After 20 years of endless appeals this scumbag was finally topped. His 11th hour appeal that one of the lethal injection drugs might not be safe – that’s a laugher – was turned down by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court. If Obama gets to appoint just one more justice the 5-4 conservative-liberal makeup of the court will shift to the liberals and we can probably kiss any further executions goodbye.
It is ironic that Arizona obtained its sodium thiopental from Britain which outlawed the death penalty in 1964.
ARISONA EXECUTES DEATH ROW INMATE AFTER BRITISH COMPANY SUPPLIES LETHAL INJECTION CHEMICAL
By Wil Longbottom
Mail Online
October 27, 2010
Arizona has executed a death row inmate after an unnamed British company supplied one of the chemicals used in lethal injections, it has been revealed.
Jeffrey Landrigan, 50, who was convicted of the murder of Chester Dean Dyer in 1989, had been granted a stay of execution over concerns about the legality of the substances used to kill him.
His lawyers had argued that the drug - sodium thiopental - might not meet U.S. standards and his planned execution violated his constitutional rights to be free from cruel and unusual punishment.
But it was cleared to proceed after Supreme Court justices voted 5-4 in favor of overturning the federal judge's order postponing the execution.
Arizona officials said the sodium thiopental came from Britain, the first time a state has acknowledged obtaining the drug from outside the US since the shortage began slowing executions in the spring.
The sentence was carried out at 6.26am this morning.
In 1989, Landrigan escaped from an Oklahoma prison where he was serving time for second-degree murder.
He was convicted of strangling Chester Dyer in Arizona a year later during an armed burglary and was sentenced to death.
Judge Roslyn Silver blocked the execution 18 hours before it was due to take place after concluding that the state had not provided his legal team with enough information on the safety and legality of substances that would be used to kill him.
But the Supreme Court ruling overrides the lower court order, saying 'there is no evidence in the record to suggest that the drug obtained from a foreign source is unsafe'.
It added: 'There was no showing that the drug was unlawfully obtained, nor was there an offer of proof to that effect.'
The state of Arizona had turned to getting supplies of sodium thiopental - which renders inmates unconscious - from abroad, due to the nationwide shortage of the drug in the U.S.
Chief Deputy Attorney General Tim Nelson said: 'This drug came from a reputable place. There's all sorts of wild speculation that it came from a third-world country, and that's not accurate.'
Hospira Inc. of Lake Forest, Illinois, the sole U.S. manufacturer of the drug, has blamed the shortage on unspecified problems with its raw-material suppliers and said new batches will not be available until January at the earliest.
There are no FDA-approved overseas manufacturers of the drug.
The limited supply has also directly affected executions in California, Kentucky and Oklahoma, and may affect executions in Missouri, which says its supply of sodium thiopental expires in January.
Sodium thiopental is the first of a sequence of three drugs administered in lethal injections that paralyse breathing and stop the heart.
Landrigan was the 24th person executed in Arizona since the state resumed capital punishment in 1992. There are currently 132 inmates on the state's death row.
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