Indiana Preps for an Execution After 15-Year Pause

Indiana officials are preparing to execute the state’s first death row inmate in 15 years, a man who was convicted a quarter-century ago of killing his brother and three other men, the AP reports. Joseph Corcoran, 49, has been on Indiana’s death row since 1999. If he is put to death as scheduled Wednesday, it will be the state’s first execution since 2009. In that time, 13 executions were carried out in Indiana, but those were initiated and performed by federal officials in 2020 and 2021 at a federal prison. Corcoran is scheduled to be executed before sunrise Wednesday at the Indiana State Prison in Michigan City, about 45 miles east of Chicago.

Indiana’s resumption of executions is refocusing attention on Corcoran’s case and questions about how the state has been able to obtain a drug for lethal injections. Indiana last executed Matthew Wrinkles, who was put to death in 2009 for killing his wife, her brother, and sister-in-law in 1994. State officials said they couldn’t continue executions because a combination of drugs used in lethal injections had become unavailable. There has been a yearslong nationwide shortage because pharmaceutical companies—particularly in Europe, where opposition to capital punishment is strongest—have refused to sell their products for that purpose.

That has prompted states to turn to compounding pharmacies, which manufacture drugs specifically for a client. Some states have switched to more accessible drugs such as the sedatives pentobarbital or midazolam, both of which, critics say, can cause excruciating pain. Indiana is following that lead, planning to use pentobarbital to execute Corcoran. The federal government also used pentobarbital in the 13 federal executions carried out during the final six months of then-President Trump’s first term. Many states, including Indiana, refuse to divulge where they get the drugs. When asked how the state obtained the pentobarbital it plans to use in Corcoran’s execution, the Indiana Department of Correction directed the AP to a state law labeling the source of lethal injection drugs as confidential.

(More Indiana stories.)