Katherine Sweeney

Tennessee will become the ninth state to use a single drug process that essentially overdoses people on the sedative pentobarbital. That's in place of a more common practice where executioners use three drugs, a sedative, a paralytic, and a drug to stop the heart. Several states have pivoted to this model since lethal injection drugs have become more difficult to source.

The federal government also used it for a few years when the Trump administration briefly resumed executions. The drugs are hard to source because pharmaceutical companies refuse to sell them for use in the death penalty. Governments have come to rely on secrecy laws and small, unregulated labs, a combination critics call dangerous. For NPR News, I'm Katherine Sweeney in Nashville.