From the Los Angeles Times ….

Legal challenges to lethal-injection procedures have kept executions on hold for five years in California, where 718 prisoners are on death row. Corrections officials’ attempt to carry out the execution of murderer Albert Greenwood Brown in September was thwarted by the litigation, as well as by the expiration of the state’s last few grams of sodium thiopental.

Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., stopped making its brand of sodium thiopental, Pentothal, at a North Carolina plant early last year because of an unspecified raw material supply problem. When Hospira attempted to move production to a factory in Liscate, Italy, near Milan, Italian authorities demanded assurances that the drug wouldn’t end up in the hands of executioners. Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg said company officers couldn’t make that guarantee and decided instead to “exit the sodium thiopental market.”

“We cannot take the risk that we will be held liable by the Italian authorities if the product is diverted for use in capital punishment,” Rosenberg said.