Enough Already. Enough.

[Content Note: Death penalty; torture.]

Pentobarbital, which has long been used in lethal injection executions, is no longer available as manufacturers now refuse to sell it for that purpose. So US states which still have the death penalty have been searching for new alternatives, with horrific results.

In January, Ohio death row inmate Dennis McGuire was executed using "a new cocktail of drugs that took nearly a half hour to kill the gasping McGuire."

In April, Oklahoma death row inmate Clayton Lockett was executed using "a disputed cocktail of drugs" which left him "writhing on the gurney" until he finally died of a heart attack 43 minutes later.

These examples of inmates being tortured to their deaths might seem a compelling argument for eradicating the death penalty once and for all, which is to say nothing of the 4% of wrongly convicted inmates sitting on death row, but some states are very determined to kill people:

Wyoming has become the latest death penalty state to consider a return to the firing squad, while Tennessee's governor has signed a bill to bring back the electric chair, amid a scarcity of lethal injection drugs and legal battles over the secrecy that surrounds their purchase and use by jurisdictions that impose capital punishment.

Legislators in Wyoming have begun to draft a bill they plan to introduce at the state's next legislative session that would reintroduce executions at the point of a gun. The move was prompted, elected members said, by the drought in lethal injection drugs caused by a pharmaceutical suppliers' boycott of US death chambers.

On Thursday night the Tennessee governor, Bill Haslam, approved the reintroduction of the electric chair in cases where drugs for lethal injection could not be acquired.

End the death penalty now. END THE DEATH PENALTY NOW.