John Oliver on lethal injections: ‘A protracted nightmare of suffering’
For the third time in Last Week Tonight’s 11 seasons, dating back to the second-ever episode, John Oliver looked at the death penalty in the US on Sunday evening. The host continued his long-running stance that it’s morally wrong, there is no humane way to do it and “any discussion of one is akin to coming up with the best way to fuck your mom, which is to say, there’s simply no right way to do that”.
But there have been some “grim developments” since the last time Oliver talked about lethal injections in 2019. Since then, the US has executed 91 people, including 13 at the federal level, all under President Trump.
“Our federal and state governments have continued to pursue questionably legal and definitely horrifying ways that, again, I would argue they shouldn’t be doing at all,” he explained. Despite shield laws protecting the identity of lethal drug suppliers in several states, many still have an issue providing lethal injections because it’s bad for business, leading to sketchy suppliers and an unconstitutional “protracted nightmare of suffering”.
Many states have switched to a single shot of pentobarbital, as did the Trump administration, which can cause suffering akin to suffocation or drowning. “At every level, those who carry out executions crave secrecy,” including the federal government.
But Oliver’s team claimed to have tracked down the Trump administration’s supplier: a company called Absolute Standards, based in Connecticut. Its business is making chemicals for calibrated machines, not drugs for humans, though Oliver suspected the company was concocting execution drugs as a side hustle. “I know I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 10 years reassuring everyone that this show does comedy and not journalism,” he said, “but I think we can all agree that the most important thing we do here is stir shit up, and it’s in that spirit that I want to explain how I got to this point.”
Reuters also suspects Absolute Standards, and Last Week Tonight filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) on the company in 2020; according to Oliver, a government representative accidentally told them, on two separate occasions, that the documents were taking so long to arrive because they were “related to the death penalty” which is “what’s known in the government world as a big, old whoopsie”.
“Honestly, five out of five on the post-call survey there,” he added. “This employee certainly helped me solve my problem.”
A confidential source also confirmed to the show that Absolute Standards is the federal government’s supplier of pentobarbital. “At this point, they might as well just update their real slogan of ‘we have the solutions’ to ‘we have the solutions that were secretly used in a bunch of government executions!’” Oliver joked.
“Maybe Absolute Solutions is proud to have made the drugs that enabled our government to effectively drown at least 13 people while they were strapped to a table,” he continued. “I don’t know. We’ve reached out to them repeatedly for comment on this story and they have ignored us, which is an odd thing to do when someone’s accusing you of making execution drugs.”
But it’s not clear whether the company should be able to because under the law, companies that make drugs need to be registered with the Food and Drug Administration. Absolute Standards is not, and the FDA has no records on the business (Last Week Tonight did another FOIA request on this, Oliver noted).
“The truth is, even if we shut down the use of pentobarbital, it won’t stop executions in this country,” he said. “Because elected leaders seem hell-bent on getting it done,” with some looking to circumvent lethal drug procurement issues by suffocating prisoners with nitrogen gas, as some Oklahoma legislators considered with a presentation by a criminal justice professor using YouTube videos of teenagers passing