US state set for first fentanyl execution

NEBRASKA was scheduled on Tuesday to carry out America’s first execution employing the opioid fentanyl as part of a four-drug combination that has never before been used.

The powerful synthetic painkiller – a key cause of death in America’s opioid and heroin abuse epidemic – was to be the second injection administered to Carey Dean Moore, sentenced to death for two 1979 murders.

Moore is not contesting his execution, the state’s first in 21 years. But a last-minute legal challenge filed on his behalf could still cause a delay.

Underscoring the difficulty states across the country have had in obtaining previously employed execution drugs, three of the four intravenous medications Nebraska is scheduled to use have never before been used for lethal injections.

It is a pivotal test for the state, which last performed an execution in 1997 by electric chair.

The American Civil Liberties Union on Monday asked the state’s highest court to delay Moore’s execution, according to the Omaha World-Herald newspaper.

The civil rights group claimed Moore’s death sentence had been automatically commuted to a life sentence in 2015, when the Nebraska state legislature abolished the death penalty, the newspaper reported.

Four-drug mixture

Nebraska voters reinstated capital punishment by referendum in the November 2016 election.

Moore has been on death row for 38 years and has said he does not want further delays.

While in his early 20s he was sentenced to death in 1980 for the killings of two Omaha taxi drivers five days apart.

Nebraska’s four-drug lethal injection mix consists of the sedative diazepam to render unconsciousness, the painkiller fentanyl citrate, the muscle relaxer cisatracurium to stop an inmate’s breathing, and, finally, potassium chloride to stop the heart. Only potassium chloride has been used before in executions.

Drug manufacturers and providers have been increasingly hostile to selling to states in order to prevent their medications from being used for executions.

States across the country have had to scramble to find the drugs they need, with varying degrees of success, or to find alternative drugs and establish new protocols.

Fentanyl killed more than 20,000 people in the US in 2016. It is 50 times more powerful than heroin and up to 100 times stronger than morphine.