Georgia is said to be rushing to put down condemned prisoners before its stock of execution drugs expires on March 1. Georgia is just one of several states that find the supply of drugs needed for lethal injections drying up. Some states are even said to be hitting the black market.
Georgia confirmed to the Guardian that its entire supply of
pentobarbital expires on 1 March. The expiration date leaves the state
in a quandary: it still has 93 men and one woman on death row, including
Hill, but with no obvious means by which to execute them.
Anti-death penalty campaigners are scathing about the unseemly haste
with which Georgia appears to rushing to beat the deadline. "This
highlights the nastiness of the process that the AG should be racing to
kill prisoners ahead of an expiration date," said Sara Totonchi,
director of the Southern Center for Human Rights.
Georgia's
difficulties procuring execution drugs is a reflection of the gradual
stranglehold that is being put on the US death penalty by authorities
and companies around the world refusing to act as accomplices in the
death sentence. The European commission, following unilateral action by
the UK, has imposed restrictions on the export of medicines to all US corrections departments.
As
a result of the European squeeze, Hospira, the only US manufacturer of
sodium thiopental, an anaesthetic that was used widely in the triple
cocktail of lethal injections, ceased production in 2011.
That, in turn, forced states including Georgia to revise their death
protocols, shifting to a single injection of pentobarbital.
But now supplies of pentobarbital are also running out. One of the leading manufacturers of the drug, the Danish firm Lundbeck, has introduced tough restrictions on the distribution of the drug to prevent it falling into the hands of US executioners.
As legal routes for the procurement of medical drugs have been
successively shut down, several of the 33 states that still practice the
death penalty have resorted to shady methods for acquiring them.
Georgia was exposed in 2011 as having been one of the states that bought lethal injection drugs from Dream Pharma, an unlicensed company that operated out of a driving school in west London.
Showing posts with label Death penalty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Death penalty. Show all posts
Saturday, February 23, 2013
Sunday, November 18, 2007
Kill' Em - You'll Be Glad You Did
The United States is a real, law and order country. Although maybe it would be more accurate to describe it as a real, "crime and punishment" country.
There's a lot of support in America for the death penalty but there's also a growing opposition to it. Opponents often cite studies, usually from other nations, that show that capital punishment is not a deterrent to homicide, especially murder.
Now a number of American studies have been released that claim to show that the death penalty is indeed a powerful deterrent to murder. From the New York Times:
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise.
“You have two parallel universes — economists and others,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment.” Responding to the new studies, he said, “is like learning to waltz with a cloud.”
The studies try to explain changes in the murder rate over time, asking whether the use of the death penalty made a difference. They look at the experiences of states or counties, gauging whether executions at a given time seemed to affect the murder rate that year, the year after or at some other later time. And they try to remove the influence of broader social trends like the crime rate generally, the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes.
“It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”
The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s.
The inconvenient fact that the American studies and the American experience stand alone to those everywhere else in the West is anything but problematical to these economists because, when you get to set the rules of the study, you work in an artificial world free of considerations such as overall crime rates, the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes. There, see it's all so simple, so very, very simple.
There's a lot of support in America for the death penalty but there's also a growing opposition to it. Opponents often cite studies, usually from other nations, that show that capital punishment is not a deterrent to homicide, especially murder.
Now a number of American studies have been released that claim to show that the death penalty is indeed a powerful deterrent to murder. From the New York Times:
According to roughly a dozen recent studies, executions save lives. For each inmate put to death, the studies say, 3 to 18 murders are prevented.
The studies, performed by economists in the past decade, compare the number of executions in different jurisdictions with homicide rates over time — while trying to eliminate the effects of crime rates, conviction rates and other factors — and say that murder rates tend to fall as executions rise.
“You have two parallel universes — economists and others,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment.” Responding to the new studies, he said, “is like learning to waltz with a cloud.”
The studies try to explain changes in the murder rate over time, asking whether the use of the death penalty made a difference. They look at the experiences of states or counties, gauging whether executions at a given time seemed to affect the murder rate that year, the year after or at some other later time. And they try to remove the influence of broader social trends like the crime rate generally, the effectiveness of the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes.
“It seems unlikely,” Professor Donohue and Professor Wolfers concluded in their Stanford article, “that any study based only on recent U.S. data can find a reliable link between homicide and execution rates.”
The two professors offered one particularly compelling comparison. Canada has executed no one since 1962. Yet the murder rates in the United States and Canada have moved in close parallel since then, including before, during and after the four-year death penalty moratorium in the United States in the 1970s.
The inconvenient fact that the American studies and the American experience stand alone to those everywhere else in the West is anything but problematical to these economists because, when you get to set the rules of the study, you work in an artificial world free of considerations such as overall crime rates, the criminal justice system, economic conditions and demographic changes. There, see it's all so simple, so very, very simple.
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