Missouri AG wants to establish a state-run laboratory to make lethal injection drugs

With the extreme secrecy enveloping Missouri's death penalty protocol coming under greater scrutiny, attorney general Chris Koster has come up with an end-around to using private pharmacies to develop lethal injection drugs.

Koster told lawyers at the Lake of the Ozarks on Thursday that the Missouri legislature should establish a state-run laboratory to produce its own lethal injection chemicals.

That, Koster says, would eliminate the rigamarole Missouri goes through to procure the drugs from pharmaceutical companies and pharmacies that are generally opposed to supplying their products for the purpose of killing someone.

That process has led Missouri to dark and largely unknown sources for its lethal injection drugs. The Pitch in January found out that Missouri was getting its drugs from The Apothecary Shoppe in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The Apothecary Shoppe is a compounding pharmacy that St. Louis Public Radio later reported had a rap sheet of warnings and disciplinary action taken against it.

Lawyers for condemned Kansas City murderer Michael Taylor sued to keep The Apothecary Shoppe from supplying Missouri with drugs used in his execution. The pharmacy agreed to sit out the Taylor execution, and Missouri found the drugs it used for Taylor's execution from another unknown source.

"Lethal injection relies upon an uneasy cooperation between medical professionals who assist in the executions, pharmaceutical companies that provide the chemicals, and the state that is ultimately responsible for coordination of executions and on whose legal authority the process is carried out," Koster said, according to a transcript of his remarks released by his office. "In recent years, this cooperative arrangement has become so strained that continued use of lethal injection as the preferred execution method is currently being reconsidered in several states."

Pressure has been mounting on Missouri's death penalty machine ever since it kicked into high gear late last year. Since executing Joseph Paul Franklin in November, Missouri has executed on average one prisoner a month.

But the state has carried out the punishment in dubious fashion. One federal judge took the state to task for executing prisoners in haste while their lawyers were attempting to get a stay from higher appeals courts. Court evidence later revealed that Missouri Department of Corrections officials were taking cash payments off the books to pharmacies that assisted with executions.

Missouri's history of using lethal injection and its method of contracting with medical professionals hasn't fared any better. It was revealed by the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in the mid-2000s that Missouri was using a doctor who later testified to often making mistakes in the dosages he used in lethal injections.

The story helped raise a troubling specter in the use of lethal injection, which became a favored execution method because of the perception that it killed the condemned peacefully. But a number of lethal injection executions over the years have resulted in gruesome and disturbing deaths, which some death penalty opponents view as the result of using incompetent corrections personnel or compromised medical professionals to carry out those executions.

The last execution in the United States was the high-profile killing of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma on April 29 in which he took 45 minutes to die after corrections officials there botched his lethal injection. Witnesses reported that Lockett's execution was a grisly scene.

Missouri tried to become the 1st state to execute a prisoner since the problematic Lockett execution when it had Russell Bucklew scheduled to die on May 21. But appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have incrementally viewed Missouri's execution protocol with greater skepticism in 2014, resulting in the Supreme Court halting Bucklew's execution until lower courts could review the issues of his case more closely.

Source: pitch.com, May 30, 2014

USA | What happens in the final weeks before an execution? These reporters were inside the room.

The journalists behind ‘The Last 12 Weeks’ earned extraordinary access to a death penalty defense team—and faced difficult ethical choices Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life. So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings. But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.

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Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea. “I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.” The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

19 July 1943 | Auschwitz's Largest Public Hanging: 12 Polish Prisoners Executed in Escape Reprisal

OSWIECIM, Poland — The SS carried out the largest public hanging in Auschwitz history on July 19, 1943, executing 12 Polish prisoners before other inmates as collective punishment for escapes and civilian contacts. The victims, all from the camp’s surveyors’ labor unit, were hanged on gallows built in front of the camp kitchen during an Auschwitz I roll call. The SS orchestrated this reprisal following prisoner escapes from the surveyors’ detail and unauthorized communication between inmates and civilians. Camp authorities used the recent escapes as a pretext to impose collective punishment.

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Japan: Capital punishment for a minor

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Florida to execute William Silvia for 2006 shooting murder of wife

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Florida executes Dennis Sochor

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Oldest inmate set to be executed in Florida will face strict spending limit for final meal

An entire category of food is also off-limits for final meal requests in Florida Florida is currently preparing to execute its oldest inmate later today (July 14), a 74-year-old convicted murderer who has been on death row since the 1980s—but his final meal will be limited by a strict budget. Dennis Sochor is scheduled to be put to death later today, making history as the oldest inmate to ever be executed in the state. The criminal, who has been on death row for nearly 40 years, will be administered the lethal three-drug injection, with the process due to begin at around 6pm.

Idaho | Death row prisoners sue over state's new firing squad

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – Days after Idaho made the switch to a firing squad for executions, two Idaho death row prisoners next in line to be put to death sued the state prison system, saying its director withheld information about how she settled on the specifics for carrying out the method. Attorneys for prisoners Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto filed suit this week in state district court against Idaho Department of Correction Director Bree Derrick. In the filing, they called her approval of an updated standard operating procedure for the firing squad and lethal injection as a backup method “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion and in excess of the statutory authority of the agency.”

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