State & Local Government Policy, Business and Technology

Fentanyl, Gas, Firing Squad: Why States Are Adopting New, and Reviving Old, Execution Methods

Governing: Death penalty opponents were horrified on Tuesday when Nebraska became the first state in the union to carry out an execution using the painkiller fentanyl, which has been a driving force of the deadly opioid epidemic.

Some critics objected to the use of “a drug that’s currently ravaging our communities and killing thousands of Americans a year,” as Democratic New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson put it on Twitter. Others, like American Civil Liberties Union attorney Brian Stull, argued that the lethal protocol for Carey Dean Moore’s death was “cruel and unusual punishment” since the state paralyzed him before injecting the fentanyl, making it harder to know if Moore felt pain.

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