Drug shortage may imperil executions in Arizona

A worldwide shortage of a drug used in lethal-injection procedures could jeopardize future executions in Arizona.

The shortage became evident last week during a federal court hearing in Ohio. There, an Arizona-based federal public defender told the court that Ohio had admitted it did not have enough of the drug, thiopental sodium, to carry out an execution later that week.

According to court transcripts, attorney Dale Baich asked if the state would call off the execution if it did not find an ample supply. By the end of the day, the state had found an alternative source for the drug, and the execution was carried out as planned on Thursday.

Baich declined comment.

The shortage could affect Arizona as well, just as it is poised to resume executions after 3 years and a long court battle to establish a constitutionally acceptable method of lethal injection.

Barrett Marson, a spokesman for the Arizona Department of Corrections, said the department does not have a stockpile of the drug. According to the state's official execution-procedure manual, finalized in September, the drugs for execution are not ordered until the death warrant is received.

On Thursday, the Arizona Supreme Court will discuss whether to issue a death warrant for convicted murderer Richard Lynn Bible, who raped and killed a 9-year-old girl in Flagstaff in 1988.

If the warrant is approved, Bible would be scheduled for execution in late June.

But he can't be executed without thiopental sodium.

Dan Rosenberg, a spokesman for Chicago-based Hospira, the sole U.S. company that manufactures thiopental sodium, told The Arizona Republic that because of an unspecified "manufacturing issue," they cannot provide the drug. Rosenberg could say only that the company expected "the product to be available again in the third quarter," which means sometime between July 1 and September 30.

Arizona carried out its last execution by lethal injection in May 2007, when it put to death Robert Comer, who murdered a man at an Apache Lake campground in 1987.

Jeffrey Landrigan, who strangled a man in Phoenix in 1989, was scheduled to die Nov. 1, 2007, but his execution was stayed by the Arizona Supreme Court while the U.S. Supreme Court pondered whether the lethal-injection protocol in Kentucky constituted cruel and unusual punishment.

The high court ultimately approved the Kentucky methodology in April 2008, but it also invited condemned inmates in other states to question the means of putting them to death.

Landrigan became the Arizona test case in Maricopa County Superior Court, and another killer named Donald Beaty was the lead defendant in federal court.

Death warrants for both men are pending before the Arizona Supreme Court and could similarly be affected by the drug shortage.

Baich was supervisor of the federal public defenders who hammered out the current Arizona protocol with the Arizona Attorney General's Office. Both state and federal judges signed off on the Arizona protocol last year.

The Ohio procedure depends entirely on thiopental, a barbiturate used as an anesthetic in Caesarean sections because it anesthetizes the mother without affecting the baby and in emergency-room intubations because it takes effect rapidly and wears off quickly.

It is also referred to as sodium thiopental and sodium pentothal.

According to a hospital medical director, who asked not to be identified because of the medical-ethics issues posed by lethal injection, available stores of thiopental have been further depleted because of a shortage of the drug propofol, the anesthetic that killed pop star Michael Jackson.

Anesthesiologists can substitute one drug for another, but executioners cannot because their protocols have been hammered out through litigation.

In Arizona, protocol calls for three drugs injected intravenously. Thiopental, the first, renders the condemned person unconscious and theoretically impervious to the other two drugs. The second, pancuronium bromide, paralyzes the defendant so that witnesses cannot see any signs of twitching or respiratory distress that could occur from barbiturate overdose. The third drug, potassium chloride, stops the heart.

Source: Arizona Republic, May 17, 2010

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