News This Sedative Is Now a Go-To Drug for Executions. But Does It Work?

[thegreenhand]

This Sedative Is Now a Go-To Drug for Executions. But Does It Work?​

Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs
New York Times
8 Mar 2022

The status of executions across the country has been in turmoil for more than a decade, ever since pharmaceutical companies began halting their delivery of the most widely used drugs for executions. State prison systems were left to create cocktails of the drugs they could still get their hands on, often relying on one sedative in particular, midazolam, to start the execution process.

But the lethal new formulations have led to legal challenges across the country, with death row prisoners and their lawyers arguing that the sedative now in use in about half a dozen states is ineffective at its primary purpose: keeping prisoners from feeling pain as they die.

The first full trial on the challenges to midazolam played out this past week in Oklahoma, where a prisoner vomited and shook for several minutes after he was injected with the sedative during an October execution. In the case before Judge Stephen P. Friot of the U.S. District Court in Oklahoma City, a group of prisoners on death row argued that the mix of drugs that awaits them in that state has the potential to cause so much pain as to be “constitutionally intolerable.”

Read the full article here (paywalled).

 

[TheAcetylationGame]

Interesting. Vomiting and convulsions is a bit of a paradoxical reaction to Midazolam

 

[solarbear]

They used to use pentobarbital or still do is that the humane stuff?