The Connecticut Company Accused of Fueling an Execution Spree

The Intercept has uncovered new details about the small family business in Connecticut identified as having sold a lethal drug to the Federal Bureau of Prisons for use in the Trump administration’s unprecedented execution spree. Beginning in July 2020, the administration killed 13 people in the federal death chamber in Terre Haute, Indiana, over the course of six months.

Absolute Standards Inc., located on the outskirts of New Haven, produces and sells materials used to calibrate laboratory and research instruments. The company is registered with Connecticut as a “manufacturer of drugs, cosmetics, and medical devices” and employed just 21 people in the lead-up to the executions, records show.

John Criscio, the company’s owner, has denied that Absolute Standards played a role in supplying pentobarbital, a barbiturate used for lethal injection.

But according to a source The Intercept interviewed last year, Criscio and the company’s director, Stephen Arpie, acknowledged in a meeting that Absolute Standards produced the active ingredient for pentobarbital for use in the federal executions. The person, who met with Criscio and Arpie about the possibility of obtaining lethal injection drugs, asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the interaction. A separate unnamed pharmacy then used the active ingredient, or API, to make an injectable drug that would stop prisoners’ hearts.

“They went about explaining to us how they produce the chemical,” the person said of Criscio and Arpie. “They’d been reading about it in the papers. And they saw that people couldn’t get it. They were like, ‘Well, we make the standard, so we know how to make it. So we can just make it.’ They basically bragged about how they built this little home market.”

A second person interviewed by The Intercept said they were also told by Arpie and Criscio that Absolute Standards made drugs for executions.

Like many of the 27 states capable of carrying out death sentences, the federal government has fought to keep the identity of its supplier hidden from the public. Earlier this month, the comedy news program “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” named Absolute Standards as the Bureau of Prisons’ drug supplier, citing an anonymous source. The segment echoed reporting by Reuters, which noted in 2020 that the House Oversight Committee had sent a letter to Absolute Standards suspecting the business was the source of the drugs. At the time, Arpie told Reuters that he did not always keep track of the final use of his products and couldn’t rule out involvement.

Interviews conducted by The Intercept and documents obtained under public records laws bolster evidence that Absolute Standards, located in a state that abolished the death penalty in 2012, helped the Trump administration resume federal executions after a 17-year hiatus. A Connecticut congressional staffer raised concerns about the company’s role in the executions as early as April 2021, suggesting that states might be looking to follow the federal government’s lead. “As Absolute Standards has been identified as the only possible supplier of pentobarbital ingredients for executions,” the staffer warned, “the risk that Connecticut medicines will imminently fuel the death penalty in executing states across the country is high.”

When asked about pentobarbital, Criscio told The Intercept, “We don’t make that material.” Arpie did not respond to multiple requests for comment, and the BOP declined to comment.

In August 2018, Absolute Standards applied to the Drug Enforcement Administration to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital, according to a notice in the Federal Register. The designation allows for the production of chemicals “by means of chemical synthesis or by extraction from other substances.” A few months later, in October, the BOP received its first batch of the API for pentobarbital, according to a declaration by Raul Campos, then-associate warden of the BOP’s Federal Medical Center Carswell in Fort Worth, Texas. The declaration was submitted as part of litigation over the Trump administration’s lethal injection protocol.

(The Intercept requested Absolute Standards’ applications to become a bulk manufacturer of pentobarbital in August 2023. On Monday, the DEA declined to hand over those records, stating that they were exempt from disclosure, in part because they included “information that is classified to protect national security.”)

For years, pharmaceutical companies refused to sell pentobarbital for use in capital punishment, creating shortages that halted executions in some states that relied on the drug. Acquiring the API marked the end of a yearslong search for the BOP.

“We were looking for the drugs domestically and internationally,” a former BOP official with knowledge of the situation told The Intercept last year. The official asked that their name be withheld because they were not authorized to speak about the procurement of execution drugs.