Free Republic

As Texas governor, GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry has presided over 234 executions. It's a record number, which, The Washington Post reported last week, bestows on Perry "a law-and-order credential that none of his competitors can match -- even if they wanted to." Watch how pundits will try to turn that statistic into a political negative -- and paint Perry as the governor with blood on his spurs -- even though American voters overwhelmingly support the death penalty. The temptation to tout Texas' status as the state with the most executions will prove too seductive. It won't matter that, as...

The Danish pharmaceutical firm H. Lundbeck A/S has announced it will no longer provide U.S. prisons with a drug used in lethal injection executions. “Lundbeck adamantly opposes the distressing misuse of our product in capital punishment,” said Lundbeck CEO Ulf Wiinberg according to a company statement. The drug in question is the barbiturate pentobarbital, know by its brand-name Nembutol, which was developed as a treatment for controlling epilepsy and is sold for that purpose. But this past spring, European exporters stopped the sale of sodium thiopental, which had been the drug of choice at U.S. prisons in 14 states where...

Mississippi is set to execute later on Tuesday a man convicted in 1999 of slaying four people, the first inmate in the state to be put to death using a new drug as part of the lethal injection. Benny Joe Stevens is scheduled to be executed shortly after 6 p.m. local time on Tuesday, according to Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood. He will be executed using the drug pentobarbital, a sedative often used to euthanize animals, because of a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental. Several states have switched to pentobarbital because of the shortage.

The Obama administration has launched a quiet campaign over the past two months to seize from local officials a key drug used in lethal injections -- part of a spreading investigation that has contributed to a de facto death penalty freeze in several states. The investigation stems from concerns about the overseas source of the drug, though some question whether those concerns make a handy excuse to slow the pace of executions. "States have death penalty laws, and the federal government is trying to make it harder for the states to execute those laws," Saunders said.

South Carolina on Friday executed a man who strangled his cellmate, using a new combination of lethal injection drugs for the first time. Jeffrey Motts, 36, was declared dead at 6:17 p.m. He was given the sedative pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental as part of the lethal three-drug combination because federal agents seized the state's supply as part of a nationwide investigation into whether prisons obtained the drugs legally from England. Motts was sentenced to death for killing his cellmate at a state prison in Greenville County in 2005. He was already serving a life sentence for killing two elderly...

(Reuters) - Texas on Tuesday carried out its first execution using a sedative often used to euthanize animals. Cary Kerr, 46, was put to death by lethal injection for the 2001 sexual assault and strangling of Pamela Horton. The new drug, pentobarbital, replaced sodium thiopental in Texas' three-drug execution protocol.

President Obama well may have begun another undeclared war - this time on states that try to enforce their own death penalty laws - on the dubious grounds that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved drugs intended to kill convicted killers. On March 15, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, the first drug given under the three-drug lethal injection protocol used in most of the country's 34 death-penalty states. The DEA also asked Kentucky and Tennessee for their sodium thiopental to aid its investigation. Why? The DEA referred me to the Department of Justice,...

The Drug Enforcement Administration on Tuesday seized the state of Georgia's supply of a key lethal injection drug less than two months after the state executed a man who unsuccessfully argued it was bought from a "fly-by-night" supplier in Britain. Agency spokesman Chuvalo Truesdell wouldn't elaborate on exactly why the DEA wanted to inspect Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental, a sedative that is part of a three-drug cocktail used in executions that has been in short supply since the sole U.S. manufacturer stopped making it. "We had questions about how the drug was imported to the U.S.," he said. "There...

The Food and Drug Administration, which has long maintained that it has nothing to do with drugs used in executions, has quietly helped Arizona and California obtain a scarce type of anesthetic so the states could continue putting inmates to death. The shortage of sodium thiopental has disrupted executions around the country. But newly released documents show the FDA helped import it from Britain. Most state prison systems use sodium thiopental to put inmates to sleep before administering pancuronium bromide, a paralyzing agent, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart. But the drug has been in short supply since last...