Off-shoring bites US death penalty in ass; 200 jobs in Italy saved!

[Northern_Piper]

Now, here’s a weird mixture of events: Company to stop making drug used in executions.

The only US drug company that supplies thiopental sodium, “a key drug widely used in lethal injections”, plans to discontinue production. It was going to make the drug at its plant in Italy, but the Italian Parliament has enacted a law that bars the export of the drug unless the manufacturer can certify that the drug won’t be used for death penalties.

Adams said that Hospira was not able to issue the guarantee to the Italian lawmakers because it typically distributes the product through wholesalers, making it difficult to control where it ended up.

Continuing to produce the drug could have put the company’s Italian plant and its 200 employees at risk, Adams said.

Goggling around a bit, it looks like this is a new tactic for death penalty opponents: to go after the pharmaceutical companies that make drugs used in executions, as reported in another article in the Wall Street Journal: Drug Halt Hinders Executions in the U.S.:

The thiopental shortage has prompted unprecedented scrutiny of the companies that make and distribute execution drugs. Court filings, for example, have revealed the names of thiopental makers and suppliers in Europe that distributed thiopental to prisons in Arizona and California, disclosures that have touched off protests by human rights advocates in Europe.

In November, a U.K. nonprofit called Reprieve, which lobbies against the death penalty, filed a lawsuit in London challenging overseas thiopental shipments. Shortly after the U.K. announced plans to ban thiopental exports to prisons to underscore its “moral opposition to the death penalty.”

The European Commission is considering a European Union-wide ban on the export of execution drugs, according to London lawyers.
…
Death-penalty opponents, Mr. Smith said, now have a powerful new weapon in their quiver: identifying and pressuring pharmaceutical companies that supply execution drugs to prisons.

“I’ve yet to find any pharmaceutical company that says their corporate ethos is to go around and kill people,” he said. “I’ve been doing [death-penalty] work for 26 years,” he added. “I can’t believe it just occurred to me to target drug companies.”

And the effect on the death penalty in the states?

Now that [Hospira] has halted production altogether, experts said, states have few immediate alternatives. There are 3,261 inmates on death row in the U.S., according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

“There is no quick fix in place for departments of corrections,” said Deborah Denno, a death-penalty expert at Fordham University Law School in New York. “There will be more delays in the death penalty after such a major [drug] provider has backed out of the market.”

A number of states, including Arizona, California, Kentucky and Tennessee, already had been struggling with a shortage of supply in sodium thiopental after Hospira halted production in 2009 because of manufacturing issues in a North Carolina plant. Until Friday, the company had planned to resume production early this year at a company plant in Liscate, Italy.

Texas, which leads the nation in executions, has enough sodium thiopental to cover two scheduled executions in February, according to Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. But it will have to obtain an additional supply to carry out a lethal injection scheduled for May, she said.

[JRDelirious]

Heh… jobs saved by NOT selling a product. Clever.

Looking at it coldly, the way for the various states to address this and continue to uphold the penalty could be either (a) switching the execution media to some other product/process that puts you out then puts you down (which BTW it has for some time now been an issue that the current "standard’ mix is a bit too cumbersome to use, anyway), preferrably one that has a reasonable demand for use in some other application so it doesn’t depend exclusively on executions; or (b) a legislated earmark to subsidize the permanence of the domestic production lines of thiopental specifically for the sake of executions. I have an odd feeling about what would be the preferred choice of some lawmakers…

[alphaboi867]

Are there any domestic rope manufacturers left?

[jayjay]

@alphaboi867

Are there any domestic rope manufacturers left?

The anti-drug crusaders put the hemp makers out of business.