All Ga. Executions On Hold After DEA Seizes Critical Drug

[Jazzy]

ATLANTA -- All Georgia executions are off after federal drug agents seized the state's supply of a sedative used in lethal injections that has been challenged by capital punishment critics and death-row inmates, including a man recently executed who called the British exporter of the drug a fly-by-night supplier.



Drug Enforcement Administration spokesman Chuvalo Truesdell wouldn't say exactly why Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental was taken Tuesday, just that we had questions about how the drug was imported to the U.S. The sedative is part of a three-drug cocktail used in executions that has been in short supply since the sole U.S. manufacturer stopped making it.



No more execution dates in Georgia have been scheduled and it's unlikely any will be set before the issue is resolved. Georgia Attorney General's Office spokeswoman Lauren Kane said prosecutors couldn't ask a judge to set executions if corrections officials didn't have the necessary supplies to carry one out.



Georgia's stockpile of the drug has been a target of death row inmates and capital punishment critics since corrections officials released documents this year showing the state obtained the drug from Link Pharmaceuticals, a firm purchased five years ago by Archimedes Pharma Limited. Both are British firms.



The drug was used in January to execute Emmanuel Hammond, a 45-year-old man convicted for the 1988 shotgun slaying of an Atlanta preschool teacher. His attorneys sought a delay to gather more information on how the state obtained the drug, claiming in court documents it came from a fly-by-night supplier operating from the back of a driving school in England. They said the drug could have been counterfeit.

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