Choose Your Poison: Arizona Lets Inmates Bring Their Own Lethal Drugs to Execution

Arizona has found a unique way to attack the crippling shortages of the anesthetics it uses to for executing the condemned—inmates facing the death penalty are now permitted to supply their own lethal drugs. This update to the state’s execution protocols has been slammed by critics as “unprecedented,” “absurd,” and even illegal.

The protocol change comes as legal challenges are mounting nationwide to the lethal injection process in state death chambers, many of these challenges being linked to the drug shortage.

Since the European Union stopped the import of medications used for capital punishment and several major pharma companies also banned the use of their drugs for that purpose, states have been turning in somersaults to find a way to kill their condemned murderers.

The shortages are exclusively of the anesthetics first administered in the lethal injection process in order to render the offender insensate, before (in most states) other drugs are injected that stop the heart and paralyze the lungs. The use of anesthetics is considered necessary to create the appearance that the execution is not “cruel and unusual punishment,” and to avoid disturbing execution witnesses with writhing, screaming and contorting inmates.

Continue to heatst.com article: http://heatst.com/culture-wars/arizona-lets-inmates-bring-their-own-lethal-drugs-to-execution/