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The Walls Unit, Huntsville, Texas where executions
by lethal injection are carried out. |
As Oklahoma continues to feel the aftershocks from its
botched execution attempt on Tuesday, attention is turning to Texas, where a key secrecy ruling is expected to be made later this month.
The next US execution is scheduled for 13 May in the nation's most-active death penalty state, where Robert Campbell is set to be given a lethal injection for the abduction and murder of Alexandra Rendon, a bank employee, in Houston in 1991.
The 41-year-old will be put to death using the sedative pentobarbital, but the source of the drug remains unknown amid a series of legal skirmishes, as in Oklahoma, over whether the state is allowed to withhold fundamental details about the deadly chemicals in its possession.
Texas has been at the heart of the execution secrecy debate in recent weeks as it has continued to execute prisoners after refusing to comply with freedom of information requests seeking to reveal the quantity and origins of its latest set of drugs.
This onset of coyness contradicted previous rulings by the Texas attorney general's office stating that such information should be available to the public. While lawyers for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) and death-row inmates litigated the issue in various state and federal courts, Texas officials asked the office of Greg Abbott, the state attorney general, for a new ruling.
That request was filed on 25 March and the deadline for a decision is 29 May, though it can be extended by a maximum of 10 days, according to a spokesperson for Abbott's office.
Critics of capital punishment said that the messy and alarming way in which Clayton Lockett died in Oklahoma - ultimately of an apparent heart attack after the failure of an execution that was to use an experimental drug cocktail - underlined the dangers of a lack of transparency.
"What we saw in Oklahoma certainly reverberates in Texas, where the TDCJ refuses to disclose their drug supply," said Kristin Houle, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.
"The biggest takeaway from Oklahoma is that secrecy doesn't work. The botched nature of Mr Lockett's execution started weeks ago when Oklahoma closed its doors and refused to provide information to Mr Lockett's lawyers," said Maurie Levin, one of the lawyers working on secrecy litigation.
Lawyers for Campbell are considering how to pitch possible last-minute appeals in the light of what happened on Tuesday. "Officials in Texas should be gravely concerned over the events in Oklahoma. Texas, like Oklahoma, continues to insist on keeping secret the source of the drugs it uses in executions, which precludes any meaningful institutional oversight," said Rob Owen, one of Campbell's attorneys.
"Transparency is absolutely indispensable to avoiding horribly botched executions like Mr Lockett's. We are still considering what steps might be taken in Mr Campbell's case to try and ensure no such outrage takes place in Texas on 13 May."
The TDCJ updated its website on Thursday afternoon to reveal that another three executions have been scheduled for August, September and January.
Litigation related to recent Texas death penalty cases is ongoing as lawyers for inmates argue that a lack of available details about drugs which are likely sourced from lightly-regulated compounding pharmacies means that prisoners cannot be certain they will avoid a painfully inefficient death that violates their constitutional right not to suffer a "cruel and unusual" punishment.
In documents filed to a federal appeals court in New Orleans on Wednesday, lawyers seeking transparency in Texas described the current dispute over access to information as a "stand-off between inmates and executioners".
They added that Lockett's fate "gruesomely underscores the importance of transparency, judicial oversight, and the crucial importance of keeping some doors open to death-sentenced inmates to assert their right to be executed in a manner that comports with the eighth amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment".
Lawyers for the TDCJ have previously argued that concerns are baseless since the state now has a solid track record of properly carrying out executions using single-drug pentobarbital since mid-2012 and has conducted its own drug-quality tests.
The state also contends that secrecy is increasingly necessary to ensure potential suppliers are not scared off by negative publicity or threats of violence made by anti-capital punishment activists. Death penalty opponents say that officials have exaggerated the risk and are asking for secrecy as a way to hide questionable and ever-more desperate attempts to source drugs that have become scarce mainly because of Europe-led boycotts.
Lawyers for Michael Yowell, who was executed last October, alleged in a court document that in an effort to trick a compounding pharmacy into supplying them with pentobarbital, Texas officials placed an order that was to be delivered to the address of a prison hospital that had closed 30 years earlier. When the pharmacy discovered the drugs were to be used for lethal injections the order was cancelled.
A TDCJ spokesman told the Guardian on Wednesday that Texas had no plans to review its procedures in light of events in Oklahoma because it uses a different drug protocol. "We monitor our system very carefully to make sure we never have happen in Texas what happened in Oklahoma," Abbott told the Dallas Morning News.
"I have no indication or evidence or reason for concern that we will have happen in Texas what happened in Oklahoma," he said. "The protocol in Texas is different than the protocol used in Oklahoma ... It's like comparing apples and oranges."
However, if Texas runs out of pentobarbital and fails to source a new supply, it would be forced to turn to an alternative drug or drugs. The state's refusal to disclose information about its stocks means it is unclear how much pentobarbital it still has, or the expiry date.
Court records from last year suggest that Texas is, or at least was, in possession of propofol, midazolam and hydromorphone, presumably as a back-up option to pentobarbital. Midazolam, a sedative, was used on Tuesday in Oklahoma. Any change to Texas's protocol, especially if it involved the use a drug at the core of a controversy, would be bound to prompt more litigation on behalf of death-row prisoners.
Source: The Guardian, May 2, 2014
Dallas Medical Examiners to Assist With Oklahoma Execution Investigation
North Texas investigators will be involved in the process of finding out what happened during a botched execution in Oklahoma.
Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett was sentenced to death for shooting a teenager and watching as she was buried alive. His lethal injection began at 6:23 p.m. Tuesday but was halted after about 20 minutes when he tried to talk and suffered seizures.
An Associated Press witness said the blinds were lowered in the execution chamber at 6:39 p.m. and Lockett died of a heart attack at 7:06 p.m.
It was the 1st use of a new combination of drugs for lethal injection in Oklahoma.
A 2nd inmate who was scheduled to be execution on Tuesday had their execution stayed until an investigation into the incident can be completed.
Following the incident, Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin ordered that the remains of Lockett are to be transported to the Dallas County Medical Examiner's officer for a post mortem examination.
Texas Attorneys to Challenge State's Execution Drug Policy
Controversy continues of the mixture of drugs used in executions in both Oklahoma and Texas. Neither state discloses what drugs are used, nor who supplied them.
Criminal defense attorneys are already mapping strategy to halt Texas executions after Tuesday's botched lethal injection in Oklahoma.
"It's shocking that the government would torture people like this," Dallas criminal defense attorney John Tatum said.
Tatum represents several Texas death row inmates, including Naim Muhammad, convicted of the 2011 Dallas drowning his two children. Tatum said the Oklahoma incident is reason to challenge all lethal injections.
"Every case that's pending in the state or any state that uses a different cocktail of drugs to kill people," Tatum said.
Tatum was one of several defense attorneys attending a conference Wednesday on capital punishment defense, where talk turned to the execution of Clayton Lockett.
"The duration of it is what was cruel and unusual in my view," said attorney Rick Wardroup.
The attorneys said Texas has refused to disclose the source of lethal injections drugs it is using now. "We don't know whether it's coming from China," said attorney Brad Lollar. "There's just no telling. And there's no quality assurance there."
Former prosecutor Toby Shook handled 21 death penalty cases. He witnessed the 2012 execution of Texas 7 leader George Rivas for the murder of Irving Police officer Aubrey Hawkins. "He went very calmly. It was very clinical," Shook said.
Shook said The State of Texas will claim its lethal injection procedures are not flawed. "I'm sure what the state will argue is that we haven't had these problems in Texas and the process has worked," Shook said.
The next execution scheduled in Texas is inmate Robert Campbell for the 1991 robbery, rape and murder of a Houston woman.
Source: nbcdfw.com, May 2, 2014
