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Executions for drug offenses plummeted worldwide during 2020, according to a new report by the global drug-policy monitor Harm Reduction International (HRI).
Three countries — China, Saudi Arabia, and Iran — carried out 30 confirmed executions for non-violent drug crimes over the course of the year, the group reported in its annual analysis, The Death Penalty for Drug Offences: Global Overview 2020. The total, the April 7, 2021 report said, was the lowest since HRI began reporting on executions for drug offenses in 2007. Drug-related executions were down 75% from the 116 confirmed drug executions worldwide in 2019 and have declined by a staggering 96% from the 755 confirmed drug executions in 2015.
HRI attributed some of the decline in execution to the COVID-19 pandemic, but said that “political developments played an important role.” Drug executions were down from 84 in 2019 to five in 2020 in Saudi Arabia, after the Kingdom proclaimed a moratorium on the practice. The report noted what it called a “slight” but “significant … decrease in confirmed executions in Iran" from 30 in 2019 to 25 in 2020 following legislative amendments to the nation’s drug laws. For the first time since 2013, HRI said, Singapore did not carry out any drug-related executions.
“It is too early to definitively conclude if this is the beginning of a long-term trend, or the outcome of an exceptional year,” the report said. HRI cautioned that cumulative data on the death penalty for drug offenses “is grossly insufficient, partly due to a lack of information on executions in China and Vietnam.” The organization confirmed that drug executions had taken place in China in 2020 but noted that “both [countries] are reported to routinely execute people for drug offences.”
While executions for drug offenses dramatically declined, HRI reported that death sentences imposed worldwide for non-violent drug crimes and the number of prisoners on death rows worldwide for drug offenses both rose in 2020. Thirty-five countries still authorize the death-penalty for drug offenses and ten imposed death sentences under those laws. HRI confirmed the imposition of at least 213 new death sentences for drug offenses in 2020, a 16% increase. At least 3,000 people are currently on death rows worldwide for drug offenses, HRI said.
HRI Executive Director Naomi Burke-Shyne called the continued use of the death penalty for drug offenses “amidst a global pandemic … abhorrent and emblematic of an overly punitive approach to drug control.” “Too many countries remain reluctant to move away from capital punishment and their false belief that the death penalty deters drug offences,” she said.
At a time in which the Arizona Department of Corrections is facing criticism for crumbling infrastructure, substandard medical care, and understaffing, the department has spent $1.5 million to purchase the lethal-injection drug pentobarbital from an undisclosed source. The exorbitant price, experts say, is a function of the questionable use of the drug for non-medical purposes and the secretive nature of the transaction.
Records obtained by The Guardian show that, in October 2020, Arizona ordered 1,000 vials of the barbiturate pentobarbital. Each one-gram vial cost the state $1,500, for what the newspaper described as a “jaw-dropping” total of $1.5 million. A heavily redacted invoice (click to enlarge picture) shows that the state ordered 4–8 “unlabeled” jars to be shipped in “Unmarked jars and boxes” to an Arizona location “to be determined.” The state’s execution protocol calls for five grams of the drug, so the vials would be enough for 200 executions in a state that has 119 people on death row.
Assistant federal defender Dale Baich, whose office represents numerous Arizona death-row prisoners, issued a statement April 9 saying: “We are shocked to learn of the steps Arizona has taken to hide the facts related to its effort to carry out executions. Taxpayer money should not be spent in this manner without complete transparency — certainly not with unmarked boxes and ‘heavily redacted document[s]’ … and not with the shroud of secrecy in which Arizona has cloaked its execution processes.”
“For the State to spend $1.5 million on execution drugs is even more disturbing given recent reports about the budget crisis at the Department of Corrections,” Baich said. “Surely there is a better use for this money than carrying out executions.”
