Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Like thousand's of users before him


Nebraska has completed the first execution using Fentanyl. This was the first time it has been officially used with the intent of death for the user. Not surprisingly it worked very well.
Prison officials in Nebraska used fentanyl, the powerful opioid at the center of the nation’s overdose epidemic, to help execute a convicted murderer on Tuesday. The lethal injection at the Nebraska State Penitentiary was the first time fentanyl had been used to carry out the death penalty in the United States.

The execution, Nebraska’s first since 1997, represented a stunning political turnabout in a state where lawmakers voted only three years ago to ban capital punishment.

The condemned man, Carey Dean Moore, 60, had been convicted of killing two Omaha taxi drivers decades ago and did not seek a reprieve in his final months. But two pharmaceutical companies tried to block the execution in federal court, claiming their reputations would suffer if the killing proceeded.

The companies could not prove that their products would be used, however, because prison officials refused to identify the suppliers of the drugs to be administered to Mr. Moore. So the execution was allowed to continue.

Mr. Moore’s death, using a previously untested four-drug cocktail, could open a new method for states that have increasingly struggled to find execution drugs as suppliers have clamped down on how their products are used. But the unprecedented use of fentanyl in an execution chamber raised new ethical concerns amid a national opioid crisis that has led to an onslaught of fatal overdoses.

“We really don’t know how fentanyl is going to play out in an execution, as opposed to an opioid overdose,” Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University who has studied capital punishment, said in an interview on Monday. “Simply because people are dying as a result of fentanyl doesn’t mean they’re dying in a way that would be considered acceptable as a form of execution.”

The four-drug cocktail contained diazepam, a tranquilizer; fentanyl citrate, a powerful synthetic opioid that can block breathing and knock out consciousness; cisatracurium besylate, a muscle relaxant; and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
The three other drugs do guarantee that the prisoner can not ber resucitated with Naloxone, but with the effectiveness of fentanyl and other opioids like oxycontin, are they really necessary? And now that the warden can get all he needs with a prescription at the local pharmacy, will we see an increase in executions?

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