Even as multiple prisons across U.S. states grapple with lethal drug shortages and have been accused of using “experimental” procedures, Oklahoma on Thursday evening executed an inmate, Kenneth Hogan (52), for stabbing a woman to death in 1988.
Mr. Hogan was reportedly pronounced dead at 6:13 pm after he received a lethal injection at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester.
He was executed with the lethal drug “pentobarbital,” a veterinary euthanasia drug that the state has now been using for a few years, despite defence lawyers arguing that its administration constituted “cruel and unusual punishment.”
Most recently another inmate, Michael Wilson, who was executed using pentobarbital at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary for a murder 20 years ago, gasped his final words, “I feel my whole body burning.”
Many U.S. states with capital punishment have had to turn to lethal drugs such as pentobarbital after the main sedative used traditionally, sodium thiopental became unavailable due to its sole manufacturer, a company called Hospira, halting production in 2010.
In that year, by when Oklahoma had started using pentobarbital, lawyers for executed inmate John Duty (58) had argued that he was used as a “guinea pig” in an experiment with the anaesthetic used to put down dogs.
In a different case in Tennessee reports noted that the post-mortem examinations of three executions showed that there was “insufficient anaesthetic in the prisoner's bloodstream: he was not rendered unconscious,” as a result of which the inmates did not die painlessly but “slowly suffocated as the other drugs took effect, an excruciating death.”
Shortly after sodium thiopental supplies dried up some U.S. prisons, including Nebraska, turned to other nations to import the drug, including from India, and despite import approvals not being authorised by the U.S. regulator, the Food and Drug Administration.
However media reports, including in The Hindu , highlighted the role of the Indian firm involved, Kayem Pharma, and that company subsequently pulled out of the deal with the U.S. prison.
