America debates execution methods amid doubts about lethal drugs

Lethal-injection drugs are in short supply in the United States, and with lawyers questioning their effectiveness, some lawmakers in some death-penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

Most states abandoned those execution methods more than a generation ago in a bid to make capital punishment more palatable to the public and to appease a judicial system worried about inflicting cruel and unusual punishments that violate the Constitution.

But to some elected officials, drug shortages and recent legal challenges are beginning to make lethal injection seem vulnerable to complications.

"This isn't an attempt to time-warp back into the 1850s or the wild, wild West or anything like that," said Rick Brattin, a Republican representative in the state of Missouri. This month he proposed making firing squads an execution option. "It's just that I foresee a problem, and I'm trying to come up with a solution that will be the most humane yet most economical for our state."

Like Brattin, a Wyoming lawmaker this month drafted a bill to allow firing squads. Missouri's attorney general and a state lawmaker have raised the notion of rebuilding the state's gas chamber. And a Virginia lawmaker wants to make electrocution an option if lethal-injection drugs are not available.

In recent years, European drug makers have stopped selling lethal-injection chemicals to prisons because they do not want their products used to kill. Earlier this month Hospira, the sole American manufacturer of an anaesthetic widely used in executions, said it would stop making the drug. It had planned production in Italy, but that country's authorities said they would bar its export if the drug, sodium thiopental, might be used for capital punishment.