PHOENIX — In Spring 2010, attorney Dale Baich attended a court hearing for a client on Ohio’s death row who had a scheduled execution date. The Ohio attorney general remarked
In Spring 2010, attorney Dale Baich attended a court hearing for a client on Ohio’s death row who had a scheduled execution date. The Ohio attorney general remarked that the state was having difficulty obtaining one of the drugs they needed to carry out the execution, sodium thiopental.
Alexandra Klein, a professor at St. Mary’s School of Law in Texas, said shield laws have created a black hole of information around execution protocols.
At a time in which the
Arizona Department of Corrections is facing criticism for crumbling infrastructure, substandard medical care, and understaffing, the department has spent $1.5 million to purchase the lethal-injection drug pentobarbital from an undisclosed source. The exorbitant price, experts say, is a function of the questionable use of the drug for non-medical purposes and the secretive nature of the transaction.
Records obtained by
The Guardian show that, in October 2020, Arizona ordered 1,000 vials of the barbiturate pentobarbital. Each one-gram vial cost the state $1,500, for what the newspaper described as a “jaw-dropping” total of $1.5 million. A heavily redacted invoice (click to enlarge picture) shows that the state ordered 4–8 “unlabeled” jars to be shipped in “Unmarked jars and boxes” to an Arizona location “to be determined.” The state’s execution protocol calls for five grams of the drug, so the vials would be enough for 200 executions in a
The most jaw-dropping outlay has been made by Arizona, a state in which Republicans hold both chambers of the legislature and the governor’s mansion. A single-page heavily redacted document obtained by the Guardian records that last October the department of corrections ordered 1,000 vials of pentobarbital sodium salt, each containing 1mg, to be shipped in “unmarked jars and boxes”.
At the bottom of the document, the record states: “Amount paid: $1,500,000.”
Arizona’s extraordinary $1.5m payment starkly illustrates the lengths to which the state is prepared to go to kill death row prisoners. Pentobarbital is a sedative that is used in Arizona executions, with 5 grams being injected into the inmate to induce a fatal overdose.