[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEB., ARIZ., CALIF., USA
Oct. 19 NEBRASKA: Secrecy for suppliers would fix death penalty law At a recent forum sponsored by death penalty opponents in Hastings, the representative of the political campaign opposing the death penalty stated most people who vote will only spend "30 seconds learning about the issue." Her implication that overwhelming public support for repealing the Legislature's elimination of the death penalty was based on voter ignorance was as incorrect as it was condescending. Contrary to her dismissal of voters as uniformed, I have found most voters asking serious and thoughtful questions about capital punishment. Unfortunately, too often facts about the death penalty in Nebraska are distorted and misrepresented by death penalty opponents. A frequent talking point of death penalty opponents is that the system for carrying out the penalty is broken beyond repair. The "broken" assertion refers to the inability to obtain sodium thiopental, the anesthetic drug administered to produce unconsciousness during lethal injection. What capital punishment opponents do not tell voters is that the drug is only unavailable due to political activism and public harassment of companies that manufacture the drug. One single statutory change fixes the allegedly "broken beyond repair" system and enables legal access to sodium thiopental. Statutory protection of the identity of the manufacturer of sodium thiopental would open a domestic source. 12 states already have shield laws. Transparency can be successfully guaranteed, making laboratory analysis of the drug publicly available for evaluation of purity and efficacy. If Nebraska voters repeal the Legislature's action, senators can quickly fix a system they have heretofore refused to repair. Voters are likely unaware of the human cost of death penalty opponent's successful elimination of sodium thiopental from the U.S. market to protect the lives of convicted death row inmates. Sodium thiopental is a safe, effective, and FDA-approved anesthetic agent, considered a mainstay of anesthesia. Protests led the last U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental to cease production of the drug in 2009. Sandoz, a subsidiary of Novartis, manufactures the drug in Europe, but the company has banned its import into the United States to prevent its use in lethal injection. The unavailability of sodium thiopental prompted the American Society of Anesthesiologists to appeal to the FDA to aid in importation, citing "a dangerous reduction in the availability of anesthesia induction medications" and "that the safety of American patients is now in jeopardy." The anesthesiologists stated the irony that many more lives will be lost or put in jeopardy as a result of not having the drug available for its legitimate medical use. Propofol, the anesthetic drug substituted due to the lack of sodium thiopental, is not indicated for use in pregnant, geriatric, cardiovascular, or neurologic surgical patients because it causes dangerous drops in blood pressure and respiratory depression in newborns. A 2nd class of drugs, called pressors, are required to counteract propofol's negative effects. Propofol has also experienced production shortages, leaving physicians with less than optimal options for safely anesthetizing patients. The assertion of sodium thiopental is considered "illegal" by FDA and the implication that it is unsafe is absolutely false. Sodium thiopental is an FDA-approved safe and effective drug. Its importation has been restricted by executive action of the DEA. I opposed the Legislature's elimination of the death penalty on every vote. My research proves Nebraska's system is fixable. Senators have a straightforward, proven solution to make Nebraska's death penalty enforceable. Instead, previous Legislatures have failed to act and further complicated the system. Voters should not be misled, and patients should not be denied effective medical therapy to protect convicted killers. (source: Opinion; Sen. John Kuehn of Heartwell represents District 38 in the Nebraska LegislatureKearney Hub) *** Governor shares reasons for supporting death penalty Public safety is one of my top priorities as your governor. One of the tools law enforcement needs to keep our families and communities safe is laws that are tough-on-crime. Criminal penalties like mandatory sentencing laws, 3-strikes laws and the death penalty act as deterrents and provide justice. Last year, the Legislature passed Legislative Bill 268 to abolish the death penalty. There was an immediate effort to allow Nebraska voters to decide the issue on the ballot. During the summer of 2015, enough petition signatures were gathered not only to allow the people to vote, but also to prevent LB268 from going into effect until after the vote of the people this November. Next month, voters will decide whether to abolish or keep the death penalty. The
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEB., ARIZ., CALIF., USA
June 14 NEBRASKA: Nebraska's reliance on 3-drug formula makes lethal injections more difficult The only prisoner who left death row in the 6 years since Nebraska made lethal injection its method of execution died of natural causes. Over the same time span, Texas has executed 87 convicted murderers via lethal injection. The Nebraska Legislature's recent vote to repeal the death penalty has touched off a scramble to do what couldn't be done over the past half-dozen years. While petition circulators collect signatures with the goal of reinstating capital punishment, the state's top elected officials try to replace expired death drugs so they can execute the 10 men on death row. Regardless of how the political drama unfolds, a question remains as to why a lethal injection execution has proved so difficult in Nebraska while Texas averages more than 1 a month. To find the answer, start with the drugs. Nebraska still relies on the same 3-drug protocol written into regulations when lawmakers passed the lethal injection law in 2009. Sodium thiopental puts the inmate under, while pancuronium bromide triggers paralysis and potassium chloride stops the heart. That's 2 drugs too many, said Kent Scheidegger, a California attorney who has written scholarly articles in defense of capital punishment. The single-drug method using pentobarbital works just fine, said Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento. Texas has done it dozens of times. Though nearly all death penalty states once employed the same drug cocktail used by Nebraska, pentobarbital has become a drug of choice in 14 death chambers, including the one in Huntsville, Texas. The drug is a barbiturate sometimes used as a seizure treatment that can put the user to sleep. Obviously, too much produces more than unconsciousness. Pentobarbital is how veterinarians put animals to sleep every day in America, Scheidegger said. It's not painful, and it's not difficult. Sodium thiopental produces the same effect, which is why it's the 1st drug administered in Nebraska's lethal protocol. If administered properly, it is supposed to knock out the inmate so he doesn???t feel the effects of the second drug, which causes suffocation, and the third drug, which causes a painful burning sensation before triggering cardiac arrest. The degree of pain felt by the inmate matters, because the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. The standard adopted by the courts says the inmate must not experience unnecessary pain. The author of Nebraska's lethal injection law had constitutional standards in mind when he settled on the three-drug formula. Then-Sen. Mike Flood of Norfolk was well aware of a 2008 case, Baze v. Rees, in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Kentucky's lethal injection procedure using the same 3 drugs. Nebraska switched to lethal injection later than other states and did so only after the State Supreme Court declared electrocution unconstitutional in 2008. That keystone ruling took place 11 years after Robert Williams was the last person to die in Nebraska's electric chair. The same 3-drug protocol that Nebraska settled upon had been around since 1978, when Oklahoma became the 1st state to adopt lethal injection. But by the time Nebraska was ready to carry out a lethal injection, supplies of death drugs were becoming tighter - none more so than sodium thiopental. The only domestic manufacturer of the drug stopped making it in 2010. The anti-death penalty movement has put a lot of pressure on drug manufacturers, said Dudley Sharp, a pro-death penalty researcher in Texas. The European Union eventually banned its sale for execution, which forced Nebraska to go to a drug broker in India. The 1st supply of sodium thiopental bought from the broker had to be relinquished to federal agents because the state lacked an importer's license. With a 2nd supply imported through the broker, the state tried to schedule executions for death row inmates Carey Dean Moore and Michael Ryan. Attorneys for the men fought off the attempts by raising credible accusations that the broker had acted unethically in obtaining the drugs from a Swiss manufacturer that didn't want them used for executions. The 2nd shipment of sodium thiopental, along with Nebraska's supply of the paralyzing agent pancuronium bromide, have since expired. Prison officials recently purchased new supplies of each drug from the same Indian broker, but it remains uncertain if they will succeed in importing the drugs. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has said that the sodium thiopental cannot come into the country. Texas ran into the same trouble securing supplies for its 3-drug protocol, so in 2012 it switched to a 1-drug procedure using pentobarbital. Texas has since carried out 43 1-drug executions. Why hasn???t Nebraska followed the
