On January 10, 2025, three Connecticut lawmakers introduced a bill that would make it illegal to manufacture and sell any drugs or medical devices in the state meant to carry out the death penalty. In 2024, Connecticut-based company Absolute Standards was identified as the source of lethal injection drugs used in 13 federal executions in 2020 and 2021. In a letter to the bill’s sponsors, John Criscio, President of Absolute Standards, said the company ceased production of pentobarbital in December 2020 and does not intend “to resume any production or sale” of the drug.
One of the bill’s co-sponsors, Senator Ceci Maher told CT Insider that she “think[s] this is something we need to do to make sure we here in Connecticut are living our values, which is that we do not condone the death penalty.” State House Majority Leader Jason Rojas expressed concern about the bill, noting, “I oppose the death penalty and wouldn’t be opposed to [banning] the sale or manufacture of lethal injection drugs” but nevertheless he wants to examine the bill’s implications.
During the April 7, 2024, episode of “Last Week Tonight,” host John Oliver focused on the use of pentobarbital in federal executions. “Our federal and state governments have continued to pursue questionably legal and definitely horrifying ways [of execution],” Mr. Oliver said. Calling the Trump’s administration accounts of 13 federal executions with pentobarbital at the end of President Trump’s first term “sanitized,” Mr. Oliver noted autopsies of two executed individuals revealed the prisoners’ lungs were “twice as heavy as they should be, indicating ‘pulmonary edema,’ where fluid rushes into the lungs and airways,” causing a drowning or suffocating sensation without adequate anesthetization. The U.S. Department of Justice is currently reviewing the appropriateness of using pentobarbital in executions. Nashville-based federal public defender Kelley Henry, who is considering a challenge to Tennessee’s single drug pentobarbital protocol notes, “We know from the scientific data that single drug pentobarbital results in pulmonary edema which has been likened to waterboarding[.]”
Through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests submitted by journalists on Mr. Oliver’s team for its April 2024 report, Last Week Tonight identified Absolute Standards as the firm that provided the federal government with the pentobarbital used in the 2020 – 2021 round of federal executions. The problem, Mr. Oliver alleges, is that while Absolute Standards has been registered with Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) since August 2018 to produce pentobarbital, the drugs produced by the manufacturer are not authorized for human consumption. According to Mr. Oliver, “under the law, companies that make drugs need to be registered with the FDA, and the Trump administration claimed, before the executions, that its supplier was ‘properly registered.’” An additional FOIA request submitted to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) revealed that the organization was “unable to locate and records responsive” to the request, and Absolute Standards “has not been inspected by the FDA.”
For more than a decade, departments of corrections across the United States have had difficulty acquiring some of the drugs traditionally used in lethal injection executions. Many drug manufacturers have explicitly banned the use of their products in executions and others have stopped producing these drugs completely. More than a dozen states have also enacted State-by-State Execution Protocols secrecy statutes intended to protect drug suppliers and manufacturers from public scrutiny.
Source:
Death Penalty Information Center, Staff, January 13, 2025
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
