Because death penalty abolitionists have hounded pharmaceutical companies, Texas and the other capital punishment states have found it nearly impossible to obtain a supply of execution drugs. Texas, which uses pentobarbital, has stockpiled some alternate lethal drugs that it intends to use in executions if and when its supply of pentobarbital is exhausted.
When the press requested that the Texas Department of Criminal Justice reveal where it obtains its supply of pentobarbital, the agency refused to do so because it feared the supplier would be harassed by opponents of the death penalty. But the State Attorney General ruled that TDCJ had to release the information under the Freedom of Information Act. When TDCJ revealed that it obtained its supply of pentobarbital from a Houston-area compound pharmacy, the owner was harassed and threatened to the point where he demanded that TDCJ return the eight vials of pentobarbital he had sold them.
On Wednesday, Michael Yowell was executed with a lethal dose of pentobarbital by the State of Texas for the 1998 murders of his parents. Prior to Yowell’s execution, his attorneys filed a public information request for an inventory of the state’s supply of execution drugs. In response, TDCJ revealed that in addition to its supply of pentobarbital, as of August 7 it had:
__200 vials of Propofol - the anesthetic that did in Michael Jackson
__25 vials of hydromorphone – a powerful opiate
__30 vials of Midazolam – a strong sedative
That revelation has led Hospira, a Chicago-area pharmaceutical company, to request that TDCJ return the Propofol it sold them. Hospira has “publicly objected to the use of any of our products in capital punishment.”
So far this year, Texas had carried out 14 executions with pentobarbital. Six more executions are scheduled between now and next February.
2 comments:
If they thin the drugs out with Drano it still works.
@ bob walsh..
You BARBARIAN or what?
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