Senators Elizabeth Warren (Mass.) and Cory Booker (N.J.) on Tuesday called on the Biden administration to regulate lethal injection drugs, arguing that the difficulty in ensuring such drugs are safe has led to botched executions.
The senators’ letter was addressed to Attorney General Merrick Garland, Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Commissioner Robert M. Califf, and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) Administrator Anne Milgram.
Senators express particular concern about racial disparities in botched executions.
Black people on death row are 220% more likely to suffer a botched execution by lethal injection than white people.
“The FDA and DEA have regulatory authority to prevent the acquisition of dangerous, low-quality drugs from secretive suppliers with a history of regulatory violations,” the letter says.
While lethal injection is the most common method of execution, senators point to a study released earlier this year that attributes botched executions to a variety of factors, including secrecy, acquiring illicit drugs, poor-quality medications and haste.
“We need to end the death penalty once and for all,” Warren said in a statement to The Hill. “But as long as it exists, the federal government should, at a minimum, regulate lethal injection drugs to minimize the risk of botched executions and to protect the security of the public drug supply chain.”
The letter follows a May letter calling on the DOJ to rescind the Office of Legal Counsel’s 2019 opinion that the FDA lacks the ability to regulate drugs intended for use in executions.
“The opinion is deeply flawed – both legally and morally – and poses unnecessary risks to individuals on death row, including the risk of suffering a botched execution,” the letter said at the time.
Wednesday’s letter highlights problems with companies supplying the lethal drug mix.
The Rite-Away Pharmacy in San Antonio, for example, which supplied lethal injectable drugs to the state of Texas, has a quote story for safety and cleanliness violations, including failure to maintain sterile conditions and inadequate record keeping, the letter said.
During the delivery of the drugs to execution sites in Texas, the lawmakers said, the small, well-guarded delivery team was subject to minimal supervision.
Meanwhile, another branch of the same pharmacy had already been sued by the federal government for dispensing medications without valid prescriptions, falsifying records and providing high doses of fentanyl without a legitimate medical purpose.
Lawmakers argue that Texas is not the only state to interact with pharmacies with checkered histories.
A recent report from the Associated Press found that Utah had considered using ketamine along with fentanyl for a future execution if it was unable to obtain the common execution drug, pentobarbital.
If authorities carry out the plan, Utah would be the first state in the country to use ketamine in an execution and experimentally combine it with fentanyl and potassium chloride.
The individual scheduled for execution argued that this combination could cause intense pain, “mental anguish”.
In the letter, the lawmakers say Utah has revealed little about how the state is acquiring fentanyl and ketamine, or how it plans to protect the drugs from leakage from the state’s supply chain to the general public.
“Just as the DEA and FDA regulate other drugs, these agencies have a responsibility to regulate drugs intended for executions,” Warren told The Hill.
This story originally appeared on thehill.com read the full story
