The Daily Beast – The Death Penalty’s Gruesome Truth

02.06.14
The Death Penalty’s Gruesome Truth
Boiling, crucifying, drawing and quartering, burning at the stake, the chair, the firing squad, the 2-drug cocktail, the three—no matter the process, capital punishment will never be ethical.

The ethics of capital punishment, long at the forefront of centuries-old debate, have recently taken a back seat in recent years to practical matters. It’s not the why we weren’t concerned about, but the how.

First, a drug used for execution in the standard 3-drug “cocktail” devised in the 1970s, thiopental (also known as “truth serum”), is no longer available. Several years ago, the US manufacturer, Hospira, yielded to pressure from anti-death penalty activists and stopped making the drug while European companies stopped selling it to the United States.

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The Atlantic – The Secrecy Behind the Drugs Used to Carry Out the Death Penalty

Inmates killed by lethal injection used to get a dose of sodium thiopental. But that drug is no longer available, and, in a blow to transparency, prison officials in Missouri and elsewhere won’t say how it has been replaced.
The death chamber at the Missouri Correctional Center in Bonne Terre, Mo. (AP Images)

The sharpest battles over capital punishment today are being fought over the identity of the drugs officials seek to use in lethal injections, how those drugs are manufactured and obtained by executioners, and the obligations state officials have to share material information about the drugs with death-row inmates and the rest of the world. Late Friday, in a case out of Missouri, the Eighth U.S Circuit Court of Appeals rendered the most significant ruling yet to come out of these battles. The result is catastrophic for those who believe the means of capital punishment should generally be as transparent as its ends.

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Policy Mic – Even Death Penalty Supporters Will Think Twice After Learning How It’s Actually Carried Out

even, death, penalty, supporters, will, think, twice, after, learning, how, it's, actually, carried, out,  Image Credit: AP

Execution in the U.S. can occur in five ways: by lethal injection, electrocution, lethal gas, hanging, or firing squad. But, lethal injection is by far the most common method employed in the states where the death penalty is legal.

In 2013, 39 people were executed in America. Thirty-eight of them were killed by lethal injection — all but one: a man who requested electrocution, which is not typical.

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