Tennessee To Use Electric Chair When Lethal Drugs Unavailable

Read the CNN article here | Ed Payne, CNN | Friday, May 23, 2014

Europe Moves to Block Trade in Medical Drugs Used in US Executions

THE GUARDIAN: New export controls will further limit the ability of states already facing severe shortages of sedatives used to kill prisoners

The European Commission has imposed tough new restrictions on the export of anaesthetics used to execute people in the US, in a move that will exacerbate the already extreme shortage of the drugs in many of the 34 states that still practice the death penalty.

The EC has added eight barbiturates to its list of restricted products that are tightly controlled on the grounds that they may be used for "capital punishment, torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment". The eight include pentobarbital and sodium thiopental – the two drugs on which almost all American executions currently depend.

The EC said its move, which follows restrictions introduced unilaterally by the UK in November 2010, was designed to forward the European Union's stated mission to abolish the death penalty around the world. "The decision today contributes to the wider EU efforts to abolish the death penalty worldwide," said the commission's vice president, Catherine Ashton. » | Ed Pilkington in New York | Tuesday, December 20, 2011

The American Way of Death
TIMES ONLINE – Leading Article: A botched execution in Ohio should quicken the end of capital punishment

America is the only big democracy — apart, occasionally, from Japan — that still carries out capital punishment. The botched attempted execution in Ohio this week of a murderer should prompt America to join the rest of the developed world in consigning judicial killing to history. There is inadequate evidence that it acts as a deterrent, it ignores the risk of miscarriages of justice and allows no room for repentance or correction. But above all it is a barbarity that stains civilised society.

There is no question but that the crime committed by Romell Broom was vile. He was sentenced to die for the rape and murder in 1984 of a 14-year-old girl. But his execution on Tuesday was halted when technicians failed, after a two-hour-long search, to find a vein sturdy enough to deliver the three-drug lethal injection.

A one-week reprieve granted by the Governor of Ohio may well be extended indefinitely, partly because it is half a century since any inmate was subjected to more than one execution, and partly because some justices of the US Supreme Court have now begun to wonder if botched lethal injections might not violate the eighth amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment”. Last year the court upheld the use of lethal injections. But Justice John Paul Stevens, while concurring, said that imposing the death penalty represented “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes”. Other justices are believed to share this view.

When Texas became the first US state to introduce lethal injections in 1982, they were thought more humane than the electric chair, gas or hanging. It is time that they went the same way. [Source: Times Online / Comment here] Leading Article | Thursday, September 17, 2009