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. [..] 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. (Ed Pilkington) More here.