States ask Texas to supply ingredient for executions

As the supply of a key drug used in lethal injections dwindles, state officials are knocking on the door of the busiest execution chamber in the country for help.

Some states that have the death penalty have asked Texas for doses of sodium thiopental, the so-called knockout drug, used as part of the three-drug cocktail in executions by lethal injection, accordingto Michelle Lyons, spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. She would not identify the states that requested assistance.

The state has declined to make its supply available even though all of its 39 available doses are set to expire in March and there are only three executions scheduled in the state before then, Lyons said.

States — including Arizona, Oklahoma, Ohio, Tennessee and Kentucky — have scrambled to acquire the drug.

Sodium thiopental renders the condemned inmate unconscious, so the prisoner does not feel pain. Hospira, the lone federally approved producer of the drug, has said new batches of the substance would not be available until next year.

Lyons said that despite the looming expiration of Texas' extra inventory, "we do not have plans to distribute the drug to other states."

"We have a responsibility to ensure we have an adequate supply of the drug on hand to carry out any executions scheduled in the state of Texas," Lyons said.

States with shortages are trying to find suppliers abroad or proposing radical changes in their execution protocols to deal with the lack of drugs.

•In Oklahoma last week, a federal judge approved the use of pentobarbital, a drug used in euthanizing animals, to replace sodium thiopental in lethal injections. Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Stephen Krise said the state was "forced" to find an alternative when sodium thiopental became "unavailable."

•In Arizona last month, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the execution of convicted murderer Jeffrey Landrigan after his attorneys challenged the state's acquisition of sodium thiopental from an undisclosed supplier in Britain.

In Kentucky in August, Gov. Steve Beshear, a Democrat, postponed the signing of two death warrants because of the shortage of sodium thiopental. "The (state's) repeated attempts to obtain additional thiopental have so far been unsuccessful," Beshear said in written statement.

For Oklahoma, the approval of the sodium thiopental substitute represents a departure from a procedure adopted in 1977, when Oklahoma became the first state in the nation to authorize lethal injection as a means of execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. (The first lethal injection was actually carried out in 1982 in Texas.)

Krise said the state settled on a plan for an alternative drug — pentobarbital — after "an exhaustive search" to obtain another source of sodium thiopental.

The assistant attorney general said he did not know how many other sources or death penalty states were approached as potential suppliers for additional sodium thiopental. Last month, he said, Arkansas provided the needed dose to carry out the execution of Donald Ray Wackerly, convicted in the 1996 murder of a Laotian immigrant.

Krise said he did not know whether Texas was asked to share its supply.

"I'm sure some states feel uncomfortable giving it out," he said.

Source: CourierPostOnline.com, November 29, 2010

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