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This Week's Lethal Injection Hearing in Oklahoma

By Steve Hall

"US state seeks to use animal drugs to execute humans," is the title of Lucile Malandain's post at AFP, via Google News. Faced with a national shortage of a key drug used for lethal injections, Oklahoma now hopes to turn to an anesthetic used to put down animals and is awaiting a court ruling on the issue. And: Now on December 16, Oklahoma plans to execute convicted murderer John Duty, 58, using the animal anaesthetic pentobarbital, employed by veterinarians to put animals to sleep. Duty's lawyers in a court document worry their client will be used as a "guinea pig" to test this new method of execution. "In the absence of expert evidence, clinical data, or other similarly sound application of scientific methods providing reliable information of expected outcomes, Mr Duty will be a human subject for an unproven mechanism of execution," they said...continue to full post

Full post as published by StandDown Texas Project on November 15, 2010 (boomark / email).