When the history of the long, slow decline of capital punishment in America is written, a footnote must be reserved for the Apothecary Shoppe of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Do not be deceived by the name. Quaint and cosy it may sound, but until this month the company was the unofficial supplier of the drug used in executions by neighbouring Missouri.
The arrangement resembled something out of The French Connection rather than preparation for the ultimate punishment that the state can mete out to one of its citizens. An official from Missouri's Department of Corrections (by such euphemisms are prison services known in the US) would secretly travel to Tulsa. There he would pay $11,000 in cash for a specially commissioned version of pentobarbital, a powerful barbiturate. The official would then carry the stuff by hand back across the state line to Missouri, to be injected into the condemned man.
Three times this happened last year – and the same thing was to have happened for this Wednesday's scheduled execution of Michael Taylor, convicted of raping and murdering a schoolgirl in 1989 while under the influence of crack cocaine. But on 10 February, the Missouri legislature held a hearing on the state's execution protocol, and the department's shifty little drug-running operation with Tulsa became public.
Taylor's lawyers, who since 2006 has been fighting the death sentence on the grounds that lethal injection violated the US constitution's ban on "cruel and unusual punishment", brought a new action against the Apothecary Shoppe, claiming it was not certified to do business in Missouri. The company thereupon announced it would not supply the drug for the execution after all.
Source: The Independent, Feb. 23, 2014
