Georgia Hopes They Will Do A Better Job At Killing Someone Than Oklahoma Did

About six weeks ago, we wrote a completely unfunny post about a botched execution in Oklahoma in which Clayton Lockett died a lengthy and agonizing death because the whole affair was basically fueled by Mystery Death Drug. States have begun using versions of Mystery Death Drug because overseas manufacturers have refused to supply the key ingredient, basically saying "naw mang, we are not going to sell you that stuff, America, because you just keep killing people with it." We should have known that little things like a horrible death and the lack of a medically sound method would not stand in the way of the state getting its kill on.

Georgia, apparently sad that Oklahoma was getting all the attention for being horrible, is set to execute Marcus Wellons today. 

OK, wait. Let's get this out of the way so that someone doesn't have to look faux-smart or contrarian about it in the comments. What Wellons did was unspeakably fucking awful. He raped and murdered a 15-year-old girl. That's pretty much literally unforgivable, but arguing that the state putting people to death via untested means is inhumane is in NO WAY FUCKING RELATED to what Wellons did nor is it an implicit condoning of what Wellons did. Reasonable people can actually hold two thoughts about two different types of horribles in their brainpans at the same time. Weird, right?

Now that we've disposed of that bit of dumb, let's go back to the big slab of awful. For Clayton Lockett's execution, Oklahoma said they would use a brand spanking new way to combine the Death Drugs, and but it was a way that didn't work out so well for Clayton Lockett or the Oklahoma Department of Corrections, and now Oklahoma has just clammed up about the whole secret sauce. Georgia will not make that mistake, though, because they're going to do the whole killing thing in an even more secretive way.

For the first time, officials turned to a so-called compounding pharmacy to produce a modified version of pentobarbital for a lethal injection. They could not secure the usual iteration of the drug from Lundbeck, the Danish company that produces the only version of pentobarbital approved for sale in the United States.

Compounding pharmacies operate independently of drug manufacturers, and are legally allowed to tweak the chemical makeup of drugs without having to seek approval from the FDA. As a result, their methodology and efficiency have been called into question by opponents of the death penalty, who argue that death-row inmates have the right to know exactly what they are being injected with. Georgia’s Department of Corrections confirmed to the Associated Press that they had obtained the dose of pentobarbital for Tuesday’s planned execution from one such compound pharmacy.

See? Look at Georgia, getting all fancy with their secret compounding pharmacy and their devil-may-care attitude about how they kill people. Georgia basically has no fucks to give about executions, as evidenced by their Supreme Court's recent ruling upholding their whole shrouded in secrecy dealio.

The appeals court, in a 5-2 decision, shrugged off concern that the drugs [from an unknown and unnamed compounding pharmacy] could be tainted and cause side effects such as a precipitous drop in blood pressure or febrile seizures.

"Such a side effect obviously would be shockingly undesirable in the practice of medicine, but it is certainly not a worry in an execution," the judges wrote.

Certainly not! Because if you cause a seizure or a drop in blood pressure, if you just leave those things unaddressed, your inmate will probably die reasonably quickly! Right? Maybe? Hopefully? Or if they don't, you could just leave the room until they do, or perhaps come back and bludgeon them with a tire iron the next day.

We're sure Georgia will figure something out, because they are pretty fucking committed to killing people.

[ Think Progress / NBC ]