Firms won't sell execution drugs to Arizon

An Arizona prison official in charge of buying drugs to carry out the death penalty testified Tuesday in a media lawsuit over access to execution information that pharmaceutical companies will no longer sell drugs to carry out the punishment.
Carson McWilliams, a division director in charge of prison operations for the Arizona Department of Corrections, testified at a one-day trial in Phoenix over whether the state must reveal its source of lethal-injection drugs and the qualifications of executioners.

Like other states, Arizona is struggling to obtain execution drugs after U.S. and European pharmaceutical companies began blocking the use of products for lethal injections.

McWilliams said it has gotten more difficult to find companies to sell drugs to Arizona, even though a law protects the firms from being publicly identified.

McWilliams said he was once shown an anonymous letter in which a supplier was threatened and told the business would be ruined if it sold drugs to state prisons.

"I don't know anyone in the United States where we could acquire chemicals to do executions," McWilliams said. "No one that I know will do business with the Department of Corrections."