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- Title
COMPOUNDED DRUGS, EXPERIMENTATION, AND BAZE: TIME FOR A BETTER SOLUTION.
- Authors
Sherman, Dana E.
- Abstract
Lethal injection executions traditionally used a three-drug cocktail of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride. In 2011, the only manufacturer of sodium thiopental in the United States, Hospira Inc., stopped producing sodium thiopental.* ¹ At the same time, Lundbeck, the sole producer of pentobarbital, the replacement drug of choice for the newly unavailable sodium thiopental, implemented end-user agreements that prevented pentobarbital from being distributed to penitentiaries or individuals for use in executions.² As a result, many states turned to compounding factories for their lethal injection drugs. 3 These compounding pharmacies have recently come under scrutiny for their lack of federal regulatory oversight and production of contaminated and sub-standard drugs. Not only have states begun to use sub-standard and untested drugs, but they have also begun to implement new and untested methods of execution. Supreme Court jurisprudence has failed to adequately address this recent shift in the lethal drug market and resulting execution methods. Until July, the most recent Supreme Court case on lethal injections was Baze v. Rees, which upheld a three-drug lethal injection cocktail and set forth a comparative standard for evaluation of future lethal injection challenges, * 4 The newest Supreme Court decision, Glossip v. Gross, not only relied heavily on Baze in its evaluation of an entirely different lethal injection drug and protocol, but also declined to alter Baze's controlling legal standard. Baze could not have anticipated these recent lethal injection developments or challenges, nor could the Court have foreseen the profound potential of the comparative standard for human rights violations. This Note examines two of the most recent challenges to lethal injections and advocates for a new standard to replace the Baze plurality standard in order to provide clarity to an otherwise chaotic area and to adequately deal with recent scientific developments in an ever-changing society.
- Subjects
LETHAL injection (Execution); BAZE v. Rees (Supreme Court case); GLOSSIP v. Gross (Supreme Court case); PANCURONIUM (Drug); HUMAN rights violations
- Publication
Columbia Human Rights Law Review, 2015, Vol 47, Issue 2, p200
- ISSN
0090-7944
- Publication type
Article