Shop鈥檚 closed. On Friday, Pfizer, one of the world鈥檚 biggest pharmaceutical companies, that its drugs could no longer be used for lethal injections.
The move underscores a message from the US medical community: if states want to keep the death penalty, they will have to find another way to do it.
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鈥淭his is probably the last prominent high-status pharmaceutical company to withdraw from allowing its products to be used in executions,鈥� says , a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley.
He says that lethal injections lend the death penalty an air of medical legitimacy. 鈥淲hat you are witnessing now is the last gasp of that pretense,鈥� says Zimring.
Tarnished by association
The death penalty is currently legal in 31 US states. Past executions have typically involved injecting prisoners with a three-drug 鈥渃ocktail鈥� of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.
But in the past few years, pharmaceutical companies have started refusing to sell their supplies to US prisons. The drug shortage makes it tougher for states to carry out executions.
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Pfizer says that now, when selling to government entities, it will ask them to certify that the drugs will only be used for medical purposes and not resold to someone else.
鈥淚t makes clear that the major pharmaceutical companies are speaking with a single voice,鈥� says Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organisation in Washington DC. 鈥淭hey don鈥檛 want their brand to be tarnished by association with killing. That鈥檚 not good for business, and that鈥檚 not good for their image, and it is certainly offensive to their medical mission.鈥�
Botched executions
Without readily available drugs, states have increasingly been forced to search for alternatives. Last year, for example, Utah relegalised death by firing squad 鈥� although this method has not yet been used since the bill was passed.
As the shortage has taken hold, states have tried importing the drugs, ordering them from special pharmacies, or trying new drug mixtures that haven鈥檛 been used for lethal injections before. That opens up the possibility for more bungled executions 鈥� such as that of Clayton Lockett, an Oklahoma inmate executed with an unproven cocktail of drugs in 2014. He reportedly suffered for 43 minutes before dying.
鈥淭he more states use unproven drugs and continue to use non-medical personnel to carry out these types of procedures, the greater the risk becomes that something will go wrong and that executions will be botched,鈥� says Dunham.
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