Republican-controlled states spend astronomical amounts of their taxpayers’ money to buy pharmaceutical drugs from illegal traders in a desperate and almost certainly illegal attempt to carry out lethal injection operations.
Documents obtained by the Guardian reveal the full extent of the spending spree embarking on U.S. death penalty states as they try to launch executions delayed by the pandemic. The findings show that Republican leaders are not only willing to deal with their own state and federal laws, but are also willing to spend lavishly in the process.
The most capable layout was made by Arizona, a state in which Republicans occupy both the chambers of the legislature and the mansion of the governor. A single-page document obtained by the Guardian noted that in October, the Department of Corrections ordered 1,000 scales of pentobarbital sodium salt, each containing 1 mg, in ‘unlabeled bottles and boxes’.
At the bottom of the document is the report: “Paid amount: $ 1,500,000.”
Arizona’s extraordinary $ 1.5 million payment sincerely illustrates the time the state is prepared to kill inmates. Pentobarbital is a sedative used in Arizona executions, with 5 grams injected into the prisoner to cause a fatal overdose.
All the more striking is Arizona’s illegal execution of drugs, as it was made in the midst of a pandemic when so many civilians were injured. At the time the payment was made, there were an estimated 1 million hungry Hungarians, including more than 300,000 children.
It is an offense under Arizona and the federal law to issue pentobarbital without a valid prescription. Medical practitioners may not issue prescriptions for the drug for use in executions, as taking the life of a prisoner has no therapeutic or medical purpose.
The Guardian has asked the Arizona Department of Corrections to explain the costly and apparently illegal purchase of pentobarbital. The department said it was not discussing how it obtained drugs for execution.
It also stresses that the information requested by the Guardian is “statutory confidential”, meaning it is secret according to the court order. A spokesman added: “Pentobarbital has been administered legally and successfully for many years”.
Other documents obtained by the Guardian relate to Tennessee and Missouri. In Tennessee, the Department of Corrections raised $ 190,000 from 2017 to 2020 to purchase midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride – the three drugs in its lethal injection protocol.
During that time, the state executed two inmates – Billy Irick and Donnie Johnson – using these chemicals. This indicates a cost per execution of almost $ 100,000.
In Missouri, the prison service has invested more than $ 160,000 in lethal injections, the documents revealed. The expenses were incurred between 2015 and 2020, when Missouri killed ten inmates, yielding an average cost to taxpayers of $ 16,000 per execution.
These hefty amounts are far from the way initial lethal injections were envisioned. The use of medical drugs to kill prisoners was a groundbreaking in 1977 in Oklahoma, where officials were convinced it would be humane and cheap – they predicted it would cost only $ 10 per execution.
No aspiration has proved this to be true. The alleged humanity of lethal injections is rejected by a series of conspiracy procedures that shocked the country.
The last time Arizona killed a prisoner was in 2014, when the executioner took nearly two hours to inject a gasping and groaning Joseph Wood 15 times while tied to the gurney.
Behind the excessive spending of the states is the utter refusal of pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors to allow their products to be used in American exports. Medical remedies are made to save lives, lead them and not to end it.
As a result, statements of capital punishment have been forced to enter into increasingly dubious – and often illegal – transactions with suppliers at home and abroad. In 2010, five U.S. states illegally purchased foreclosures without the approval of the federal Food and Drug Administration of Dream Pharma, a wholesaler run by a driving school in London.
Since then, states have scrambled legal boundaries in their favor to evade the boycott of pharmaceutical supplies. “States have switched from one drug to another, crossed state borders to get drugs, paid cash and not recorded the payments to keep the purchases secret,” said Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School.
Denno added: “All of these actions are against state or federal laws, and all have ultimately increased the price of the drugs.”
In recent years, 19 states as well as the federal government have secretly shut down their enforcement practices – working particularly hard to disguise the source of their deadly injections. This allows unscrupulous producers and traders to increase their prices.
“Every time a government secretly withdraws, you know there’s a problem. If you are not accountable, it opens the door to favoring, transplanting and dealing with many shady characters who do not have the public interest in mind, ” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. .
Prashant Yadav, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, said prices are usually 1,000% or more higher than the rate charged in regular pharmaceutical markets. “These drugs are traded in a zone of unclear regulatory equipment, so they usually charge a higher price,” he said.
Another cause of the high drug prices is the cost of legal disputes. Between 2018 and 2020, Nevada spent more than $ 100,000 to defend itself in a lawsuit filed by a pharmaceutical manufacturer, which objected to its drugs being fraudulently obtained for use in executions.
Such mismanagement of public money is likely to occur in the current debate in the Nevada state legislature, where lawmakers are considering abolishing the death penalty altogether. Although the legislature is debating the abolition bill, state authorities are aggressively campaigning for the execution of prisoner Zane Floyd.
The Guardian documents, obtained through public records requests, do not disclose where Arizona, Tennessee and Missouri obtained the lethal injectors at such extraordinary costs. However, we know how they want to use the chemicals.
Arizona insists on resuming the execution after the seven-year hiatus that followed Wood’s execution. The state’s attorney general has announced that he intends to seek immediate death orders for two inmates – Frank Atwood, who was sentenced to death for the murder of a girl in 1984, despite inconsistencies in the evidence against him; and Clarence Dixon, who has a long history of mental illness, including schizophrenia.
Tennessee hopes to kill Pervis Payne. The execution of the prisoner has been postponed due to Covid until after April 9 when a new warrant can be instituted. Questions were also asked about Payne’s possible innocence.
One of the paradoxes of the current scramble to illegally and at such high prices purchase lethal injectors is that the efforts are being used exclusively by Republicans who regularly claim to be the party of fiscal conservatism and small government. Hannah Cox, national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said the expenses the Guardian revealed were shocking.
‘You can not run around saying that you are a fiscally conservative Republican, or that you are a limited government and are for the free market, and then have to act that way. “This is completely contrary to every conservative value,” she said.