John Oliver asks: Why do 'execution drug' companies want to remain anonymous?
Answer: Wouldn't you if that was your thing?
I’m a regular watcher of This Week Tonight With John Oliver on HBO (now rebranded as Max; there is also a YouTube feed featuring many of his segments). It’s always amusing and, at times, laugh-out-loud funny. The Englishman usually starts off with some shorties on U.S. politics, then segues into a longer piece on an undercovered topic of interest. Warning: If you are very conservative politically, you might want to steer clear of Oliver. He is an unabashed progressive.
What’s unique about Oliver is that, unlike all other political comedians I’ve seen, he actually commits random acts of journalism in these extended segments. Like other good opinion journalists, Oliver and his team of writers and researchers have a point of view, but they present facts and studies to support their perspectives. In other words, they bring receipts to the table.
In between the analyses, there is plenty of knee-slapping humor. The trick is to discern when he’s serious and when he’s joking, but this is easy because the audience typically guffaws at his jokes — though we never actually see any crowd shots, so I suspect it’s just a laugh track.
In a show that aired last month (you can view the pertinent segment below), Oliver explored one of his favorite topics: the death penalty — specifically the companies that manufacture the drugs used in the lethal-injection form of capital punishment.
Let me first say that my own position on capital punishment has evolved. Until about 30 years ago, I was an advocate for the deathly sanction. I figured that if you deliberately took the life of another, then you deserved the same fate if convicted by a jury of your peers.
Then I began studying the plight of the wrongfully convicted. It happens more often than you might think, but the example I like to come back to is that of Peter Reilly, the trauma stricken 19-year-old from Falls Village, Connecticut, who was identified as the only suspect immediately and brow-beaten by State Police into a forced confession that he killed his mother in 1973. Reilly was eventually exonerated after new evidence was brought forward, but that never would have happened if not for the efforts of some wealthy celebrities, including William Styron and Arthur Miller, who stepped up after his conviction to provide Peter with first-rate legal representation. Barbara Gibbons’ murder remains unsolved some 50 years later.
Two books were written on the Reilly travesty, including one by the late journalist Donald Connery, entitled Guilty Until Proven Innocent. I have also interviewed both Connery and Peter myself. In addition, Peter’s story was made into a book and movie, A Death In Canaan. The entire movie is on YouTube (see below):
As the State Police have acknowledged, troopers deprived Peter of sleep and barely fed him. They essentially brainwashed him into confessing to the savage murder of his mother Barbara Gibbons. Click here for a timeline and summary on my old blog of the Reilly case, which did more to harm the reputation of the Connecticut State Police and turn me against capital punishment than anything else I can think of.
There is also the case of Richard LaPointe, the mentally disabled dishwasher who, based on little more than a gossamer confession, was convicted in 1992 of the brutal rape and murder in Manchester, Connecticut, of his then-wife’s 88-year-old grandmother. He was also accused of subsequently setting fire to her home to cover up the crime. I wrote a column on it for CTNewsJunkie in 2012. Connecticut abolished the death penalty in 2012. LaPointe faced the death penalty but was ultimately sentenced to life without parole. His conviction was later overturned.
But as usual, I digress. Oliver has a long-standing moral opposition to capital punishment and he used the drug companies’ role as a springboard to argue against the practice. Oliver has always maintained that there is no humane way to kill a murder convict and that “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.”
Then Oliver explores a phenomenon that I was completely unaware of. Most pharmaceutical companies that manufacture drugs used in executions do not want the public to know about it. They often go to great lengths to hide their involvement in the research and development of those drugs and have even convinced at least 12 state legislatures to enact shield laws protecting the identities of these companies from exposure through freedom-of-information laws. Most traditional pharmaceutical companies refuse to manufacture the drug at all, which has forced death-penalty jurisdictions to resort to contracting with companies of questionable repute.
Here’s an interesting tidbit that Oliver did not address. According to a Pew survey from three years ago, “60% of U.S. adults favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder, including 27% who strongly favor it.” In other words, the death penalty is popular, but drug companies still don’t want to be associated with it, or they don’t want you to know they manufacture drugs whose only utility is to help the government kill people. How could that be if 60% of adults favor the death penalty?
The simple truth is that even among those who favor capital punishment, the injection procedure and the convict’s reaction to it evokes such disturbing images that drug companies want no public part in it. And neither do I.
Here is a list on Wikipedia of exonerated death-row inmates across the world. Each is externally sourced. Here is a list from the Death Penalty Information Center of persons who were executed and later found to be either innocent or possibly innocent.
Our system of justice is better than most of the world’s. But juries and law enforcement officials sometimes make mistakes. People who are wrongfully convicted of a crime that includes jail time can be let out and regain their freedom if later exonerated. But if you are put to death and exculpatory evidence later emerges, the wrong cannot be made right.
If anything is more barbaric than the murder and mayhem inflicted by John Wayne Gacy, it’s the state-sanctioned murder that followed. As you can see from this interactive map of the nations that still permit capital punishment, we are not in very good company. Even Russia has suspended the practice, though the family of Alexei Navalny might dispute that.
Judges and prosecutors in most cases do not want to overturn a conviction, even when faced with overwhelming evidence to the contrary. You are correct, Terry, you can’t undo an execution.
Some states are using more brutal and painful techniques, such as nitrogen.
Of course, no drug company wants to have any public part in gruesome executions.