Records Show Tennessee Officials Have Spent Nearly $600,000 of Taxpayer Funds for Lethal Injection Drugs Since 2017

According to records request­ed by The Tennessean, between 2017 and 2025 the Tennessee Department of Correction (TDOC spent near­ly $600,000 of tax­pay­er funds obtain­ing drugs for lethal injec­tion exe­cu­tions.

Specific infor­ma­tion about the drugs’ sources and ori­gins remains unknown because of the state’s secre­cy pro­vi­sions. During this time peri­od sev­en exe­cu­tions were car­ried out: five by elec­tro­cu­tion, two by lethal injection.

The TDOC ini­tial­ly refused to respond to The Tennessean’s February 2025 records request for drug invoic­es, cit­ing state secre­cy law that shields infor­ma­tion about the drugs, the drug sup­pli­er and the indi­vid­u­als involved in exe­cu­tions. 

In response, the news group point­ed to spe­cif­ic lan­guage in the law that per­mits the state to reveal the cost of the drugs, but not the iden­ti­ty of the drug man­u­fac­tur­er. In March 2025, TDOC released to The Tennessean nine high­ly-redact­ed pages, reveal­ing the costs asso­ci­at­ed with each invoice — but no dates, drug quan­ti­ties pur­chased, or drug sources.

The nine invoic­es total $588,169.50, with the sin­gle largest invoice amount­ing to $525,000. One pay­ment for $19,031.28, match­es an August 2018 lethal injec­tion drug invoice pre­vi­ous­ly obtained by The Guardian. 

In 2018, Tennessee used a three-drug exe­cu­tion pro­to­col begin­ning with mida­zo­lam, fol­lowed by vecuro­ni­um bro­mide and potas­si­um chlo­ride. In December 2024, the state announced a shift in its lethal injec­tion process to a one-drug pro­to­col using pentobarbital.

With no trans­paren­cy we can’t know where the drugs are com­ing from, but $500,000 to me is an indi­ca­tion that they came from a gray mar­ket source…That’s just a huge amount of mon­ey, so some­body is prof­it­ing off of these state exe­cu­tions, and they’re prof­it­ing using taxpayer dollars.

— Kelley Henry, Supervisory Assistant Federal Public Defender in Tennessee.

Since the 2010s, many phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal com­pa­nies have refused to pro­vide states with their med­i­cines and drugs for use in exe­cu­tions, and as a result, some states began to pro­cure drugs using less con­ven­tion­al means, turn­ing to over­seas phar­ma­cies and local com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies. This shift towards unreg­u­lat­ed com­pound­ing phar­ma­cies, or as fed­er­al pub­lic defend­er Kelley Henry calls it, the ​“gray mar­ket,” means that depart­ments of cor­rec­tions across the coun­try have spent mil­lions of tax­pay­er dol­lars attempt­ing to secure drugs.

In May 2022 Tennessee Governor Bill Lee halt­ed all exe­cu­tions and called for an ​“inde­pen­dent review” of the state’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col to address a ​“tech­ni­cal over­sight” that led him to stop Oscar Smith’s exe­cu­tion less than a half-hour before it was sched­uled to be car­ried out in April 2022. 

Gov. Lee retained for­mer U.S. Attorney Ed Stanton to con­duct a review of Tennessee’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col after cor­rec­tion depart­ment offi­cials failed to test the exe­cu­tion drugs for bac­te­r­i­al endo­tox­ins ahead of Mr. Smith’s sched­uled exe­cu­tion. Mr. Stanton’s inde­pen­dent review, which exam­ined all exe­cu­tions car­ried out in the state between 2018 and 2022, and released in December 2022, found that the same lax over­sight that occurred in the lead up to Mr. Smith’s exe­cu­tion had also occurred in the prepa­ra­tions for the sev­en pre­vi­ous exe­cu­tions. 

According to Mr. Stanton’s final report, Tennessee’s pre­vi­ous exe­cu­tion pro­to­col required that the drugs be test­ed for poten­cy, steril­i­ty, and endo­tox­in con­t­a­m­i­na­tion, but TDOC repeat­ed­ly vio­lat­ed that require­ment, test­ing for endo­tox­ins in just one of eight pre­pared lethal injection doses.

Documents released with Mr. Stanton’s report indi­cates that in 2017, while the state relied on pen­to­bar­bi­tal for exe­cu­tions, TDOC offi­cials con­sid­ered acquir­ing the drug from a vet­eri­nar­i­an and inter­na­tion­al man­u­fac­tur­ers, but there were logis­ti­cal con­cerns with inter­na­tion­al trans­port. According to the Associated Press, records reveal that Tennessee’s inter­nal review of its exe­cu­tion pro­to­col cost more than $219,000.

A group of nine death row pris­on­ers have filed a law­suit chal­leng­ing Tennessee’s sole use of pen­to­bar­bi­tal in its revised lethal injec­tion pro­to­col, argu­ing it cre­ates a ​“high risk of a tor­tur­ous death.” 

Earlier this month, the Tennessee Supreme Court sched­uled exe­cu­tion dates for four indi­vid­u­als: Oscar Smith (May 22), Byron Black (August 5), Donald Middlebrooks (September 24), and Harold Nichols (December 11). Mr. Smith and Mr. Black are both par­ties to the law­suit chal­leng­ing the state’s use of pen­to­bar­bi­tal. Tennessee’s last exe­cu­tion was car­ried out in February 2020, with the elec­tro­cu­tion of Nicholas Sutton.

Other states have also spent large sums to acquire lethal injec­tion drugs. A 2021 inves­ti­ga­tion from The Guardian revealed that in 2020, the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation, & Reentry, (ADCRR) spent $1.5 mil­lion on 1,000 vials of pen­to­bar­bi­tal all shipped in ​“unmarked jars and box­es.” 

In 2015, Arizona spent $27,000 to pro­cure 1,000 vials of sodi­um thiopen­tal to use in exe­cu­tions from a sup­pli­er in India, after domes­tic pro­duc­ers would not sell the drug for exe­cu­tions. The drugs were seized by the US Customs and Border Protection in Phoenix after the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) warned ADCRR that the pur­chase was illegal.

In Idaho, pub­lic records reveal the state spent more than $150,000 on lethal injec­tion drugs in its efforts to exe­cute Thomas Creech—$50,000 in October 2023 and $100,000 in June 2024. 

Recent ren­o­va­tions to the F Block unit at the Idaho Maximum Security Institution to cre­ate an exe­cu­tion prepa­ra­tion room cost an esti­mat­ed $313,915, accord­ing to Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC) pub­lic infor­ma­tion offi­cer Sanda Kuzeta-Cerimagic. 

The ren­o­va­tions in the exe­cu­tion room are just the first phase of a two-state ren­o­va­tion. The sec­ond stage includes the cre­ation of a secured facil­i­ty for exe­cu­tions via fir­ing squad, which was adopt­ed as an alter­na­tive method of exe­cu­tion in 2023 and made the pri­ma­ry method of exe­cu­tion in March 2024.

Phase two con­struc­tion costs are esti­mat­ed at $952,589, as report­ed by the Idaho Capital Sun.

Source: Death Penalty Information Center, Hayley Bedard, March 25, 2025

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."

— Oscar Wilde