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Florida Executes Prisoner Using Anesthetic Untested in Executions

HeadlineAug 25, 2017

In Florida, prison officials on Thursday injected a 53-year-old condemned prisoner with a dose of an anesthetic never before used in a U.S. execution. At 6:10 p.m., Mark James Asay was strapped to a gurney and administered the drug etomidate. Witnesses say Asay twitched his legs briefly and appeared to breathe rapidly before his death was declared at 6:22 p.m. Etomidate was developed by Janssen, a division of Johnson & Johnson, and has been criticized as being unproven in executions. In response, the company said, “We do not condone the use of our medicines in lethal injections for capital punishment.” Mark James Asay was the first white man to be put to death in Florida for killing a black man since the state reinstituted the death penalty in 1979. We’ll have more on the death penalty and last night’s execution in Florida later in the broadcast.

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