Utah became the first U.S. State to reinstate execution by firing squad amidst a spiralling crisis due to lethal drug shortages faced by U.S. prisons, even as the State’s Governor was on the record describing the procedure as “a little bit gruesome.”
According to Republican Governor Gary Herbert, who signed the law approving the use of the firing squad on Monday, the death penalty would be administered in this manner when no lethal injection drugs was available and the latter would remain the “primary method” of executing inmates. Under the law in Utah, inmates would be killed by a firing squad only if the State cannot acquire lethal injection drugs 30 days prior to the scheduled execution date.
Since 2010, U.S. correctional facilities have struggled to procure a key drug in the three-drug lethal cocktail administered to death row inmates, sedative sodium thiopental, after its sole U.S. producer, Hospira, took its production plants offline in the face of anti-death penalty campaigns and other obstacles.
In a scramble to procure an alternative, numerous U.S. prisons turned towards foreign suppliers, including from Europe and India, although media reports, including in The Hindu , led to the Indian suppliers such as Kayem Pharma and Naari pulling out of the supply chain.
After hitting a dead end, U.S. prisons entered a phase of experimenting with different drug protocols, including in States such as Georgia and Missouri, which relied on the use of a massive overdose of animal euthanasia drug pentobarbital. Such manipulations of the drug protocol yielded mixed results, culminating in the botched execution on April 29 last year of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.
