Execution drug wasn’t made to kill, says chemist
TUCSON, Ariz. — When a chemist named Armin Walser helped invent a sedative more powerful than Valium more than 40 years ago, he thought his team’s concoction was meant to make people’s lives — not their deaths — easier.
Yet decades after midazolam entered the market, a product more often used during colonoscopies and cardiac catheterizations has become central to executions around the country and the debate that surrounds capital punishment.
“I didn’t make it for the purpose,” Walser said in an interview at his home in Tucson, Arizona. “I am not a friend of the death penalty or execution.”
Midazolam has been used for sedation during 20 lethal injections in at least six states, including Ohio, and its path from Walser’s laboratory into execution chambers has been filled with secrecy, political pressure, scientific disputes and court challenges.
The latest controversy is the extraordinary plan in Arkansas to execute eight inmates in 10 days next month. The state is racing the calendar: Its midazolam supply will expire at the end of April, and, given the resistance of manufacturers to having the drug used in executions, Arkansas probably would face major hurdles if it tried to restock.
In Arkansas, where no prisoner has been put to death since November 2005, midazolam is planned as the first of three drugs
in the state’s lethal injections. The drug is intended to render a prisoner unconscious and keep him from experiencing pain later in the execution, when other drugs are administered to stop the breathing and heart.
Supporters of midazolam’s use, which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld in a case from Oklahoma less than two years ago, say it is a safe and effective substitute for execution drugs that have become difficult to buy.
Death-penalty critics, citing executions that they say were botched, argue that midazolam puts prisoners at risk of an unconstitutionally painful punishment because the condemned might be insufficiently numbed to the agony caused by the execution drugs.
A major legal test is in Ohio, where a federal appeals court recently heard arguments about the drug’s future in the state.
“The states will be watching the legal proceedings out of Ohio, but also the on-theground experiences out of Arkansas, Virginia and elsewhere,” said Megan McCracken, who specializes in lethal-injection litigation at the law school of the University of California-Berkeley.
“Time and time again when you see executions with midazolam, you see, at best, surprises and, at worst, very bad executions,” McCracken said.
States have resisted such critiques, and during arguments last week before a federal appeals court in Cincinnati, Eric Murphy, Ohio’s state solicitor, said midazolam’s use in a three-drug protocol “does not create a substantial risk of pain that is sure or very likely to occur.”
Most executions involving midazolam drew little sustained criticism, but problems emerged during some. In Ohio in 2014, murderer Dennis McGuire’s execution took longer than previous injection-induced deaths in the state.
Testifying in U.S. District Court in January in connection with a lawsuit over Ohio’s lethal-injection protocol, Dispatch Reporter Alan Johnson said McGuire had been “coughing, gasping, choking in a way that I had not seen before at any execution.”
Ohio has not executed anyone since then.
Midazolam also was used in an execution in Oklahoma that state officials said had gone awry because of an improperly placed intravenous line. Critics said the episode still proved the inadequacy of midazolam during lethal injections.
In Arizona, the execution of Joseph R. Wood III took nearly two hours, long enough that a federal judge was holding an emergency hearing about the matter at the moment Wood died.
Arizona later agreed that it would “never again use midazolam, or any other benzodiazepine, as part of a drug protocol in a lethalinjection execution.”