Italy Blocks Capital Punishment in America

“Company to stop making drug commonly used in executions,” announced the Washington Post on the first page. “Hospira to Stop Making Lethal-Injection Drug,” echoed the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Everyone agreed on the cause: “Opposition from government figures in Italy.” It’s the story of the most effective strike ever launched against capital punishment in America: a veto cast from abroad, before which the United States finds itself helpless.

At the heart of the story is the use of sodium thiopental in the “pharmaceutical cocktail” of lethal injections. This is, by far, the current preferred method to carry out a death sentence. One thousand two hundred thirty-seven executions: This is the number of executions in America since 1976, when the Supreme Court authorized the resumption of executions after a moratorium. Of these, 1,063 were carried out by lethal injection, whereas very few have died by the electric chair, hanging, gas chamber or firing squad.

Of the 35 U.S. states where the death penalty is legal, all use lethal injection as the primary method or, in some cases, exclusively. For inmates sentenced to death by federal courts, injection is the only method allowed. In the mix of lethal drugs administered, an essential component is the powerful anesthetic as required by law to make the condemned unconscious: sodium thiopental. The supply [of this drug] to U.S. states that carry out the death penalty is a quasi-monopoly in the hands of pharmaceutical company Hospira Inc. in Lake Forest, Illinois. From 2009 onward, this company has lacked the essential active ingredient to produce sodium thiopental in their main laboratory based in North Carolina.

Faced with the shortage, Hospira had decided to supply American prisons with sodium thiopental from its Italian plant in Liscate. But following an investigation by the Italian government, that road has become impassable. Dan Rosenberg, a spokesman for Hospira, said that Italian authorities demanded that sodium thiopental not be used for capital punishment. “We couldn’t meet the Italian demands, and we were concerned if we couldn’t, our Italian facility and employees could face liability.” At this point the states and the federal department must engage in a complex process to find alternative suppliers or alternative medicines, with all the obstacles that will emerge. Opponents of the death penalty, in fact, may have recourse in court against the legality of fallback solutions, gaining time. This is what’s happening in Oklahoma: The decision of the state to replace sodium thiopental with pentobarbital, an analgesic used for the euthanasia of domestic animals, was immediately appealed and will become the subject of lengthy court battles.

“This is clearly going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of states,” explained Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center. “It’s more evidence the house of cards is crumbling on this system,” said Diann Rust-Tierney of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty. Today there are 3,261 death row inmates awaiting execution in the United States. Texas, the state with the largest number of condemned, has four executions scheduled: two in February, one in May and one in July. It only has two remaining doses of sodium thiopental.

Arizona, California, Kentucky and Tennessee have already had to postpone some executions due to the lack of sodium thiopental. Hospira does not seem very cooperative: Sodium thiopental represents only 0.2 percent of its turnover and is a source of unwelcome publicity to the pharmaceutical company. The Italian example is setting precedence. Britain has banned exports of sodium thiopental by its pharmaceutical laboratories to the United States. The European Commission is considering prohibiting it throughout the entire European Union. Sandoz, a unit of the German group Novartis, has decided to prohibit sales to anyone who can supply them to the United States. Clive Stafford Smith, who directs the English campaign Reprieve against capital punishment, admits that “I’ve been doing [death-penalty] work for 26 years. I can’t believe it just occurred to me to target drug companies.”