Is the Texas Death House Finally Coming to Grinding Halt?
USA Today reports
"HOUSTON (AP) — Texas has obtained a new batch of the drugs it uses to execute death row inmates, allowing the state to continue carrying out death sentences once its existing supply expires at the end of the month. But correction officials will not say where they bought the drugs, arguing that information must be kept secret to protect the safety of its new supplier. In interviews with The Associated Press, officials with the Texas Department of Criminal Justice also refused to say whether providing anonymity to its new supplier of the sedative pentobarbital was a condition of its purchase. The decision to keep details about the drugs and their source secret puts the agency at odds with past rulings of the state attorney general's office, which has said the state's open records law requires the agency to disclose specifics about the drugs it uses to carry out lethal injections. "We are not disclosing the identity of the pharmacy because of previous, specific threats of serious physical harm made against businesses and their employees that have provided drugs used in the lethal injection process," said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark"
Could the Texas Death House could be coming to the final death? That is the question that eventually face the prison-industrial complex.
The slow, bitter end to all of those death row executions did not come from a ballot intiative. It came through the will of the free market. Since the competive advantage of the manufacturing the drugs used in lethal injection has shifted overseas, European drug companies had states that they want to do nothing with the murder by state institution.
There are a lot of people who are worthy of the death penalty. They have killed a lot of people and really deserve the ultimate punishment. However, there has been hundreds of people in US history that have been put death wrongly. The whole concept of state-sanctioned murder might be morally wrong even if the people who killed a lot of people deserve the death penalty.
The Europeans have dictated to us that they want to do nothing in the process of putting people to death. The drugs used in lethal injection have proven to provide a quick and relatively painless for inmates. However, new compound drugs present the possibility of painful and silent death to inmates. According to the US constitution, that is considered to be cruel and unusual punishment.
Maybe, it is time for GOP lawmakers in Texas to realize that the death penalty days are numbers. Like Russia taking the Crimera, the Europeans drug companies essentially told the US that the death penalty days are numbered and that there is nothing US can do change that.
Making compound drugs in secret labs is against the constitution. The prisoners have the right to know what the effects of the drugs that are being took and the execution protocol used to execute them. Even if the death penalty is justified, an inmate should have the right to die in dignity and without pain. We are not Iran who makes sixteen people hang in public a slow death or neither we are Saudi Arabia that beheads inmates and than decides to crucify them.
It is time for the Texas GOP to execute the remaining cases where the death penalty is justified and the prisoners are involved are totally guility. After that, the right thing to do is to have Rick Perry to commute all of the death sentences to life without parole if he cannot properly obtain a batch of drugs that he can disclose the source and disclose the execution process to the inmate.