British Pharmaceutical Company Knew it Was Complicit in Murder

When it was revealed that fly-by-night British drugmaker Dream Pharma was selling lethal injection drugs to states like Arizona desperate to put prisoners to death, owner Matt Alavi claimed he didn't know the corrections departments he sold it to would use it to kill.

As far as excuses go, Alavi's was never very persuasive. And as e-mails obtained by human rights group Reprieve confirm, it was a lie. When told his drugs would be used to carry out state-sanctioned killings, Alavi's response? “I am more than happy to assist.”

The email was released as the result of litigation in Georgia on the behalf of Emanuel Hammond, a man who many believe was wrongly convicted of murder – first by the media, then by a court. Thanks to Alavi's greed – he marked up his drugs at 1,000 times their market price, knowing full well that the only U.S. supplier of lethal injections had stopped selling them – Hammond could be executed as soon as Tuesday at 7 pm.

Hammond, an African American, was convicted amid a media circus of the 1988 rape and murder of 27-year-old, white preschool teacher Julie Love.

On Monday, Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson denied a request from Hammond's lawyers to delay his execution, claiming there was not sufficient evidence to prove the state's lethal injection drugs from Dream Pharma – which is located in the back of a driving school in England – were counterfeit or impure, never mind the fact that they have not been approved or inspected by the FDA.

And that means Alavi – and the British government, which failed to stop the sale of the lethal injection drugs despite its rhetorical opposition to the death penalty – could be complicit in the killing of an innocent man. As the Cornell Death Penalty Project notes, researches who have examined Hammond's case over the last decade have “uncovered an extraordinary amount of prosecutorial misconduct, ranging from withholding of exculpatory evidence pointing to other possible perpetrators, the manicuring of the testimony of prosecution witnesses, and the concealment of the criminal history of the state’s star witness.”

“Tomorrow a man is set to die thanks to Dream Pharma's heartless pursuit of profit,” says Reprieve Director Clive Stafford Smith, who actually provided Hammond free representation 20 years ago. He notes that Hammond's original public defender was so incompetent he in presented arguments suggesting police originally thought the murderer was a “Mr. Fanulanu,” unaware FNULNU was an acronym standing for “First Name Unknown, Last Name Unknown.”

While Alavi's profit-over-people mindset is despicable, his sale of lethal injection drugs never should have taken place in the first place. As already mentioned, the U.K. government claims to be opposed to the death penalty. And after significant public pressure, British Business Secretary Vince Cable last year banned the export of key lethal injection drug sodium thiopental for use in U.S. executions.

Yet Cable has yet to respond to demands he restrict the export of other drugs used almost exclusively for lethal injections.

Join with Reprieve in urging the British government to live up to its declared "moral opposition” to state-sanctioned murder by urging Secretary Cable to ban the export of drugs that are fueling America's death penalty.

(Editor's note: Dream Pharma sold the sodium thiopental just before the U.K. imposed export restrictions, not before as originally suggested.)

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Photo Credit: Reprieve