South Dakota buys death penalty drug

National shortage prompts purchase for 2 executions

South Dakota has bought a new supply of the drug that the state uses in executions because of reports of a national shortage.

Officials spent $5,000 to acquire enough sodium thiopental for the lethal injections of convicted killers Donald E. Moeller and Charles Russell Rhines. The drug is under storage at the state penitentiary in Sioux Falls, said Sara Rabern, public information officer for the attorney general's office.

Moeller and Rhines have appeals pending. Neither has an execution date, but the state is preparing because of reports supply of the drug would run low.

"This is a proactive response to a national shortfall," Attorney General Marty Jackley said Wednesday. "We're not in a situation where we need to use it. But the main goal is to obtain the drug ... and to keep legal custody of it."

Death penalty opponents consider the purchase a chapter from the theater of the absurd.

"To run out and buy it to try to get the last item on the shelf is just grotesque," said Jeanne Koster of Watertown, former director of the South Dakota Peace and Justice Center.

Moeller was convicted of the 1990 rape and murder of 9-year-old Rebecca O'Connell of Sioux Falls.

Rhines was convicted of killing 22-year-old Donnivan Schaeffer in a 1992 burglary of the Rapid City doughnut shop where Schaeffer worked.

The state's last execution was in 2007, when Elijah Page died by injection for torturing and killing Chester Allan Poage in 2000 in Lawrence County. That was South Dakota's 1st execution since George Sitts died in 1947 in the electric chair. A judge also sentenced Briley Piper to death for his role in killing Poage, but the Supreme Court in 2009 sent his case back to circuit court for a jury to decide Piper's sentence.

Source: Argus Leader, April 7, 2011

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Death Penalty Foes Shut Down Another Execution-Drug Supply Route

An Indian drug company that supplied thiopental sodium to U.S. prisons has decided to halt future sales following objections from death penalty opponents.

Kayem Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd supplied Nebraska prison officials with a large supply of thiopental sodium, an anesthetic typically used to render a condemned inmate unconscious before other lethal drugs, including a paralytic agent, are administered.

The company also supplied the drug to South Dakota, Navneet Verma, the managing director of the Mumbai-based company, told WSJ.

“We appreciate the global concerns about the death penalty and particularly the concerns of the human rights community,” Mr. Verma said. “I decided voluntarily not to sell a single vial of thiopental for use in lethal injections.” (Here’s a statement on Kayem’s website about the decision and here’s a WSJ article.)

The decision could make it even more difficult for U.S. prisons to find the drug, which has been in short supply for about a year. Prison officials in South Dakota and Nebraska were not immediately available for comment.

Hospira Inc., the only U.S. manufacturer of thiopental, decided earlier this year to stop making the drug due to concerns from death-penalty opponents.

Some states, including Texas, have switched from using thiopental to pentobarbital, a sedative often used to euthanize animals.

Source: Nathan Koppel, Law Blog, The Wall Street Journal, April 6, 2011

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US death row injection comes from Mumbai firm

MUMBAI: Correctional services in the US are buying sodium thiopental from a little-known firm in Borivli (West) for use in lethal injections to execute death sentences.

Kayem Pharmaceuticals Pvt Ltd, at Marian Colony, shipped a 500-gram consignment of the yellow powder, packed in a hefty 25-kg strongbox, on December 8, 2010, to the Nebraska department of correctional services. Sodium thiopental is generally used along with pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride to create a cocktail with which several states in the US carry out the death sentence by lethal injection. In February this year, Kayem sold another consignment to the South Dakota department of corrections. Executions are yet to be carried out by Nebraska or South Dakota with the drug purchased from Kayem.

Sodium thiopental has been in short supply in the US for about a year after the sole American company that manufactured it ceased production. That has forced American prisons to look abroad. For Nebraska and South Dakota, that search led to the residential Greenfield Cooperative Housing Society in Borivli (West), where Kayem is located. Kayem is a two-room set-up — office and storeroom — with a balcony that doubles as a kitchen.

American prisons have taken flak for purchasing sodium thiopental, used in lethal injections, from overseas. An earlier purchase from the UK apparently degraded by the time it reached American shores, said Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, an international charity assisting people around the world facing the death penalty. "The failure of the sodium thiopental purchased in the UK has thus far caused the excruciating and torturous death of three people, one in Arizona and two in Georgia," Smith said.

That prompted a lawyer in Nebraska — where the execution of Carey Dean Moore, 53, is pending — to move court there against the use of the sodium thiopental bought from Kayem. There were also questions raised about whether Kayem is properly registered in the US.

Officials in the Nebraska corrections department did not respond to queries emailed by this newspaper. However, replying to the court in the Nebraska case, state solicitor-general J Kirk Brown said: "The state of Nebraska has duly enacted a new statutory method of execution (lethal injection) and adopted an execution protocol pursuant to the statute, which together satisfy all currently understood requirements of our state and federal constitutions."

Kayem, a small-scale Indian company, may now be in a position to increase its business. "Several American states have now approached us for sodium thiopental," said Navneet Verma, director, Kayem Pharmaceuticals. Verma said he sold the first consignment of 500 grams to the Nebraska correctional services at $3.50 a gram. That works out to $1,750, or around Rs 78,000. When officials at the South Dakota department of corrections evinced interest to buy the same drug, Kayem jacked the price up to $10 a gram.

Derived by mixing sodium and thiopentone, the drug sodium thiopental doesn't really require a huge facility to manufacture and goes for around Rs 35 a gram in the Indian market.

Source: The Times of India, April 5, 2011

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