Plan B Forum

The cost of lethal injection drugs used in the US to kill criminals on death row has risen dramatically over the past year. The increase comes as their manufacturers move to prevent them being used in executions.


The state of Texas is scheduled to spend $1,286.86 (£811) to kill Keith Thurmond on Wednesday night.

Thurmond, a 52-year-old former air-conditioning technician, was convicted in 2002 of killing his estranged wife and her lover in an argument over child custody.

A little after 18:00 local time (midnight GMT), Texas prison officials will strap Thurmond to a gurney and inject a series of three drugs into his arm.

The cost of the death drugs has risen 15-fold since 2010, when they cost the state $86 (£55).

That is because the drug formerly used to sedate the patient, thiopental sodium, is no longer available, having been pulled off the market in 2010.

As a result, Texas and several other states switched to another sedative, pentobarbital. The drug is significantly more expensive - and it may soon become impossible for capital punishment prisons to purchase.

"Even though it is a small amount in the big scheme of things, it represents one more spiralling expense that makes the death penalty less reliable and more costly," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington DC.

Rivas, shown here in 2001, was sentenced to die for killing a man after a prison escape

Volumes of research have suggested the death penalty is significantly more expensive to taxpayers than the punishment of life in prison, due largely to the lengthy legal processes involved.

Fundamentally, it stems from the use of what opponents say is a barbaric, antiquated mode of punishment within a sophisticated legal system ostensibly aimed at ensuring the rights of the accused, preventing punishment of the innocent, and executing human beings without causing them too much physical pain and suffering.

Aside from Texas, most of the 34 US states with death penalty laws on the books seldom carry out executions. But even those that do must spend billions of dollars to defend the death sentence against prisoners' appeals and to house the condemned securely and what they see as humanely.

California, for instance, has spent about $4bn (£2.54bn) since 1978 to fund its capital punishment system, but has executed only 13 prisoners, Federal Judge Arthur Alarcon and Loyola Law School Professor Paula Mitchell found in a law review article.

In that same period, at least 78 death row inmates died of natural causes, suicide or other causes while awaiting execution, they wrote.

In Washington state, one prosecutor told a committee of the state bar association that capital cases are at least four times as costly to prosecute as a non-capital murder trial.

"The rarefied nature of a death penalty case results in more motions being brought and more advocacy being presented, which further adds to the time and costs of a capital case," the commission reported in 2006.

Medical supplies to end a life - North Carolina's costs, 2009
Syringes: $5.52
Saline solution: $2.13
IV kit: $37.26
Thiopental sodium: $81.12
Pancuronium bromide: $34.25
Potassium chloride: $7.75
Total: $168.03
Source: Independent Weekly of Durham, North Carolina; North Carolina Department of Correction

The on-the-day costs of the execution vary from state to state, but are relatively small compared to the costs the states incur on the way to the death chamber.

The state of Washington spent $97,814 (£62,004) to execute Cal Brown in 2010.

Most of that was staff pay, but the state also had to hire fencing and lighting for the demonstration outside the prison, a tent for news media, food for the special security teams, and counselling for staff, says Maria Peterson, a spokeswoman for the Washington department of corrections.

Also, the thiopental sodium used to sedate the convicted murderer cost $861.60 (£546), she says.

Ronnie Lee Gardner's 2010 execution by firing squad cost Utah $165,000 (£105,000). Most of that was staff pay, but $25,000 (£15,800) went on materials used in the execution, including the chair to which he was strapped and the jumpsuit he wore, a corrections spokesman told the Salt Lake Tribune.

The execution of rapist and murderer Robert Coe in 2000 cost Tennessee $11,668 (£7,395), according to a report by the state comptroller. That included medical supplies and personnel and the death drugs.

The cost of the death drugs in Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma and other states has risen as manufacturers pull the drugs off the market, not wanting to supply pharmaceutical products used to end lives.

Texas and other states switched the sedative used to render the condemned person unconscious from thiopental sodium to pentobarbital last year after the only US maker of the drug, Hospira, said it was pulling the drug off the market in order to avoid a row with authorities in Italy, where the drug was manufactured.

In December, the European Commission ordered EU firms wanting to export drugs that can be used in lethal injections to ensure the product was not going to be used for executions.

Indian producer Kayem Pharmaceuticals has also said it will no longer sell thiopental sodium to US prisons.

It is unclear how long pentobarbital, the current replacement drug, will be available.

The only company approved by US drug regulators to market the sedative in the US, Danish pharmaceutical giant Lundbeck, has just sold the drug to Illinois company Akorn, which has pledged to restrict distribution of it to prevent it being sent to prisons in capital punishment states.

Executions in 2010
96 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes
23 countries carried out executions
China: 1,000s (lethal injection)
Iran: 252+ (hanging)
North Korea: 60+ (hanging)
Yemen: 53+ (shooting)
US: 46 (lethal injection, electrocution)
Saudi Arabia: 27+ (beheading)
Libya: 18+ Syria: 17+ (hanging)
Bangladesh: 9+ (hanging)
Somalia: 8+ (shooting)
Source: Amnesty International, BBC research

Now, purchasers must sign a form affirming they will use the drug, normally used to treat epilepsy and other conditions, on their own patients and not resell it without authorisation.

The difficulty obtaining the death drugs illustrates the problems inherent in lethal injection as an execution method, says Kent Scheiddeger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports the death penalty.

"It amounts to medicalising a procedure that shouldn't have anything to do with medicine," he says.

"It's supposed to be punishment - it shouldn't be this quasi-medical procedure. It just strikes me as wrong and now we have all these additional complications. Manufacturers, particularly in Europe, try to meddle in things that are none of their business and try to cut off the supply."

Mr Scheidegger does not foresee a halt to executions forced by a lack of drugs, as the executioners can merely change the ingredients in the cocktail, he says.

"Any barbiturate will do it," he says.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17210285

California's death penalty: Unusual but not cruel
Op-Ed


Capital punishment in California should be streamlined, not abolished.



January 03, 2012|By Charles Johnson


With a drug cocktail that puts death row inmates to sleep, California's capital punishment can hardly be said to be cruel — but it is so unusual that death row inmates in the Golden State routinely die of old age or by suicide. When, or more likely if, justice comes, it doesn't come cheap. By some estimates, it costs $100,000 a year per prisoner to keep California's 718 inmates alive on death row, thanks in part to the endless, often frivolous appeals brought by inmates and death penalty opponents. If capital punishment is prohibitively expensive, it is because those professionally seeking to abolish it have made it so.

Even death penalty supporters, such as Chief Justice Tani Cantil-Sakauye of the California Supreme Court, have given up. "I don't think it is working," the newly appointed chief justice told The Times last week. California's death penalty requires "structural change, and we don't have the money." Still, Californians need a "merit-based discussion on its effectiveness and costs." But the chief justice ignored why that load continues to mount: death penalty opponents.

Death penalty foes have seized on the cost issue for their latest attempt at killing it off. Led by Natasha Minsker of the ACLU of Northern California, they are gathering signatures to put the so-called SAFE California initiative on the November 2012 ballot. Minsker's co-written report, "California's Death Penalty Is Dead," concedes that it is the appeals process that clogs the courts, noting that "death penalty trials cost up to 20 times more than trials for life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.... Taxpayers are legally required to pay for numerous appeals in death penalty cases, unlike cases involving life without possibility of parole, where the prisoner gets only one taxpayer-funded appeal."

Only 13 death row inmates have been executed since Californians voted, by a 2-to-1 margin to reinstate capital punishment in 1978, over the objections of then-Gov. Jerry Brown, who had previously vetoed it. Californians, like most Americans, like the death penalty and favor it by roughly the same margin they did in 1978. Support softens when life without parole is considered as an alternative, perhaps because of expense issues. Nonetheless, according to a Field Poll in September, 68% of Californians support capital punishment.

One mark of its popularity is how often it is meted out. For all the supposed blood lust of Texans, where more inmates are executed (and more cheaply), California's jurors are twice as likely to sentence criminals to death. According to a Cornell University study, this is because Texas' death penalty sentencing criteria are far more objective than California's; juries in states with "subjective" death penalties — where they take into account heinousness, for example — are twice as likely to impose the death penalty than are states with stricter guidelines.

That subjectivity gives inmates, activists and lawyers just enough wiggle room. Take Robert Alton Harris, the first Californian executed in 25 years. Harris admitted to murdering two boys because he wanted their car for a crime spree. He even finished off the Jack in the Box burgers they were eating. But Harris' lawyers spent 13 years dragging out his appeals. Or consider Randy Kraft, convicted in Orange County's costliest trial of murdering and mutilating 16 young men. Among his contentions on appeal, he has argued that execution would force him to "actively participate in his own killing," violating his 1st Amendment religious protections. Kraft, suspected in 67 killings, has become a champion bridge player on death row.

In 2006, federal District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel stayed Michael Morales' execution. Morales admitted to killing 17-year-old Terri Winchell in 1981. She was stabbed, strangled, knifed and hammered. Fogel stayed Morales' execution on the grounds that the three-drug method of execution might — there was a .001% chance — cause Morales pain. He worried that California's execution team was too poorly trained, the execution chamber too dimly lit. The state hired two anesthesiologists to administer the drugs and to guarantee that Morales would feel no pain, but the doctors balked, saying their involvement would violate their Hippocratic oath.

Thus capital punishment in California remains in limbo until September 2012, the soonest the Brown administration and death row inmates' attorneys will be ready to review the state's new procedures. Candidate Brown promised to "vigorously enforce the law," but Gov. Brown will probably wait to see the November ballot initiative's results first.

Meanwhile some lawsuits countering the death penalty have gone from frivolous to farcical. One, filed against the Food and Drug Administration, argues that California's drug supply of sodium thiopental for executions was improperly obtained abroad. It's the FDA's job, the lawyers say, to make sure that even death penalty drugs are safe and reliable.

THIS IS ENOUGH TO MAKE A SKUNK VOMIT!

dales wrote: "Repeal The Death Penalty"

Killing criminals is mostly driven by the emotional retardation of a part of the population who cannot achieve sexual release w/o killing someone.

yrs,
rubato

Executions in 2010
96 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes
23 countries carried out executions
China: 1,000s (lethal injection)
Iran: 252+ (hanging)
North Korea: 60+ (hanging)
Yemen: 53+ (shooting)
US: 46 (lethal injection, electrocution)
Saudi Arabia: 27+ (beheading)
Libya: 18+ Syria: 17+ (hanging)
Bangladesh: 9+ (hanging)
Somalia: 8+ (shooting)
Source: Amnesty International, BBC research

I cannot fathom how anybody could be proud of being a member of this club:

Killing criminals is mostly driven by the emotional retardation of a part of the population who cannot achieve sexual release w/o killing someone.

yrs,
rubato

The death penalty is barbaric, dysfunctional and should be abolished.

Lord Jim wrote:I strongly believe that it is "barbaric, uncivilized and immoral" to permit those who have shown such utter contempt for the value of the lives of others keep theirs.

Lord Jim wrote:Obviously, we are in completely different quadrants of the galaxy on this; I think you've got the moral arguments exactly upside-down, and this is clearly not a topic where we are going to have a "meeting of the minds" or reach any sort of agreement.

We're just going to have to agree to disagree.