Executed man's mother urges ban on exports profiting from death penalty

Patches Rhode believes her son Brandon died in agony after anaesthetic supplied by UK wholesaler appeared ineffective.

The mother of a US death row inmate who was executed with British-supplied drugs is to call for a ban on exports that support capital punishment overseas when she appears before MPs.

Patches Rhode believes her son, Brandon, died in agony from a lethal injection in a Georgia prison because the UK-sourced anaesthetic, sodium thiopental, appeared not to have been effective.

Her grief has been sharpened by the revelation that the drug which enabled the execution to go ahead was sold by a small-scale pharmaceutical wholesaler, Dream Pharma, that operates out of a driving school office in the west London suburb of Acton.

"I was under the impression that Great Britain is against the death penalty and that any exports [aiding it] would be illegal," she said. "I didn't know that [the government] allowed such drugs to leave the country."

Lord Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions who is chairman of the anti-capital punishment charity Reprieve, is demanding legislation to block exports that profit from or help deliver the death penalty.

He maintains US states inadvertently exposed a loophole in UK law when they ran out of local supplies of the anaesthetic prescribed by US law last summer and began advertising abroad.

Patches Rhode, who will give evidence to the all-party parliamentary group for the abolition of the death penalty, said her son had been so terrified of the method of his execution that he tried to kill himself beforehand, slashing his neck and arm with a razor.

Brandon Rhode was 31 when he was put to death in Jackson state prison on 27 September last year. He had been in jail since 1998; at the age of 18 he carried out a burglary with another youth during which a father and 2 children were shot dead. Brandon's lawyers argued that he had limited mental capacity.

The day before his scheduled execution, Patches was allowed to visit her son. "He was terribly distraught," said the 48-year-old financial auditor, speaking from her home in Mississippi . "He didn't trust the people who run the prison to do what they had to without causing him massive amounts of pain. I was trying to help him come to terms with everything."

After she left the prison, Brandon was allowed a telephone call. "He said, 'I'm going to die tomorrow, aren't I?' and I said, 'Short of a miracle, I think so'."

She said Brandon cut himself after keeping a razor and lost pints of blood but was saved by prison doctors and he spent the last week of his life strapped to a chair. "His hands were in handcuffs and had plastic bags on to stop him unpicking the stitches," his mother said. "Then it was down to an hour-by-hour wait to see what the US supreme court was going to do. On 27 September, his options ran out.

"I was across the highway in a truck stop. His pastor was with him. I had said I would be there [as a witness] if needed but Brandon said he could not look at me and would break down ... When the pastor, Randy Loney, came back, he told me that Brandon had maintained eye contact the whole time.

"But I thought that was real strange because the anaesthetic was supposed to put him to sleep. He never closed his eyes and that suggests it didn't work. So I am left with the thought of my child stretched out on a table and trying to scream but being unable. Imagine how scary that would be: you can't move or speak as they pour battery acid down your veins. I would like to see the death penalty abolished. [The prisons] see these people as less than human and treat them as such."

In a statement given to Reprieve, Dr Mark Heath, a US expert on lethal injection drugs, agreed that the fact that Brandon's eyes remained open suggested he was not properly anaesthetised.

"If the thiopental was inadequately effective Mr Rhode's death would certainly have been agonising," Heath wrote. "There is no dispute that the asphyxiation caused by pancuronium [bromide] and the caustic burning sensation caused by potassium [chloride] would be agonising in the absence of adequate anaesthesia."

According to one pharmaceutical expert, allowing sodium thiopental to drop below freezing in storage or transit might result in it becoming "denatured and not fit for purpose".

Dream Pharma is run by Mehdi Alavi and operates out of the offices of Elgone Driving Academy in west London. At the time of the sale last summer, there was no ban on selling sodium thiopental to the US.

Alavi had earlier suggested that he thought the drugs might have been intended for use in a prison hospital. Asked how the anaesthetic had been stored or transported, he told the Guardian on Friday: "I have no comment on that." He declined to answer further questions.

The anaesthetic is still used, on occasions, in hospitals. It is also one of three drugs administered in sequence supposedly to induce unconsciousness, paralyse the condemned convict -- so that witnesses do not see their death throes -- and stop the heart. The drugs are stipulated by US court rulings. Last summer, American manufacturers ran out of sodium thiopental.

Three people on death row -- Brandon Rhode, Emmanuel Hammond in Georgia, and Jeffrey Landrigan in Arizona -- have been executed using drugs exported by Dream Pharma. Reprieve says it has seen court papers showing that the firm sold sufficient quantities for at least 18 deaths.

California, additionally, has revealed that it has obtained enough sodium thiopental from unidentified UK suppliers for 85 executions.

Sodium thiopental is manufactured in Austria and sold to the Reading-based pharmaceutical company, Archimedes Pharma. Archimedes has denied having any direct dealing with, or knowledge of, Dream Pharma. "Archimedes does not export the product to the US," the company has said.

The business secretary, Vince Cable, imposed export controls on overseas sales of sodium thiopental to the US last November. The department is considering whether to ban exports of pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

Macdonald said: "It is completely unacceptable that [the UK] should be supplying chemicals for use in executions. We need primary legislation to ban the knowing export of drugs for that purpose.

"Some of the markups on the drugs were up to 1,000%. This is profiteering. Parliament needs to intervene. I'm going to bring forward an amendment to a suitable bill."

The British Association of Pharmaceutical Wholesalers (BAPW) will warn this week that the Dream Pharma case highlights serious inadequacies in the licensing regime operated by the government's Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA).

Tony Garlick, the BPAW's technical director, claimed the association had a vested, financial interest in granting licences and was therefore unable to enforce correct handling of drugs according to medical guidelines. "The MHRA is self-financing," he said. "The more licences they grant, the more money they receive. They are granting too many licences to these small operators. They are not being inspected for 3 years and someone can do quite a lot of damage in that time. You don't need to be a qualified pharmacist to be a licensed wholesaler."

An MHRA spokesman said: "The MHRA recognises that there are a large number of licensed wholesale dealers in the UK. Traditionally the UK has had an active and diverse licensed wholesale dealing market and this extensive and varied sector has seemed to help protect the UK from supply shortages in the past.

"A wholesale dealer's licence is only issued after it is established that the appropriate standards of premises, controls and staff are in place. Wholesalers are now subject to a risk-based inspection programme and the MHRA undertakes a series of targeted inspections.

"The MHRA's independence and ability to carry out its regulatory functions are determined by UK and EU legal requirements, not by the way they are funded. Most leading medicines regulators worldwide are funded substantially or exclusively by user-fees."

Source: The Guardian, February 14, 2011

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