23

Since the beginning of the 2000s, a controversy has emerged around executions by lethal injection in the United States, first nationally and then extending to a transnational scale. During this period, this particular form of capital punishment has been denounced for its highjacking of techniques and products borrowed from medical practice. The amplification of the debate has been such that the principal multinational pharmaceutical companies have intervened. For about a decade these companies have adopted contractual measures to prevent the sale and use of their products for the execution of condemned inmates. A research combining interviews and document analysis enables here a retracing of the stages of this unprecedented mobilisation of contract law. It also reveals the effects this activity has on state pretention to the “monopoly” on legitimate violence and its means: because they make weapons out of products that above all are traded on the market as medicines, American states must negotiate their purchase and possession of supplies with hostile industries, before commercial courts where their punitive objectives are rarely taken into account.