Their executions will go forward in April, using midazolam.įollowing another 2015 Supreme Court decision, in the case of Glossip v. The court also declined to hear appeals from all eight remaining inmates on Arkansas' death row. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, meaning his execution can go forward. In neighbouring Alabama, one death row inmate, Tommy Arthur, turned to the Supreme Court to argue that the firing squad would be more humane than death by lethal injection using midazolam. Another proposal to include the firing squad was struck down by a committee, but is available in Utah and Oklahoma. In response, lawmakers in the state of Mississippi have introduced legislation that would legalise the use of midazolam and expand other options for executioners, including the electric chair, and nitrogen asphyxiation, which has never been tried before. Nevertheless, executions have gone ahead using the drug. The use of of the sedative midazolam has been the subject of legal challenges across the US by death row prisoners, who say it violates the Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution, which bans "cruel and unusual" punishment. Some states have turned to local pharmaceutical companies, regulated at the state level, for the deadly chemicals.
The shortages came about after European pharmaceutical companies started to refuse to sell them on moral grounds to states for the purpose of capital punishment. Shortages of execution drugs over the last ten years have encouraged some states to carry out executions with experimental methods, often fighting in court to keep the sources and combinations of these drugs secret. The American public's support for the practise is falling, as a nationwide shortage of lethal injection drugs has led states to experiment with chemicals that slowly torture prisoners to death.Īlthough no prisoner has lived to describe what the process feels like, Supreme Court justice Sonia Sotomayor, after hearing testimony on the issue, said that midazolam's inability to anaesthetise the condemned "may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned at the stake."ĭennis McGuire was executed in 2014 using midazolam, which did not seem to fully sedate him. The US is at a crossroads when it comes to capital punishment. "It is being trapped in a small room, in this case with his daughter, son and daughter-in-law, whom I was there with by his request to offer them comfort and consolation. "Once you've been through a trauma like that, the one thing you want to do is try to forget it," Hummer said, remembering watching McGuire struggle for breath for half an hour. Hummer had been McGuire's priest at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Chillicothe, and had heard McGuire confess to, and ask for, forgiveness for the 1989 murder of a pregnant woman that put him on death row.
It made my skin crawl," Hummer told TRT World. "I wanted out of there in the worst way possible. Experts believe the drug fails to render a prisoner unconscious before the injection of other deadly chemicals that paralyse them and stop their hearts.Īlthough Hummer was just a few feet away in the observation room, he couldn't help McGuire. On January 14, 2014, Hummer attended the execution of McGuire, an Ohio death row inmate who received a combination of drugs including midazolam, a drug that has been linked to a string of botched executions in prisons across the United States. What Hummer witnessed was not a stranger choking, but the state of Ohio killing Dennis McGuire. "When you see someone gasping for breath, the one thing you want to do is reach out and help," said Father Lawrence Hummer, a Catholic priest. Oklahoma has been the centre of controversy over lethal injection methods in the US. The Oklahoma death chamber and the "gurney," or stretcher, used to execute death row prisoners. A shortage of deadly drugs has led states to try out new methods that have ended in botched executions across the United States, opening up legal battles for more humane deaths.