News and press coverage tracking the pharmaceutical industry’s work to keep medicines out of lethal injection executions.
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One in eight American adults took a GLP-1 weight-loss drug such as Ozempic or Mounjaro in 2025, and much of that supply came from compounding pharmacies…
Read more →Texas has spent more than $775,000 in taxpayer dollars since October 2024 to acquire pentobarbital for executions, according to an NBC News investigation…
Read more →An NBC News investigation has revealed how Idaho obtained pentobarbital for executions through discreet handovers outside its maximum-security prison…
Read more →In January 2025, a group of 12 experts in public health and drug safety, including a former commissioner and principal deputy commissioner of the FDA, filed an amicus brief…
Read more →Lethal injection remains the most common method of execution in the United States. Because the method relies on drugs that were never intended to be used to kill…
Read more →Lethal injection issues were featured on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. The segment focused on a company operating out of Connecticut which had supplied drugs for executions, allegedly in violation of federal law…
Read more →This Fourth Edition of the State-by-State Risk Index serves as a guide for companies concerned about execution secrecy laws and the implications for commercial enterprises and public health…
Read more →The Governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, recently held a press conference in which he confirmed that he expects there will be no further executions before he leaves office…
Read more →On January 31, 2024, five manufacturers of medicines that are misused in lethal injection protocols collectively filed an amicus brief to state their deep concern about South Carolina’s secrecy law…
Read more →This Third Edition of the State-by-State Risk Index serves as a guide for companies concerned about execution secrecy laws and the implications for commercial enterprises and public health…
Read more →On 21 November, Alabama announced that all executions in the state will be halted pending a top to bottom review of the state’s execution protocol…
Read more →In May 2022, Tennessee’s Republican Governor Bill Lee imposed an official moratorium on the death penalty while an independent review of the lethal injection protocol is carried out…
Read more →In March 2022, state officials in Louisiana said that they are unwilling to use manufactured medicines in lethal injection executions. Corrections Secretary James LeBlanc testified in court…
Read more →A federal judge in Las Vegas is holding a series of hearings to assess whether Nevada’s new lethal injection protocol is constitutional…
Read more →The House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties is demanding answers from the Department of Justice (DOJ) about whether Biden administration officials have any plans to procure or use…
Read more →A lawsuit filed in Oklahoma County District Court challenges the Oklahoma DOC’s refusal to disclose critical information about the substances used in the state’s lethal injection executions…
Read more →Oklahoma carried out its first lethal injection execution in more than six years, despite a long and troubling history of botched lethal injections and having previously rejected the method altogether…
Read more →Ohio Governor Mike DeWine granted four reprieves due to the unavailability of lethal injection drugs, continuing the state’s recent trend of postponing executions…
Read more →On July 1, 2021, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium on federal executions and ordered the Department of Justice (DOJ) to review policies and procedures…
Read more →On June 24, 2021, Hikma Pharmaceuticals USA Inc., a company that manufactures the anesthetic Ketamine, sent a cease-and-desist letter to Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford…
Read more →On February 5, 2021, the Virginia House of Delegates voted to approve a bill to abolish the death penalty in the state and the state Senate approved a similar measure…
Read more →Documents obtained by the ethics watchdog organization Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and investigative journalists at ProPublica revealed the myriad ways…
Read more →In December 2020, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine announced that lethal injection is no longer an option for Ohio executions and lawmakers must choose a different method of capital punishment…
Read more →This Second Edition of the State-by-State Risk Index serves as a guide for companies concerned about execution secrecy laws and the implications for commercial enterprises and public health…
Read more →The State of Nebraska ignored drug manufacturers’ demands to return execution drugs, less than three weeks before the fentanyl made by a company based in London was used to carry out…
Read more →A laboratory that was revealed last week to have been testing the purity of a lethal-injection drug for the U.S. Department of Justice has said it will no longer test…
Read more →In April of this year, the state of Nevada agreed to relinquish its supply of drugs intended for executions to the pharmaceutical companies who manufactured them…
Read more →On April 13, 2020, Governor Ralph Northam signed into law a bill ending execution secrecy in Virginia — a significant development marking a major victory against lethal injection secrecy…
Read more →On April 9, 2020, a group of prominent medical practitioners and health experts sent a letter to corrections departments warning that many of the sedatives and paralytics used in executions…
Read more →In May 2019, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the US Department of Justice published an opinion determining that drugs intended for use in lethal injections are not…
Read more →On November 20, 2019, the US District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction barring the Federal Government from carrying out four executions scheduled for December 2019…
Read more →Ohio’s Governor DeWine announced on August 1, 2019 that he will be delaying the execution of Warren Henness in the state due to challenges in obtaining execution drugs…
Read more →A secrecy bill that would have rendered confidential information about the source of the state’s execution drugs stalled earlier this year in Louisiana’s Senate judiciary committee following engagement by pharmaceutical…
Read more →In a hearing in the Arkansas House Judiciary Committee earlier this month for a bill seeking to shield the state’s drug supplies in secrecy, Representative Andrew Collins raised concerns…
Read more →Several companies that manufacture drugs used in the Ohio death penalty have spoken out in opposition to the misuse of their products in executions, raising more questions…
Read more →Two pharmaceutical companies, Hikma Pharmaceuticals and Fresenius Kabi USA, have objected to legislative efforts to expand the secrecy surrounding the source of Arkansas’ lethal injection drugs…
Read more →On January 25, 2019, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine issued a temporary reprieve to death row inmate Warren Henness in response to a judicial ruling on Ohio’s lethal injection cocktail…
Read more →By Prashant Yadav, in the Houston Chronicle: when we’re sick, we are at our most vulnerable — so it’s vitally important that we can trust the medicines our doctors…
Read more →At oral arguments in Bucklew v. Precythe on November 6, 2018, Supreme Court Justices appeared troubled that a lethal injection execution could cause “gruesome and brutal pain” for a Missouri…
Read more →On September 28, 2018 a District Court judge in Nevada granted a preliminary injunction to American pharmaceutical company Alvogen, prohibiting the use of the company’s drugs…
Read more →Published in the Journal of the American Pharmacists Association, September 2018, by Prashant Yadav, PhD, and Rebecca Lynn Weintraub, MD, of Harvard Medical School…
Read more →Arkansas prison officials announced earlier this month that they were halting their search for lethal injection drugs, a move that means that the state is unlikely to put any inmates…
Read more →On July 10th, 2018, the American pharmaceuticals company Alvogen sued the state of Nevada to prevent the use of its medicines in an upcoming execution. The lawsuit sought the return…
Read more →The American pharmaceutical company Alvogen has sued the state of Nevada to prevent the use of its medicines in the execution of Scott Dozier, which is scheduled for tomorrow…
Read more →Following a similar announcement by Oklahoma in March of 2018, Alabama has become the second state to make the decision to move away from lethal injection in upcoming executions…
Read more →In March 2018, Oklahoma became the first state to categorically reject lethal injection as a method of execution, moving to a new method of execution using nitrogen gas…
Read more →It is time to debunk the myth that lethal injection is a humane procedure, and remove medicines from the capital punishment process, says Maya Foa, director of Reprieve…
Read more →Universal consensus is a rare thing. Universal consensus amongst rival companies in a highly competitive industry is almost unheard of. So the point we have now reached in the debate…
Read more →Johnson & Johnson, the world’s largest healthcare company, has hit out at plans by the US state of Florida to execute a prisoner on death row using an experimental lethal…
Read more →On August 14, 2017, a group of pharmacists submitted a public comment to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, raising “grave concerns” about the proposed protocol…
Read more →During a public hearing in 2017, Virginia Governor-elect Ralph Northam recognised the concerns of the healthcare industry about the misuse of medicines in executions…
Read more →A study shows four states that adhere to capital punishment are hoarding stashes of medicines that could otherwise treat patients in life-or-death procedures.
Read more →A US healthcare giant has accused the state of Arkansas of effectively lying to it over the sale of a pharmaceutical drug that the Republican governor had been poised to…
Read more →As Arkansas prepares to carry out an unprecedented string of executions beginning next week, the state is facing new criticism over the lethal injection drugs it plans to use…
Read more →Last week, the global drug company Pfizer announced sweeping new restrictions on the distribution of seven of its products, preventing them from being used to carry out the death penalty…
Read more →The pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced on Friday that it had imposed sweeping controls on the distribution of its products to ensure that none are used in lethal injections…
Read more →We understand that several states in the US are considering using Propofol for lethal injections. Missouri intended to employ a Propofol-based injection, but has recently announced its decision not to…
Read more →In 2011, several death row inmates brought a suit against the Food & Drug Administration (FDA), alleging that the FDA had violated federal law by allowing shipments of misbranded, unapproved…
Read more →The European Commission has imposed strict controls on the export of drugs used to carry out lethal injections. EU firms wanting to export drugs such as the sedative sodium thiopental…
Read more →A Danish pharmaceutical company said Friday that it would stop shipping a powerful drug to American prisons that carry out the death penalty by lethal injection…
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