The state of Missouri is threatening to resurrect the use of the gas chamber for executions, as an alternative to its dwindling supply of lethal-injection drugs.
The state's attorney general, Chris Koster, has warned that unless Missouri is allowed by the state supreme court to press ahead quickly with pending executions under its current lethal-injection protocol, its drug supplies will expire. In that case, the state might have to turn to the only other option open to it the gas chamber."
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Koster's extraordinary statement, raising the possible return of the gas chamber, is a sign of the increasing fall-out on the 32 death-penalty states of the boycott on sales of medical drugs for use in executions. Drugs companies in America, Europe and Asia have refused on ethical grounds to sell their products to corrections departments, and the European Commission has imposed tough restrictions on the export of anaesthetics to the US.
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In the wake of the legal challenge, the Missouri supreme court has refused to schedule any more execution dates until the question of the constitutionality of the new method of death is settled. That in turn has set the clock ticking on the state's limited supply of propofol.
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Missouri switched from hanging as its preferred method of judicial killing to the gas chamber in 1937. The last time such an execution was carried out in the state was in 1965.
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Joseph Luby, an attorney with the Death Penalty Litigation Center in Kansas City who helped bring the legal challenge to the use of propofol in Missouri, said he would be surprised if the courts allowed the state to revive the gas chamber. "Its use has fallen into disrepute not least in the Western mind post World War Two. We see gas chambers as problematic for reasons that don't need spelling out."
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AMBER ALERT WA - Roman Huizar, 1, West Richland, 21 April 2024
