The American Pharmacists Association has voted to encourage its 62,000 members not to assist prison officials in carrying out the death penalty on convicts sentenced to capital punishment,
The Guardian reported.
With the vote, the pharmacists' group joins other associations in the medical community that have been successfully
lobbied by death penalty opponents and are refusing to provide the drugs needed to execute prisoners on death row.
The vote will make it even more difficult for prison authorities to obtain the lethal drugs used in executions.
Bill Fassett, a professor emeritus of pharmacy law and ethics at Washington State University and a member of the pharmacist association, said the group favored the policy change because lethal injections had made it seem that executions were sterile affairs.
"It's like we're not really executing. We're sort of like taking Spot to the vet. We're just putting him to sleep, and that's not true," the Guardian reported.
Some pharmaceutical companies have lately become reluctant to provide ready-made lethal drugs to prisons. Now the association representing pharmacists trained to compound drugs has joined in that opposition.
In response, a number of states are pursuing alternative methods of carrying out capital punishment sentences or, as in the case of Ohio, postponing executions for a year or so. Texas has reportedly found a supplier to restock its lethal drug inventory; Tennessee may turn to the electric chair; Utah favors going with the firing squad; and Oklahoma is pursuing using a gas chamber, the Guardian reported.
There have been 10 executions carried out in the U.S. so far in 2015, all by lethal injection and all the prisoners were on death row for at least a decade. Seven of the executed were white, one was black, and the remainder were of Hispanic heritage, according to the
Death Penalty Information Center.
Among those executed was Johnny Kormondy, who, in July 1993, murdered Gary McAdams and, with his accomplices, repeatedly raped McAdams' wife, according to the
Pensacola News Journal.
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