A ship­ment of sodi­um thiopen­tal, an anes­thet­ic once wide­ly used in exe­cu­tions, was recent­ly stopped in India before it could reach Nebraska. The Indian dis­trib­u­tor sold more than $50,000 worth of sodi­um thiopen­tal to the state in May, but the ship­ment was stopped before leav­ing the coun­try because of ​“improp­er or miss­ing paper­work.” FedEx said it halt­ed the ship­ment because it did not have Food And Drug Administration clear­ance: ​“As with any inter­na­tion­al impor­ta­tion of a drug, data about that ship­ment is trans­mit­ted to fed­er­al agen­cies in advance, includ­ing U.S. Customs and the Food and Drug Administration. If the ship­ment is autho­rized, we will deliv­er it to the recip­i­ent; if it is not, we will return it to the for­eign ship­per.” Nebraska pur­chased the drugs despite the FDA’s warn­ing that impor­ta­tion of sodi­um thiopen­tal for exe­cu­tions vio­lates fed­er­al law. The FDA has con­sis­tent­ly said that it will not allow exe­cu­tion drugs into the U.S. because the pro­duc­ers are not FDA-cred­it­ed and the drugs are not approved for that purpose.

Nebraska spent $54,400 to pur­chase enough drugs for 300 exe­cu­tions from the over­seas sup­pli­er. After the ship­ment was halt­ed, a state spokesper­son con­firmed that it does not have a usable sup­ply of lethal injec­tion drugs. Ten peo­ple are on death row in Nebraska, though the legal­i­ty of their death sen­tences is being chal­lenged based upon the leg­is­la­ture’s repeal of the state’s death penal­ty in May.

(C. McDaniel and T. Nashrulla, “$25,000 Shipment Of Illegal Execution Drugs To Nebraska Gets Held Back In India,” BuzzFeed, September 17, 2015). See Lethal Injection and Recent Legislation.

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