Treating Convicts Like Dogs

Texas switches to animal euthanasia drug for lethal injections

Commentary
by Bruce Felps

Texas executions marked a new milestone, yes that’s redundant, earlier this week.

For the first time, the state used a lethal injection containing the drug pentobarbital rather than the sodium thiopental formerly used in the final cocktail. For those of us not pharmaceutically inclined, pentobarbital is the drug typically used to euthanize animals.

And somewhere out there, someone is thinking, “Hmm, how fitting.”

According to a Reuters report, Cary Kerr, convicted of sexually assaulting and strangling a woman, batted leadoff in the new drug era. The results remained the same.

State 1, Condemned 0.

The state did not switch from the old drug because it contains sodium, which is bad for one’s blood pressure. Nope, it changed because the manufacturer, Hospira Inc., produced the lethal weapon in Italy, and Italy didn’t like that.

Enter pentobarbital, and exit Kerr, whose penultimate last words were, “Never trust a court-appointed attorney.”

And that right there must just be a worthy epitaph.


Bruce Felps owns and operates East Dallas Times, an online community news outlet serving the White Rock Lake area. He opposes the death penalty. Isolated banishment to a tiny little atoll, though …

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