Missouri Threatens Return of Gas Chamber

“With drugs needed for lethal injection in short supply and courts wrangling over how to execute prisoners without them,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster (D) “is floating one possible solution: Bring back the gas chamber.”

Koster says Missouri statutes “allow two options for executions: lethal injection and death by gas. Koster’s comments come amid his growing frustration over the Missouri Supreme Court’s refusal to set execution dates until lethal injection issues are resolved.”

The Guardian notes Koster’s extraordinary statement “is a sign of the increasing fall-out on the 32 death-penalty states of the boycott on sales of medical drugs for use in executions. Drugs companies in America, Europe and Asia have refused on ethical grounds to sell their products to corrections departments, and the European Commission has imposed tough restrictions on the export of anaesthetics to the US.”