08 February 2020 :

Reaching the 10-year mark since its last execution this month, Louisiana has joined a trend of falling execution numbers across the country. Death chambers in 12 of 29 states with legalized capital punishment have gone unused for more than a decade, said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center (California, Colorado, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wyoming, plus US Federal Government and US Military). Utah will join that list in June. 68 people sit on Louisiana’s death row, with no execution dates set. Louisiana's execution protocols are tied up in litigation, and corrections officials say they can't obtain lethal injection drugs amid pushback from pharmaceutical manufacturers. Not surprisingly, people on opposite ends of the capital punishment debate disagree about the driving forces behind the drop in executions. “The reason it’s not being enforced is political. If there was a strong interest in getting the law enforced for the worst murderers in Louisiana, you’d have the drugs or you’d have alternative drugs,” said Michael Rushford, president of the California-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports capital punishment. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards, a Democrat recently reelected to a 2nd term, refuses to disclose his personal opinion about the death penalty. But he insists the issue is out of his hands, both because of a 2012 lawsuit challenging the state's lethal injection protocol and procedures and because companies don't want their products associated with capital punishment. “There is a federal court stay on executions in Louisiana, and we also have an inability to acquire the drugs to use in lethal injections,” Edwards said during his reelection campaign. “No manufacturer will sell them to us for that purpose — and in fact they have threatened suit against Louisiana if we use them for executions.” While executions remain stalled, Louisiana's death row continues to shrink. 22 inmates previously sentenced to death have had those sentences reduced or have been exonerated since 2010, according to the corrections department, and 4 people awaiting executions have died from natural causes.