Lawyers for an inmate on Alabama's death row say the state has kept them in the dark about most of the details of its new protocol for execution by lethal injection.
"The state's new lethal injection protocol has not been examined by any court," attorneys for inmate Thomas Arthur say in a motion filed with the Alabama Supreme Court last week.
Arthur, 73, has been on death row since 1983 for the murder of Muscle Shoals resident Troy Wicker. He was scheduled to be executed in 2012, but received a stay as Alabama wrestled with its problems obtaining execution drugs.
Several states have faced shortages of key lethal injection drugs, largely because drug manufacturers in Europe - where there's significant opposition to capital punishment - refuse to sell the drugs for use in executions. State officials acknowledged earlier this year that they couldn't hold executions because they'd simply run out of drugs.
Arthur's case lurched into motion again on Sept. 10, when state officials agreed on a new set of drugs for lethal injection. A day later, lawyers for the Attorney General's Office filed a motion with the Alabama Supreme Court, seeking execution dates for Arthur and 9 other inmates.
That motion lays out the 3 main drugs the state now plans to use in executions: midazolam hydrochloride as an anaesthetic; rocuronium bromide to relax the muscles; and potassium chloride to stop the heart. The Attorney General's Office argued that the combination was "virtually identical to Florida's newly revised protocol, which has been ruled constitutional."
Florida has executed 7 inmates since adopting midazolam, without significant difficulties. Other states that use midazolam have run into problems. An Ohio execution in January took 25 minutes, with the inmate gasping for breath, according to accounts in the press. In May, an Oklahoma inmate died 43 minutes after first being lethally injected.
Florida's protocol uses a stronger dose of midazolam than the ones prescribed in Ohio or Oklahoma. Alabama's new protocol uses the same dosage as Florida.
Still, it's not clear just how closely the new Alabama protocol follows Florida's. In Florida, executions conducted according to a 10-page set of instructions that outlines how prison staff will verify an inmate's death and when an execution process should be halted.
Alabama has declined to release its full protocol.
The details in the protocol can matter, said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a nonprofit group that studies capital punishment.
Dieter said an execution protocol can outline how much training prison staff should receive for executions. It can also explain what prison staff should do when things go wrong.
"What if the execution doesn't work?" he said. "It's gruesome, but there are times when staff have decided an execution should just be stopped because it was done wrong."
Oklahoma released a new protocol last week, in response to its botched execution in May. That protocol included new drug combinations, but also required more training for prison staff.
When The Anniston Star asked for a full copy of Alabama's protocol last month, Department of Corrections officials said a court order in a capital case prevented them from releasing it.
"While the department generally considers execution-related documents confidential and exempt from public disclosure under Alabama law, because of pending litigation, we are abiding by the court order and will not release any execution information," Department of Corrections spokeswoman Kristi Gates said in an email.
That court order emerged from Arthur's case. In 2012, Arthur challenged the legality of an earlier drug protocol, and the state sought and got a gag order prohibiting the release of that protocol to the public. It's not the 1st time the state has sought to place its execution procedures under a gag order. There are similar orders in cases filed in 2006 and 2007.
Arthur's lawyer, Suhana Han, said the state has yet to release the new protocol to her.
"We're in the middle of litigation," she said. "There's no basis for the State of Alabama to refuse to provide us with a copy."
Gates, the prison spokeswoman referred additional questions to the Attorney General's Office. Attempts to reach officials in the office for comment were not successful Monday.
Source: Anniston Star, October 7, 2014
