Alavi’s office. Photo by Reprieve UK.

IT is 5:31pm in Jackson, Georgia and Emmanuel Hammond is waiting to die. His last meal arrives on a small orange tray: fried chicken, French fries, corn on the cob, jalapeno peppers, mint chocolate chip ice cream, and cherry lemonade. The hours pass slowly. His family and close friends arrive for an awkward exchange of goodbyes; they do not know what to say. Guards enter. They escort Hammond to a requisite medical check-up, the last formality before the state puts him to death. Then the reporters arrive, scratching on their notepads. Their scribbling intensifies when the relatives of Hammond’s victim file in, eyes dull and lifeless, seeking final retribution. A door opens. A corrections officer appears and leads this unlikely congregation into the sterile execution theatre.

11:26pm. An officer drags back a curtain, revealing Hammond to the audience. He is strapped onto a gurney and tilted towards them, an IV infusion carefully poked into his wrist. Silence. Everything is white – the walls, Hammond’s shirt, the uniforms on the nurses, the dazzling flash of the hypodermic needle under fluorescent light. The guards glance at the clock on the wall, exchange nods, and administer a sequential cocktail of lethal drugs. The first is sodium thiopental, a sedative inducing deep sleep, followed by pancaromium bromide, a powerful muscle paralyser. The bromide should prevent Hammond from thrashing around, should the sedative malfunction. Finally, potassium chloride, to stop his heart, is pumped into his veins.

Josh Green, a reporter for the Gwinett Daily Post, is in the audience. A minute passes. Green frowns. The thiopental sedative has dripped through the surgical tubes by now and entered Hammond’s body, but his eyes are wide open. Then he mouths some words to his victim’s fiancé in the front row, inaudible because microphones in the theatre are been switched off. The man, bereaved, passes out. Some reporters tentatively eye the vomit bags placed on the seat.

11:39pm. Hammond is dead. Twenty years ago, he kidnapped and raped Julie Love, a 27 year-old primary school teacher. Then he shot her in the face at point blank range with a shotgun. Now, an anonymous orderly draws a curtain across his corpse. Justice is served. Case closed.

SIX years earlier. A chemist at Sandoz Pharma, Austria, is synthesising a batch of sodium thiopental. He stores the chemicals under strictly controlled conditions before dispatching them in a frozen container to Archimedes Pharma, based in Reading, Great Britain. Soon afterwards, Archimedes sells the chemicals to a tiny company based in Acton, London, transporting the vials at a fixed temperature. It is presumed the drug will be employed for palliative care in the health industry.

In Acton, a pale, thin man steps out of the back of a driving school, carrying three small vials. He tapes them up inside a Federal Express package and drops it off at the post office. A few hours later, the vials rattle in the hangar of a plane, at air temperature, before a postman eventually grabs the package. He drives to Jacksons’ Penitentiary and dumps it into their mailbox.

The invoice inside the package is signed with best wishes from Matt Alavi, Managing Director of Dream Pharma Ltd. His website describes the company as “an independent pharmaceutical wholesaler committed to excellence by providing high quarlity (sic) products at competitive rates and superior service.” In addition to drugs used for state executions, sold at 1000% mark-up, Dream Pharma also provides healthcare products to hospitals and third world relief agencies. The company does not publish a list of the drugs on offer, nor do they publish a standard price list, as the prices “are constantly changing”.

Last January, I began an investigation into Alavi’s business, and the furtive international market in which he trades. After ruling out complicity on the part of the Pharma companies in Austria and Reading, I made a phone call to Mr Alavi one rainy afternoon, to learn more about his role in Hammond’s execution.

The phone rang twice before a soft-spoken voice introduced itself as Matt Alavi.

“Hello, Mr Alavi. This is James Rothwell speaking, a student journalist from The Oxonian Globalist. I have a few questions about the sodium thiopental which you sold to the state of Georgia, for its execution of Emanuel Hammond. I just need to clarify some of the allegations being made against you at present.”

“I thank you very much for your concern, and for your interest, sir, but I’d like to make no comment on that matter.”

“Were you aware that the batch of drugs which you sold to Georgia was going to be used in state executions?”

“I would like to refrain from making a comment about that.”

“Do you intend to continue selling these lethal drugs, in spite of the media attention your company has recently attracted?”

A long pause.

“Sir, I understand that you’re at Oxford, a dedicated educator, and I appreciate and admire that, but I’d like to make no further comments.”

“Is it true you sold enough drugs to execute over a hundred people?”

“No comment.”

“Is it true that most of the vials of thiopental were damaged in transit to the US, or had expired already when you posted them?”

“No comment. I thank you for your concern about this matter, but I really do have no further comments and… Actually, I have another call coming. Goodbye, sir.” He hung up abruptly.

I returned the receiver to its cradle and surfed the internet for stories about Hammond’s execution. The tabloids had united in condemnation of Dream Pharma. Families of other prisoners who were recently executed had started to come forward, doubting the potency of the drug which put their hus- bands, sons, and fathers to sleep. Further down the results page, a law charity called Reprieve was preparing to sue Vince Cable, the UK Business secretary, who had refused to prevent Alavi’s transaction from taking place. This was the organisation which had published a detailed transcript of an affidavit filed by Dr Mark Heath, a medical expert based in New York. According to the document, Heath witnessed dozens of executions, and never before had any of the prisoners opened their eyes after the sedative was administered; they were in a deep, deep sleep. He claimed Alavi’s batch of drugs contained “expired thiopental,” and referred several times to an inmate named Brandon Rhodes. Rhodes was also executed courtesy of Dream Pharma, shortly before Hammond. Rhodes’ eyes “remained wide open” after the guards administered the sedative, and Heath found this “very surprising and unusual… it implies that the sedatives were ineffective and that Rhode’s death would have been agonising.”

The possibility that Alavi’s sedative had expired and that Hammond had been fully conscious while the drugs seared through his veins and stopped his heart seemed to rear its ugly head everywhere I looked. I called the Georgia Department of Corrections to address this concern and was eventually put through to the Death Row press office. Their spokesperson refused to comment on the efficacy of the drugs and claimed the press office had nothing to say regarding their origin. Yet, as to the possibility that Hammond’s death was “agonising,” she responded calmly: “We had no issues with our execution.”

I then contacted Josh Green, one of the reporters present at Hammond’s execution. He had delineated the process in vivid detail for an article in the Gwinnett Daily Post. Anti-capital punishment groups were rapidly syndicating his account across the internet. In his article, Green describes the eerie silence of the death chamber, and how the victim’s fiancé had fainted in the front row, with his head draped over the bench. Immediately after the curtain hid Hammond’s corpse from view, he remembers scribbling the following visceral impressions into his notebook:

“Clinical, anti-climactic, eerie, tense, almost cinematic, haunting, professional, dizzying, fascinating, macabre, respectful, terrifying.”

Green’s account also mentioned that Hammond mouthed words to the witnesses behind the glass screen, although they were inaudible. This was particularly bizarre as the thiopental injection should have rendered Hammond totally unconscious. Yet when speaking to Green about his experience, he told me that “Hammond’s eyes were not fully open…but I can’t say I’m certain they were fully closed, either.” When I pushed further about the possibility of a botched execution, he responded: “Other than some laboured breathing, he seemed to slip slowly, peacefully into death.” Green would go on to adjust his account of Hammond’s execution.

A few days before Green responded to my e-mail, I had contacted Reprieve. They vehemently insisted that Hammond’s sedative was dysfunctional, and that he therefore suffered a slow and painful death. They pointed to the statements of Dr Heath, describing the sensation of the muscle paralyser flowing into the veins as a “caustic burning”. It must be stated that their argument that Hammond was not properly sedated, ultimately, hangs upon the “eyes open” phenomenon. Several prisoners to this date, including Hammond, have been executed by Dream Pharma’s drugs, and in nearly every case, observers claim that the prisoners’ eyes remained wide open throughout the process. They undergo a locked-in-body sensation, during which they are fully conscious and aware of their surroundings, but unable to move, to even twitch a single fibre of their muscles.

A few days after I spoke to Green, yet another execution witness came forward to question the efficacy of Dream Pharma’s sedative. This time it was Dale Baich, an Ohio-based lawyer who had defended one Jeffrey Landrigan and watched him die on the gurney. Landrigan, convicted for murder in 1989, was executed shortly before Hammond using the same batch of drugs procured from Dream Pharma. Here is an extract from Baich’s sworn affidavit:

“The execution of Mr. Landrigan commenced on October 26, 2010 shortly after 10:15:30pm when Mr. Landrigan’s final words were “boomer sooner.” At 10:16:30pm, Mr. Landrigan’s chest heaved three times and his eyes closed slightly.

At 10:17:20pm, his eyes were half-way open.

At 10:17:55pm, Mr. Landrigan’s eyes were still open.

At 10:18:25pm, Mr. Landrigan’s eyes were still open.

At 10:19:00pm, Mr. Landrigan’s eyes were still open.

At 10:20:00pm, Mr. Landrigan’s mouth opened. His eyes were still slightly open.

At 10:21:03pm, color began to leave Mr. Landrigan’s face. His eyes were still half to a quarter of the way open.

At 10:26pm, it was announced that the execution was complete. Mr. Landrigan’s eyes were still half to a quarter way open.”

Landrigan’s sedative was almost certainly a dud. And it was the same sedative used on Emanuel Hammond. Any further doubts I had vanished when Clive Stafford Smith, who had been Hammond’s lawyer over twenty years ago, sent me the following message: “I understand that you heard something from a journalist about Emanuel Hammond. You should know witnesses have stated that he mouthed different words after the execution began, indicating again that the anaesthetic did not work.” With every e-mail, every phone call, the integrity of Hammond’s execution was further called into question. Smith has worked death row cases for over twenty years and saw six of his clients die in the execution chamber. He knows when something isn’t right. Interestingly, a few weeks after Green told me he “couldn’t be sure” if Hammond’s eyes had been fully open, he seemed to change his mind: he now thinks, according to Reprieve, that Hammond closed his eyes when the thiopental was administered, only to open them again some minutes later.

How does the British government respond to these claims? My last port of call was the office of Vince Cable. Unsurprisingly, he was unwilling to comment on the controversy surrounding Dream Pharma and the integrity of their sedatives. However, two weeks after my phone call I received a letter from Tom Smith at the Department of Business Innovation and Skills. The letter said that Vince Cable, “after careful consideration… had decided to limit the export of sodium thiopental to the United States.” It went on to assert that the government is eager to encourage other European Union states to adopt these export limitations and “is currently considering the merits of imposing controls on other drugs used in execution, such as pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride.” The letter failed to address the accusation that Dream Pharma’s thiopental did not render Hammond or Landrigan unconscious.

The world of capital punishment is a murky one – enquiries are usually met by a wall of silence. The process itself is so medical, so sterile, so contrived, that not even the witnesses can ascertain what was intended to happen, and what was not. Opinions change, memories change, statements change – but the drugs never change. And they never take sides.

At the time of writing, Roy Blankenship, convicted of murder in 1978, is the next American prisoner due to be executed with Dream Pharma’s cocktail of lethal drugs. The US District Court Judge has postponed the execution over fears that the sedative is “outdated”. Yet Blankenship will likely as not, in due time, take Hammond’s place in that impossibly white, medical- ised death theatre. The drugs will surge through the IV infusion, deep into his veins and upward towards his heart. Eventually, it will stop beating. Of course, Roy Blankenship might feel nothing at all. Or he may suffer every nanosecond of it. Only he will know.