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Comment by b_tterc_p | Hacker News Reader

Why does the state need to obtain illegal execution drugs?

Let’s say you’re the prison. You’re supposed to execute a prisoner tomorrow. You don’t have the drugs to do so.

You could either fail to execute the prisoner, or take a fairly large risk and get illegal methods. Would the prison really lose face if it just said that it didn’t have the means to carry out the execution and thus did not?

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Because the main ingredient of the injection cocktail, sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the US. The EU has also banned the drug. So states are now trying to "score" an alternative, pentobarbital which works similarly to sodium thiopental, but is slower acting, resulting in a few botched executions in Texas.

https://www.inverse.com/article/4100-the-growing-black-marke...

And to be quite clear (while I am personally against all applications of the death penalty), a botched execution is far more expensive, legally, and even medically (if there are increased healthcare costs for that timeframe), and also, a botched execution is generally considered "cruel and unusual punishment".

>a botched execution is generally considered "cruel and unusual punishment".

Not any longer. The Supreme Court ruled this term that prisoners sentenced to die have no right to a comfortable death.

I wouldn't expect that ruling to survive this particular SCOTUS. They've broken years of precedence and created law from thin air that don't exist prior. It's not likely to survive when the pendulum swings on the court again, justice like judicial overreach on anti trust with the previous liberal majority was generally overturned.

Its really expensive to have people sitting on death row?

I'd be of the opinion that anyone who uses expense as a justification here is less morally balanced than most of the people on death row.

Death row is very expensive. In part because the types of people up for death are high risk and so they have to pay for more security (guards, locks and even fire protection). In part because death row sees the most appeals so lawyers keeping them in cost more.

I wonder if it is $775 per day?

Where the heck did you pull that number from? Also why are you posing it as a question?

The closest thing I see from google is "Trump's Child Detention Camps Cost $775 Per Person Every Day" which is unrelated to this discussion.

Just for kicks and giggles: I wonder if it's $1337.995 per day?

Shit. Yeah that’s it and is retrospectively obvious. The prisons probably are responsible for operating under their assigned budgets, which means they need to literally kill off their liabilities.

I wonder what correlations exist between prison profitability and inmate death rates.

At least as of 2009, no state housed death row inmates in private prisons: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/24/us/24prison.html. In Alabama, death row inmates are housed and executed in Holman, a public facility. Moreover, Alabama has just 1% of its prison population in private prisons. Many states that have the death penalty (Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kansas, etc.) have no private prisons at all.

That’s good, but not contradictory of the point above. A public, not for profit prison presumably still has to operate on a budget. I did say “profitability”, but I suppose I really meant ability to operate.

If prisons are held accountable to their finances, which I assume they are, they’re put into a position where expensive inmates who are budgeted to die must die, else they threaten the entire prison.

Then you have a condemned criminal sitting in a cell instead of being tortured in Hell like he’s supposed to be. Can’t have that.

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