John Oliver on lethal injections: ‘A protracted nightmare of suffering’

For the third time in Last Week Tonight’s 11 seasons, dating back to the second-ever episode, John Oliver looked at the death penalty in the US on Sunday evening. The host continued his long-running stance that it’s morally wrong, there is no humane way to do it and “any discussion of one is akin to coming up with the best way to fuck your mom, which is to say, there’s simply no right way to do that”.

But there have been some “grim developments” since the last time Oliver talked about lethal injections in 2019. Since then, the US has executed 91 people, including 13 at the federal level, all under President Trump.

“Our federal and state governments have continued to pursue questionably legal and definitely horrifying ways that, again, I would argue they shouldn’t be doing at all,” he explained. Despite shield laws protecting the identity of lethal drug suppliers in several states, many still have an issue providing lethal injections because it’s bad for business, leading to sketchy suppliers and an unconstitutional “protracted nightmare of suffering”.

Related: John Oliver on student loans: ‘It’s hard to feel like this system isn’t rigged’

Many states have switched to a single shot of pentobarbital, as did the Trump administration, which can cause suffering akin to suffocation or drowning. “At every level, those who carry out executions crave secrecy,” including the federal government.

But Oliver’s team claimed to have tracked down the Trump administration’s supplier: a company called Absolute Standards, based in Connecticut. Its business is making chemicals for calibrated machines, not drugs for humans, though Oliver suspected the company was concocting execution drugs as a side hustle. “I know I’ve spent a lot of time over the last 10 years reassuring everyone that this show does comedy and not journalism,” he said, “but I think we can all agree that the most important thing we do here is stir shit up, and it’s in that spirit that I want to explain how I got to this point.”

Reuters also suspects Absolute Standards, and Last Week Tonight filed a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA) on the company in 2020; according to Oliver, a government representative accidentally told them, on two separate occasions, that the documents were taking so long to arrive because they were “related to the death penalty” which is “what’s known in the government world as a big, old whoopsie”.

“Honestly, five out of five on the post-call survey there,” he added. “This employee certainly helped me solve my problem.”

A confidential source also confirmed to the show that Absolute Standards is the federal government’s supplier of pentobarbital. “At this point, they might as well just update their real slogan of ‘we have the solutions’ to ‘we have the solutions that were secretly used in a bunch of government executions!’” Oliver joked.

“Maybe Absolute Solutions is proud to have made the drugs that enabled our government to effectively drown at least 13 people while they were strapped to a table,” he continued. “I don’t know. We’ve reached out to them repeatedly for comment on this story and they have ignored us, which is an odd thing to do when someone’s accusing you of making execution drugs.”

But it’s not clear whether the company should be able to because under the law, companies that make drugs need to be registered with the Food and Drug Administration. Absolute Standards is not, and the FDA has no records on the business (Last Week Tonight did another FOIA request on this, Oliver noted).

“The truth is, even if we shut down the use of pentobarbital, it won’t stop executions in this country,” he said. “Because elected leaders seem hell-bent on getting it done,” with some looking to circumvent lethal drug procurement issues by suffocating prisoners with nitrogen gas, as some Oklahoma legislators considered with a presentation by a criminal justice professor using YouTube videos of teenagers passing out from inhaling helium. Despite the fact that most veterinarians no longer allow for pets to be put down with nitrogen gas, Oklahoma and several other states have now authorized use of the method for executions. In January, Alabama became the first state to execute a prisoner with nitrogen gas, in an execution one witness described to CNN as “definitely the most violent execution I’ve ever witnessed”.

“All of which makes it pretty galling,” said Oliver, that Alabama’s attorney general, Steve Marshall, bragged about the execution as “textbook”.

Related: John Oliver to US state medical boards handling malpractice: ‘Fix this mess’

“I would call it textbook bullshit,” Oliver contended. “Alabama, do you ever get tired of being trailblazers in all of the worst ways?”

“All this secrecy is also meant to protect us, the people in whose name it is done, from confronting the horror of what the death penalty truly is,” Oliver added. “Because whether it’s nitrogen gas, or an IV injection of drugs, or a firing squad, or an electric chair, or being pressed with weights, it’s all brutal.”

“It’s never going to be OK, and we are kidding ourselves if we think taking someone’s life is actually going to lower the number of killers in the world,” he concluded. “It literally, definitionally, creates more.”

With 2,331 people currently on death row, Oliver’s prescription was simple: “Just stop doing it.” And for Joe Biden, to commute death-row sentences, as well as other regulation efforts of lethal drugs. “If the government is going to give itself the power to execute its citizens,” he argued, “then I want to see where the drugs come from, who’s making them, and relentless scrutiny on every part of the process.”