American Civil Liberties Union

The courts of the U.S. have long held that the states may punish people with death, putting us in the minority of the world's countries and in the company of Iran, Iraq, North Korea and the Sudan. The caveat, in the U.S., is that the executions must be humane, and this has led to litigation over the manner in which states perform executions. In the last 30 years the gas chamber and the electric chair have fallen into disuse for this reason; there have also been a number of cases about the drugs used in lethal injection. Unfortunately, states' efforts to afford fairness in capital (and other) trials have far too often been lax, while their efforts to keep enough drugs on hand for executions have been anything but.