On January 16, 2025, days before Pres. Donald J. Trump (R) returned to office for a second term, outgoing U.S. Attorney General (AG) Merrick Garland withdrew the Department of Justice (DOJ) protocol under which condemned federal prisoners are executed with pentobarbital. A DOJ report released with the announcement found “significant uncertainty about whether the use of pentobarbital as a single drug lethal injection causes unnecessary pain and suffering.”

The federal government wasn’t alone in facing scrutiny over the execution drug. The Indiana Capital Chronicle filed suit against that state’s Department of Corrections (DOC) on January 21, 2025, challenging its refusal to disclose what it paid for the drug. In Arizona, a former judge hired to review the state’s execution protocol lambasted the state Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Re-entry (DCRR) for lax procedures storing its stock of pentobarbital, saying he was “flabbergasted that a medical doctor would draw anything from an unmarked container and put it into people.”

At the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP), the single-drug protocol replaced a more widely accepted three-drug combination, after components became hard to get or compound because manufacturers and pharmacists objected to participating in public killings. Trump has vowed to restart BOP executions, though outgoing Pres. Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (D) commuted all but three federal death sentences before leaving office, as PLN reported [See: PLN, Jan. 2025, p.16.]

Yet the DOJ report may have some lasting impact. In Indiana, the Chronicle filed a public records request for DOC’s pentobarbital expense before it was used to kill prisoner Joseph E. Corcoran, 49, on December 18, 2024—the state’s first execution in 15 years. Prior to that DOC had said it couldn’t obtain the drug. So the amount that it paid when a source was finally found “should be promptly released to help the public better understand how much public money it costs to carry out the death penalty in Indiana,” said Kris Cundiff, an attorney with the nonprofit Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, which filed the suit for the newspaper.

In Arizona, Gov. Katie Hobbs (D) paused executions after her election in 2022, the same year that the state botched its last three killings. To review the execution protocol, Hobbs hired retired federal judge David Duncan, who found the state’s stockpile of pentobarbital in unmarked containers in a DCRR refrigerator. The agency promised there was no expiration date. But a federal public defender in Tennessee, Kelley Henry, said that manufacturer Absolute Standards told her it has a 30-month shelf life. Since Arizona’s invoice was dated 2020, Duncan questioned the efficacy of the drug. His final report draft called lethal injection “fundamentally unreliable, unworkable and unacceptably prone to errors”—even a firing squad was preferable, he said.

Before he could make that report, though, Hobbs fired Duncan on November 28, 2024, deciding to accept DCRR’s own review completed six days earlier. In that, Director Ryan Thornell unsurprisingly promised that he was “operationally prepared to proceed with an execution.” The state planned to kill prisoner Aaron Gunches, 53, on March 19, 2025, after the state Supreme Court issued his execution warrant on February 11, 2025. See: State v. Gunches, Ariz., Case No. CR-13-0282 (2025).

As the DOJ report noted, the U.S. Supreme Court briefly banned executions in 1972 over concerns about cruelty. But it has never banned a method of execution. DOJ’s review found that pentobarbital could induce “flash” pulmonary edema, causing a feeling of suffocation that “experts have likened … to the experience elicited during waterboarding.” See: Review of the Federal Execution Protocol, DOJ Off. Legal Policy (Jan. 2025).  

Additional sources: AP News, Arizona Mirror, Indiana Capital Chronicle, KJZZ, New York Times, Phoenix New Times, Politico

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