For the third time in Last Week Tonight’s 11 seasons, dating back to the second-ever episode, the show's host John Oliver discussed the use of the death penalty in the United States last night. The host continued his long-running stance that it’s morally wrong and there is no humane way to do it, in ultimately more colorful verbiage than we'll use in this space, but impactful nonetheless.

Oliver noted “grim developments” since the last time he talked about lethal injections on the show in 2019. Since then, the US has executed 91 people, including 13 at the federal level during the Trump Administration.  Many states have switched to a single shot of pentobarbital, as did the Trump administration, which can cause suffering akin to suffocation or drowning.

“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,” Oliver explained. Despite shield laws protecting the identity of lethal drug suppliers in several states, many still have an issue procuring lethal injections because it’s bad for business, leading to sketchy suppliers and an unconstitutional “protracted nightmare of suffering”.

But Oliver’s Last Week Tonight team claimed to have tracked down the Trump administration’s supplier: a company called Absolute Standards, based in Connecticut. Their business is making chemicals for calibrated machines, not drugs for humans, though Oliver suspected they were concocting execution drugs as a side hustle. A confidential source confirmed to the show that Absolute Standards are the federal government’s supplier of pentobarbital.

Reuters, the news organization, also suspected Absolute Standards of producing drugs for executions, 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”.

“The truth is, even if we shut down the use of pentobarbital, it won’t stop executions in this country,” Oliver 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.”

“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,” Oliver 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”.

Clips from this episode of Last Week Tonight will be available on the show's YouTube channel on Thursday. If you have a subscription to Max, you can stream it there.