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Lethal injection in the United States has long been controversial, but the issue really came to a head last year after the botched execution of a convicted murderer in the Midwestern state of Oklahoma. In that case, Joseph Rudolph Wood was injected with an untested cocktail of drugs, and it took him more than two hours to die; it was reported that he gasped for air hundreds of times. Jeffrey Stern has written about this case, and the overall shortage of execution drugs in America, for the Atlantic Magazine. He says that when the executioners supply of their preferred drug— sodium thiopental— suddenly dried up in the US, prison officials went searching for it across the globe.
Image: The ‘death chamber’ in Huntsville, Texas, where death row inmates receive lethal injections. Credit: Getty Images