For more than 20 years, Randy Workman was the man who accompanied people during their death.
He is a senior corrections official in the state of Oklahoma, who participated in 32 executions performing various functions, such as escorting prisoners, selecting executioners, and searching for lethal injection medications.
“You could tell the moment they died. If you looked at them long enough, you could tell immediately that they were gone,” he told the BBC.
But their work took an unexpected turn in 2010, when Hospira, the maker of the drug sodium thiopental, halted production in the U.S. due to an unspecified problem related to obtaining raw materials.
The drug, which renders a person unconscious and suppresses the nervous system, is one of three substances in a cocktail widely used in executions. It is also the oldest drug approved for capital punishment.
The company attempted to move production to Italy in 2011, where capital punishment is illegal, but the country refused to allow it unless Hospira could guarantee it would not be used in executions.
So Workman’s job was transformed: he now had to obtain the medicine from other sources.
It was not easy.
“You felt isolated because you felt like the world was angry with you,” he tells the BBC.
“It made you feel like you were doing something wrong. If you believe in the death penalty, we don’t really.”
At one point, Workman was able to establish connections with a pharmaceutical company in India that looked like it would be able to deliver the supply without obstacles, but he abandoned the idea when he discovered that the company did not have the approval process used in the US.
It meant that he could not guarantee the quality of the medicine.
“That was a scary thought. You really don’t know what you’re getting into and you can’t take risks in the process,” he said.
In the state of Arizona, prison chief Carson McWilliams was also on the hunt for lethal drugs.
He had been calling US-based pharmaceutical companies to ask if they had any drugs left from previous orders.
“I probably contacted every pharmaceutical company I knew. Most of them wouldn’t even talk to me.”
Since no one did, he also turned to the Indian supplier. In his case, he did order some shipments, as did the Texas Department of Corrections.
It was vital to seek out the drugs, McWilliams said, because in Arizona, when an execution order is issued, a penitentiary has 31 days to comply with it before the order expires, at which point they would have to start the process again.
“That clock starts ticking. You’re under pressure to make this happen. So you have to be creative and do what you have to do to make this happen,” he said.
But when the drugs arrived in the U.S., federal officials confiscated them, bringing McWilliams back to square one.
An important mission
It was then that he contacted a pharmacist in England who could supply him with sodium thiopental. At that time the supply of the product was legal.
“It felt good because we know what these medications are and we’ve used them before,” he said.
But the supplier was not a large pharmaceutical company. In fact, Medhi Alawi operated from an address that apparently also doubled as a driving school in Acton, London.
Hundreds of vials of white powder were packed in a cardboard box and shipped to Carson McWilliam’s office in Florence, Arizona. It became one of the few suppliers in the United States.
Word spread to prison authorities across the country, and emails soon began circulating requesting access to medicines ordered in the UK.
McWilliam thought they had resolved their search for drugs to carry out the executions, but most of the shipment from London was confiscated by the US Food and Drug Administration due to licensing problems.
However, some jars had already been used to carry out executions in Arizona and Georgia.
Testing what has not been tested
In 2011, the United Kingdom made it illegal to export drugs for use in capital punishment.
Without a steady supply of sodium thiopental from the UK, the search continued for years. Controversially, some states even tried different drug combinations in executions.
Joel Zivot, an associate professor at Emory University School of Medicine who has campaigned against lethal injection procedures for the past decade, said drugs and other medical tools should not be used in executions.
“No serious pharmaceutical company produces drugs with execution in mind. When the Department of Corrections uses drugs to kill, it is a misuse of that product,” he told the BBC.
He added that instead of ending the production of drugs that have other therapeutic purposes, governments should intervene and pass regulations that restrict the use of lethal drugs.
Some, including McWilliams, who supports the death penalty, think the new drug combinations had different effects than the original formula.
“About the original drug cocktail that people use, everyone knew it worked well and there were no problems with it. Some of the other drugs were not as effective, so the executions lasted longer,” he said.
Lawyers for convicted murderer Joseph Wood sued to stop his execution over concerns about the supply of drugs used in Arizona. The Supreme Court finally allowed it to take place in 2014, but the procedure lasted almost two hours and resulted in him being injected 15 times.
That led Arizona to temporarily suspend executions to review the state’s procedures. Capital punishment was not restarted until 2022.
Charles Ryan, director of the Arizona Department of Corrections, said in a statement after Wood’s execution: “Once the inmate was sedated, he did not grimace or make any additional movements.” He said he was “unequivocally assured that the inmate was in a coma and never felt any pain or distress.”
Also in 2014, Clayton Lockett’s execution in Oklahoma failed and he died shortly after of a heart attack. Some blamed a previously unused cocktail of medications, while reports also suggest a problem with the intravenous line used to administer the substance.
The failure was condemned by the UN and President Barack Obama, and helped shed light on capital punishment in the United States, the only democracy in the Western world that still carries out executions. Many have argued that the use of new medications and substance combinations violated the US Constitution’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual” punishment.
But despite the concerns, the Supreme Court repeatedly upheld the legality of the death penalty and the use of lethal injectable medications.
Reduction of the death penalty
Today, the death penalty continues, but it has diminished and concerns persist about the methods used to carry it out.
Oklahoma is one of five US states to carry out an execution in 2023.
There are currently approximately 2,400 inmates in US penitentiaries on death row. At the time of writing, 20 prisoners had been executed in 2023, below the modern-era peak of 1999, when 98 executions were carried out in 20 US states.
More than 60 global pharmaceutical companies do not allow their drugs to be used for capital punishment.
Without reliable access, five states (Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Utah and South Carolina) have passed laws allowing prisoners to choose death by firing squad as an alternative.
Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham Law School in New York City, says the difficulty in obtaining lethal injectable drugs is one reason for the decline in executions.
He said executions have always had an “element of secrecy” associated with them. But that secrecy became more pronounced after drug shortages became widespread.
Some states even enacted laws to keep secret information about what medications were used, such as the Georgia Lethal Injection Secrecy Act of 2013.
This raised concern, he said. Although he does not oppose the death penalty, he criticizes the methods currently used.
“They will say they are keeping it secret as a matter of security to protect what happens inside a prison. But there is absolutely no reason why we can’t know what kind of drugs are used.”
Paul Cassell, a law professor at the University of Utah who supports the death penalty, said activists have seized on the medication issue.
He believes the shortage of lethal injectable drugs “is being used as a kind of bottleneck to block the death penalty.”
Both Randy Workman and Carson McWilliams are now retired.
McWilliams was involved in 29 executions while working for the department of corrections.
“I didn’t grow up thinking, hey, this is what I want to do for a living. It’s just what happened with my job.”
Workman still lives near the Oklahoma State Penitentiary, on a small farm about two hours from Oklahoma City.
It is a quiet place and a world away from the high-security prison that houses 1,200 inmates and where he spent his working life.
He is happily retired, relaxed and cheerful. He loves his wife and her goat, but she also has some mementos from his time working in corrections, including a knife confiscated as prison contraband.
Reflecting on the years he spent searching for the lethal drugs, Workman said, “It was a horrible problem. It was like dealing with a drug dealer.”
He supports the death penalty, but now says he is ready to “get away from it” and carries out pastoral activities in prison.
“I don’t like seeing people die. I don’t care what they’ve done. They’re still people,” he said.
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cqv9p1g493yo, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-10-25 18:20:05
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