Death Penalty Focus, William T. Montgomery & Oklahoma Plans to Be First to Use Execution Method, Trump wants death penalty for some drug dealers and so lets start with people at Miami-Luken, Tug Valley Pharmacy, Hurley Drug in Williamson, H.D. Smith and all corrupt people in Big Pharma
President Donald Trump officially proposed imposing the death penalty for some drug dealers on Monday.
Speaking at an event focused on the opioid epidemic in New Hampshire, Trump said it was critical to “get tough” on combating the epidemic.
“If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we are wasting our time,” Trump said. “And that toughness includes the death penalty.”
Trump went on to say that dealers “will kill thousands of people during their lifetime” but won’t be punished for the carnage they cause.
“This is about winning a very, very tough problem and if we don’t get very tough on these dealers, it is not going to happen, folks,” he said.
Monday’s event marks Trump’s first trip back to the first-in-the-nation primary state — and the state that that introduced the businessman-turned-politician to the opioid scourge — since he won the presidency.
The President, joined by first lady Melania Trump, laid out a plan that looks to balance increasing punitive measures to stop drug traffickers and broadening the federal government’s involvement in combating the epidemic with a sweeping ad campaign about addiction and more funding for drug treatment programs, according to Trump administration officials briefed on the plans.
The plan will include stiffer penalties for high-intensity drug traffickers, including the death penalty for some, Trump said.
Though Trump has long advocated for sentencing certain drug traffickers to death, public policy experts have condemned the proposal even before Trump rolled it out, arguing that it misses the cause of the opioid epidemic.
White House officials told CNN that Trump’s broader plan will focus on key areas: law enforcement and interdiction, prevention and education through a sizable advertising campaign, improving the ability to fund treatment through the federal government, and helping those impacted by the epidemic find jobs while fighting addiction.
Congress recently appropriated $6 billion to combat the opioid epidemic, and a senior administration official told CNN that Trump’s plan will lay out how the White House believes that money should be spent. At the time, treatment advocates and drug policy experts were concerned the uptick in funding wouldn’t be spent wisely and wasn’t nearly enough.
Trump has credited voters in New Hampshire with introducing him to the opioid crisis during his 2016 campaign. He frequently referenced the scourge when campaigning in the state, which has been epicenter in the fight against opioids. But in a call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shortly after his inauguration, Trump referred to the state as a “a drug-infested den,” drawing fierce criticism from the state’s leaders.
Days before Election Day in 2016 — when time is a campaign’s most precious commodity — Trump even traveled to New Hampshire to discuss opioid addiction and pledge to make fighting the epidemic a focus.
His response as President, however, has been mixed, according to epidemic experts. The President has been accused of sidelining the Office of National Drug Policy Control, failing to heed the recommendations of his opioid council and focusing too much on the punitive measure to respond to the epidemic.
Trump in October declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency, telling an audience of experts and people in recovery that “we can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic.”
Recently released numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that around 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016. And since 1999, the number of American overdose deaths involving opioids has quadrupled.
Drug firms shipped 20.8M pain pills to WV town with 2,900 people.
Over the past decade, out-of-state drug companies shipped 20.8 million prescription painkillers to two pharmacies four blocks apart in a Southern West Virginia town with 2,900 people, according to a congressional committee investigating the opioid crisis.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee cited the massive shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone — two powerful painkillers — to the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, amid the panel’s inquiry into the role of drug distributors in the opioid epidemic.
“These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia,” said committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., in a joint statement.
The panel recently sent letters to regional drug wholesalers Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith, asking why the companies increased painkiller shipments and didn’t flag suspicious drug orders from pharmacies while overdose deaths were surging across West Virginia.
The letters outline high-volume shipments to pharmacies over consecutive days and huge spikes in pain pill numbers from year to year.
Between 2006 and 2016, drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in Williamson, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data obtained by the House Committee.
Springboro, Ohio-based Miami-Luken sold 6.4 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy from 2008 to 2015, the company disclosed to the panel. That’s more than half of all painkillers shipped to the pharmacy those years. In a single year (2008 to 2009), Miami-Luken’s shipments increased three-fold to the Mingo County town.
Miami-Luken also was a major supplier to the now-closed Save-Rite Pharmacy in the Mingo County town of Kermit, population 400.
The drug wholesaler shipped 5.7 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Save-Rite and a branch pharmacy called Sav-Rite #2 between 2005 and 2011, according records Miami-Luken gave the committee. In 2008, the company provided 5,624 prescription pain pills for every man, woman and child in Kermit.
In its letters, the panel also raised questions about Miami-Luken’s shipments to Westside Pharmacy in Oceana, Wyoming County. The committee cited documents that show a Miami-Luken employee reported a Virginia doctor, who operated a pain clinic located two hours from Oceana, was sending his patients to Westside Pharmacy, which filled the prescriptions.
In 2015, more than 40 percent of the oxycodone prescriptions filled by Westside Pharmacy in Oceana were coming from the Virginia doctor, according to the committee’s letter. The following year, the Virginia Board of Medicine suspended the doctor’s license, finding his practice posed a “substantial danger to public health and safety.”
The panel’s letter also mentions Miami-Luken’s suspicious shipments to Colony Drug in Beckley. In a five-day span in 2015, the drug wholesaler shipped 16,800 oxycodone pills to the pharmacy.
“In several instances, Colony Drug placed multiple orders for what appears to be excessive amounts of pills on consecutive days,” the committee wrote.
The House committee questioned H.D. Smith’s painkiller shipments to Family Discount Pharmacy in Logan County. The drug shipper distributed 3,000 hydrocodone tablets a day to the pharmacy in 2008, a 10-fold increase in sales from the previous year, according to the committee’s letter. The pharmacy, located in a town of 1,800 people, was shipped 1.1 million hydrocodone pills in 2008.
The House panel also cited Springfield, Illinois-based H.D. Smith for spikes in painkiller shipments to Sav-Rite, Westside Pharmacy, Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug.
Oxycodone is sold under brand names like OxyContin, while hydrocodone brands include Vicodin and Lortab.
“The committee’s bipartisan investigation continues to identify systemic issues with the inordinate number of opioids distributed to small town pharmacies,” Walden and Pallone said in the statement. “The volume appears to be far in excess of the number of opioids that a pharmacy in that local area would be expected to receive.”
In a statement, H.D. Smith said it was reviewing the committee’s letter Monday.
“H.D. Smith works with its upstream manufacturing and downstream pharmacy partners to guard the integrity of the supply chain, and to improve patient outcomes,” the company said.
Miami-Luken did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In February 2016, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey ended a state lawsuit against Miami-Luken after the company agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle allegations that it flooded the state with painkillers. Morrisey, a former lobbyist for a trade group that represents Miami-Luken and other drug distributors, inherited the lawsuit in 2013 after ousting longtime Attorney General Darrell McGraw.
H.D. Smith paid the state $3.5 million to settle the same pill-dumping allegations in January 2017.
The committee gave H.D. Smith and Miami-Luken until Feb. 9 to turn over documents and answer dozens of questions about what steps, if any, the companies took to stop the flood of pain pills into Southern West Virginia.
“We will continue to investigate these distributors’ shipments of large quantities of powerful opioids across West Virginia, including what seems to be a shocking lack of oversight over their distribution practices,” Walden and Pallone said.
The state has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation. More than 880 people fatally overdosed in West Virginia in 2016.
The state of Ohio may be set to execute an innocent person. Tell Gov. Kasich that OH should not execute an innocent person
William T. Montgomery has maintained his innocence before, during, and after the trial that sent him to Ohio's death row 31 years ago. Despite significant doubts over his guilt, the state has scheduled his execution for April 11, 2018.
Here are just a few troubling facts about this case:
We've made it easy to help, and you don't need to live in Ohio to do so. Please use the link below to sign a petition to Gov. Kasich. After you sign, you'll receive additional instructions and alerts. Click here to get started!
Oklahoma Plans to Be First to Use Execution Method. Nitrogen gas will be new primary method of execution.
The gurney in the. death chamber is seen from the witness room at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)
If new protocols are successfully developed and the change isn't blocked by court challenges, one of Oklahoma's 49 condemned inmates will soon become the first person in the US legally executed with nitrogen gas. The state—which started exploring the use of the inert gas after a botched lethal injection in 2014 halted executions—says it has made nitrogen inhalation its primary method of execution and will be using the gas when executions resume, the BBC reports. State Attorney General Mike Hunter announced the change Wednesday, saying nitrogen is easy to obtain, causes a painless death, and "requires no complex medical procedures." No other state uses the method.
Dale Baich, a lawyer for Oklahoma inmates challenging execution protocols, called for total transparency from the state. "This method has never been used before and is experimental," he said, per the Washington Post. "Oklahoma is once again asking us to trust it as officials ‘learn-on-the-job' through a new execution procedure." Nitrogen execution will involve placing a mask over a person's nose and mouth to flood their lungs with nitrogen, causing them to die from lack of oxygen in a death that Slate notes could be "mildly euphoric," similar to the "raptures" experienced by deep-sea divers low on oxygen. (A lawyer says an execution attempt in Alabama last month was "gory" and "botched.")
Speaking at an event focused on the opioid epidemic in New Hampshire, Trump said it was critical to “get tough” on combating the epidemic.
“If we don’t get tough on the drug dealers, we are wasting our time,” Trump said. “And that toughness includes the death penalty.”
Trump went on to say that dealers “will kill thousands of people during their lifetime” but won’t be punished for the carnage they cause.
“This is about winning a very, very tough problem and if we don’t get very tough on these dealers, it is not going to happen, folks,” he said.
Monday’s event marks Trump’s first trip back to the first-in-the-nation primary state — and the state that that introduced the businessman-turned-politician to the opioid scourge — since he won the presidency.
The President, joined by first lady Melania Trump, laid out a plan that looks to balance increasing punitive measures to stop drug traffickers and broadening the federal government’s involvement in combating the epidemic with a sweeping ad campaign about addiction and more funding for drug treatment programs, according to Trump administration officials briefed on the plans.
The plan will include stiffer penalties for high-intensity drug traffickers, including the death penalty for some, Trump said.
Though Trump has long advocated for sentencing certain drug traffickers to death, public policy experts have condemned the proposal even before Trump rolled it out, arguing that it misses the cause of the opioid epidemic.
White House officials told CNN that Trump’s broader plan will focus on key areas: law enforcement and interdiction, prevention and education through a sizable advertising campaign, improving the ability to fund treatment through the federal government, and helping those impacted by the epidemic find jobs while fighting addiction.
Congress recently appropriated $6 billion to combat the opioid epidemic, and a senior administration official told CNN that Trump’s plan will lay out how the White House believes that money should be spent. At the time, treatment advocates and drug policy experts were concerned the uptick in funding wouldn’t be spent wisely and wasn’t nearly enough.
Trump has credited voters in New Hampshire with introducing him to the opioid crisis during his 2016 campaign. He frequently referenced the scourge when campaigning in the state, which has been epicenter in the fight against opioids. But in a call with Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto shortly after his inauguration, Trump referred to the state as a “a drug-infested den,” drawing fierce criticism from the state’s leaders.
Days before Election Day in 2016 — when time is a campaign’s most precious commodity — Trump even traveled to New Hampshire to discuss opioid addiction and pledge to make fighting the epidemic a focus.
His response as President, however, has been mixed, according to epidemic experts. The President has been accused of sidelining the Office of National Drug Policy Control, failing to heed the recommendations of his opioid council and focusing too much on the punitive measure to respond to the epidemic.
Trump in October declared the opioid epidemic a public health emergency, telling an audience of experts and people in recovery that “we can be the generation that ends the opioid epidemic.”
Recently released numbers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that around 64,000 people died from drug overdoses in 2016. And since 1999, the number of American overdose deaths involving opioids has quadrupled.
Drug firms shipped 20.8M pain pills to WV town with 2,900 people.
The House Energy and Commerce Committee cited the massive shipments of hydrocodone and oxycodone — two powerful painkillers — to the town of Williamson, in Mingo County, amid the panel’s inquiry into the role of drug distributors in the opioid epidemic.
“These numbers are outrageous, and we will get to the bottom of how this destruction was able to be unleashed across West Virginia,” said committee Chairman Greg Walden, R-Ore., and ranking member Frank Pallone Jr., D-N.J., in a joint statement.
The panel recently sent letters to regional drug wholesalers Miami-Luken and H.D. Smith, asking why the companies increased painkiller shipments and didn’t flag suspicious drug orders from pharmacies while overdose deaths were surging across West Virginia.
The letters outline high-volume shipments to pharmacies over consecutive days and huge spikes in pain pill numbers from year to year.
Between 2006 and 2016, drug wholesalers shipped 10.2 million hydrocodone pills and 10.6 million oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug in Williamson, according to Drug Enforcement Administration data obtained by the House Committee.
Springboro, Ohio-based Miami-Luken sold 6.4 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Tug Valley Pharmacy from 2008 to 2015, the company disclosed to the panel. That’s more than half of all painkillers shipped to the pharmacy those years. In a single year (2008 to 2009), Miami-Luken’s shipments increased three-fold to the Mingo County town.
Miami-Luken also was a major supplier to the now-closed Save-Rite Pharmacy in the Mingo County town of Kermit, population 400.
The drug wholesaler shipped 5.7 million hydrocodone and oxycodone pills to Save-Rite and a branch pharmacy called Sav-Rite #2 between 2005 and 2011, according records Miami-Luken gave the committee. In 2008, the company provided 5,624 prescription pain pills for every man, woman and child in Kermit.
In its letters, the panel also raised questions about Miami-Luken’s shipments to Westside Pharmacy in Oceana, Wyoming County. The committee cited documents that show a Miami-Luken employee reported a Virginia doctor, who operated a pain clinic located two hours from Oceana, was sending his patients to Westside Pharmacy, which filled the prescriptions.
In 2015, more than 40 percent of the oxycodone prescriptions filled by Westside Pharmacy in Oceana were coming from the Virginia doctor, according to the committee’s letter. The following year, the Virginia Board of Medicine suspended the doctor’s license, finding his practice posed a “substantial danger to public health and safety.”
The panel’s letter also mentions Miami-Luken’s suspicious shipments to Colony Drug in Beckley. In a five-day span in 2015, the drug wholesaler shipped 16,800 oxycodone pills to the pharmacy.
“In several instances, Colony Drug placed multiple orders for what appears to be excessive amounts of pills on consecutive days,” the committee wrote.
The House committee questioned H.D. Smith’s painkiller shipments to Family Discount Pharmacy in Logan County. The drug shipper distributed 3,000 hydrocodone tablets a day to the pharmacy in 2008, a 10-fold increase in sales from the previous year, according to the committee’s letter. The pharmacy, located in a town of 1,800 people, was shipped 1.1 million hydrocodone pills in 2008.
The House panel also cited Springfield, Illinois-based H.D. Smith for spikes in painkiller shipments to Sav-Rite, Westside Pharmacy, Tug Valley Pharmacy and Hurley Drug.
Oxycodone is sold under brand names like OxyContin, while hydrocodone brands include Vicodin and Lortab.
“The committee’s bipartisan investigation continues to identify systemic issues with the inordinate number of opioids distributed to small town pharmacies,” Walden and Pallone said in the statement. “The volume appears to be far in excess of the number of opioids that a pharmacy in that local area would be expected to receive.”
In a statement, H.D. Smith said it was reviewing the committee’s letter Monday.
“H.D. Smith works with its upstream manufacturing and downstream pharmacy partners to guard the integrity of the supply chain, and to improve patient outcomes,” the company said.
Miami-Luken did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In February 2016, West Virginia Attorney General Patrick Morrisey ended a state lawsuit against Miami-Luken after the company agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle allegations that it flooded the state with painkillers. Morrisey, a former lobbyist for a trade group that represents Miami-Luken and other drug distributors, inherited the lawsuit in 2013 after ousting longtime Attorney General Darrell McGraw.
H.D. Smith paid the state $3.5 million to settle the same pill-dumping allegations in January 2017.
The committee gave H.D. Smith and Miami-Luken until Feb. 9 to turn over documents and answer dozens of questions about what steps, if any, the companies took to stop the flood of pain pills into Southern West Virginia.
“We will continue to investigate these distributors’ shipments of large quantities of powerful opioids across West Virginia, including what seems to be a shocking lack of oversight over their distribution practices,” Walden and Pallone said.
The state has the highest drug overdose death rate in the nation. More than 880 people fatally overdosed in West Virginia in 2016.
The state of Ohio may be set to execute an innocent person. Tell Gov. Kasich that OH should not execute an innocent person
William T. Montgomery has maintained his innocence before, during, and after the trial that sent him to Ohio's death row 31 years ago. Despite significant doubts over his guilt, the state has scheduled his execution for April 11, 2018.
Here are just a few troubling facts about this case:
- No credible evidence ties Montgomery to the crime, and facts actually point to suspects who were never fully investigated.
- The only evidence implicating him was the testimony of a co-defendant who changed his story five times and only implicated Montgomery in the last version. The co-defendant received a special deal from prosecutors in exchange for his testimony.
- Prosecutors withheld evidence such as police reports, tips about other suspects, physical evidence implicating the co-defendant, and more.
- A recent review of the forensic evidence completely undermines the case that was presented at his trial.
We've made it easy to help, and you don't need to live in Ohio to do so. Please use the link below to sign a petition to Gov. Kasich. After you sign, you'll receive additional instructions and alerts. Click here to get started!
Oklahoma Plans to Be First to Use Execution Method. Nitrogen gas will be new primary method of execution.
If new protocols are successfully developed and the change isn't blocked by court challenges, one of Oklahoma's 49 condemned inmates will soon become the first person in the US legally executed with nitrogen gas. The state—which started exploring the use of the inert gas after a botched lethal injection in 2014 halted executions—says it has made nitrogen inhalation its primary method of execution and will be using the gas when executions resume, the BBC reports. State Attorney General Mike Hunter announced the change Wednesday, saying nitrogen is easy to obtain, causes a painless death, and "requires no complex medical procedures." No other state uses the method.
Dale Baich, a lawyer for Oklahoma inmates challenging execution protocols, called for total transparency from the state. "This method has never been used before and is experimental," he said, per the Washington Post. "Oklahoma is once again asking us to trust it as officials ‘learn-on-the-job' through a new execution procedure." Nitrogen execution will involve placing a mask over a person's nose and mouth to flood their lungs with nitrogen, causing them to die from lack of oxygen in a death that Slate notes could be "mildly euphoric," similar to the "raptures" experienced by deep-sea divers low on oxygen. (A lawyer says an execution attempt in Alabama last month was "gory" and "botched.")
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| Three executions scheduled for the same night late last month ended three very different ways. SCOTUS agreed to review the case of Vernon Madison, whom Alabama officials want to execute even though he can’t remember his crime. Kevin Cooper, who is on San Quentin’s death row for a quadruple murder he didn’t commit, recently received some significant support from California law school deans. Three states have been debating whether to repeal their death penalty, while state officials from elsewhere around the country continued to tinker with their machinery of death. There was no shortage of interesting writing on criminal justice issues produced in the past month, and we have some reading suggestions for you. And in our “Voices” column, we meet the man responsible for Michigan’s constitutional ban on the death penalty. |
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Three Executions, Three Very Different Outcomes
On Thursday,
February 22, three executions in three different states were scheduled, with
three very different outcomes.
Read
More » |
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SCOTUS to Hear Case of AL Man Who Can’t Remember Crime that Put Him on Death Row
The U.S. Supreme
Court late last month stayed the execution of Vernon Madison, less than an hour
before it was to take place, and agreed to review his case.
|
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Four California Law School Deans Ask Gov. Brown to Grant Kevin Cooper’s Clemency Petition
Kevin Cooper has been on San
Quentin’s death row for 33 years for a quadruple murder he didn’t commit. To the
long list of judges, investigators, law enforcement and lawyers who believe in
his innocence we can add four influential law school deans.
|
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Three States, Three Repeal Efforts
Three states – Washington, Utah,
and New Hampshire – have been debating repeal bills recently.
|
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In Brief: March 2018
From Arkansas to New Jersey,
state officials continue to tinker with “the machinery of death.”
|
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While we’re on the Subject . . .
A psychologist
argues for raising the age of eligibility for capital punishment, a pro bono
death penalty attorney offers an exhaustive analysis of death penalty trends
throughout 2016, and Journalist Radley Balko and Mississippi Innocence Project
Director Tucker Carrington have written a book about the dentist and the medical
examiner who were involved in wrongful convictions of several defendants in
Mississippi.
Read
More » |
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Voices: Eugene G. Wanger
He has fought the
death penalty for over 50 years, and while he refuses to take sole credit, he’s
the reason Michigan has a death penalty ban enshrined in its
constitution.
Read
More » |
