A recent maneuver out of the state attorney general’s office in Tennessee is being called unprecedented after officials there asked the Supreme Court for permission to execute 10 prisoners currently on death row.
Those ten inmates have been awaiting execution an average of more than 27 years, but the state put a hold on the practice of putting prisoners to death in 2011 after it was forced to surrender its supply of sodium thiopental, a sedative that had up until then been one of three components used in the lethal cocktail administered by executioners in Tennessee.
Just this September, though, the Tennessee Department of Correction announced it would be switching to a single-drug lethal injection method, relying instead on just one narcotic, pentobarbital, which had been used primarily by veterinarians up until recently when other states began administering it to death row inmates.
The use of pentobarbital as the sole drug of choice at executions across the United States has generated a fair share of criticism and safety concerns in recent years, but it isn’t the narcotic that’s now raising questions in Tennessee. Rather, officials are being asked to explain why for the first time presumably ever they’ve ordered at once death warrants for 10 separate individuals.
Tennessee has only executed six prisoners between 1960 and 2009, and hasn’t ended an inmate’s life at all since 2009. According to an article published Thursday morning by The Tennessean’s Brian Haas, however, officials there are now hoping to have 10 inmates all killed in only a few months’ time.
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