"The European Union has a statute that does not allow the export of any product that might be used in capital punishment," says company spokesman Matt Kuhn.
So when Fresenius Kabi got word of Missouri's plan to use the drug for capital punishment, it began limiting how the propofol would be distributed in the U.S. Kuhn says it supplies about 90 percent of the U.S. market for the drug.
"If propofol was used in an execution, then the likelihood of sanctions or a ban exporting it from the European Union would become a reality," he says. "And in turn, that would lead to a shortage of the product that's used 50 million times a year in the U.S."
Missouri announced Tuesday it would not use propofol; it's going to use pentobarbital instead.
Richard Dieter, who opposes the death penalty and directs the Death Penalty Information Center, says Missouri made the right decision in switching drugs.
"I think Missouri wisely got out of that whole crisis area and now finds a local pharmacy that will make a different drug, and joins Texas and some other states like Ohio and Georgia in this process," he says.
Compounding The Issue
But now there's another issue: Missouri and a number of states are now getting their drugs from compounding pharmacies. That bypasses the big European drug manufacturers altogether. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration doesn't regulate them, either.
"The drugs they're producing, including this pentobarbital, are not made specifically for executions and ... no court has actually reviewed this process," Lohr says. "So if the drugs cannot be validated as effective, this could be a violation of an inmate's Eighth Amendment right against cruel and unusual punishment."
Texas, Ohio and Missouri all have announced plans to use compounding pharmacies just this month.
"I think we should be using the best practice -- not what's available," Dieter says. "And that's what we've come down to: What can the states get a hold of from the back room of local pharmacies, rather than what's recommended by medical experts."
In addition, states are withholding details about the compounding pharmacies. Georgia inmate Warren Lee Hill is challenging the state's claim that the information should be kept secret.
"His attorneys say they need this information about where the drug is coming from and how it's manufactured -- even to know if they can mount a legal challenge," Lohr says.
The states argue that the pharmacies may not want to sell the drugs if it's made public that they're contributing to capital punishment. A lack of sellers -- and therefore drugs -- could get in the way of carrying out executions.
"So that issue is now making its way through the courts in Georgia, and the execution of an inmate here, Warren Lee Hill, is on hold," Lohr says. "Also, more legal challenges are expected on this issue across the country."
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