Today's Austin American-Statesman reports, "Prisons running low on execution drugs again, but prison agency withholds details." It's by Mike Ward.
A new report surfaced on Tuesday that Texas again might be running out of a key drug used to execute its condemned criminals, but state prison officials said that they have enough to carry out the next six scheduled executions.
What happens after that might be anyone's guess, thanks to a new no-disclosure policy imposed by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice on details about the execution drugs.
Two years ago, the prison system revealed its drug supplier and the amount of drugs on hand after Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott issued an opinion saying it was public information. The prison system had sought to keep the information secret, arguing that releasing details about the drug supply might trigger violent protests outside the execution chamber or embolden death penalty opponents.
Prison system spokesman Jason Clark said Tuesday that the agency is seeking another opinion from the attorney general on the execution drug information "because the law has changed and due to changing circumstances."
Specifically, Clark said, a state Supreme Court ruling last July could have changed the situation. The case, filed by the Austin American-Statesman and other newspapers, sought travel vouchers for the governor's security detail under the Texas Public Information Act.
In that case, the Supreme Court ruled, for the first time, that safety concerns might trump laws mandating public disclosure of information that reveals how a government spends taxpayer money.
Texas operates the busiest death chamber in the United States, executing more than twice as many prisoners last year as any other state — 13 in all. Its execution practices have made it a target of death penalty opponents for years.
The Guardian, a British newspaper, reported Tuesday that Texas has only enough pentobarbital on hand to complete six executions "and may be incapable of carrying out further death sentences after June."
And:
Texas faced the same problem 13 months ago, when the sole U.S. manufacturer of the sedative sodium thiopental permanently halted production after authorities in Italy, where it was made, demanded a guarantee that it would not be used in executions — a promise the company said it could not give.
The Guardian report is, "Texas executions threatened as stocks of death penalty drug run low," by Ed Pilkington writing in New York.
The dwindling supplies in the nation's most prolific death penalty state underline the crisis that is sweeping the 34 states that still have the death sentence on their books. Last summer, Lundbeck, the Danish company that makes pentobarbital under the trademark Nembutal, placed strict restrictions on its distribution to prevent it falling into the hands of US executioners.
Georgia, the state that caused outrage in September when it put to death Troy Davis despite considerable doubts about his guilt, is also running low on stocks of the drug it used to kill him. It has only enough pentobarbital to kill four more prisoners – the same number of executions as it carried out in 2011.
The severity of America's lethal injection drought has been uncovered by the human rights group Reprieve. Using freedom of information appeals, its investigator Maya Foa has calculated the remaining stocks in Texas and Georgia of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used to put prisoners to sleep before they are administered a separate drug to stop their heart.
Her calculations show that Texas has 27 vials of Nembutal left in its stocks, with each vial containing 2.5g of the sedative. The state needs two vials to inject into each condemned prisoner, and a further two as a back-up in case of problems with the first, as outlined in its official execution procedures.
That is sufficient for 6.75 executions.
The Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined to confirm how much pentobarbital it had in its stores, saying it was seeking to keep the quantity secret "for security reasons".
Similarly, Georgia has 17 vials of pentobarbital left, Reprieve has calculated – just over four executions' worth.
"These shows that the restrictions on sale of medical drugs to US corrections departments are starting to bite. States that practice the death penalty are now reaching a desperate situation," Foa said.
"It's getting harder and harder for them to get hold of these drugs and eventually they will be forced to recognise that medicines should not be used to execute people."
Difficulties over lethal injections has already put a halt to executions in several other states. California has a moratorium in place until at least 2013 as a result of legal wrangling over the procedure, while Ohio has also been forced to put its executions on hold because it was found by the courts to be straying from its own protocols in administering the drugs.
The question hanging over death rows across the country is what happens when states like Texas run dry of pentobarbital. Will they move on to a new alternative sedative in the hope of bypassing restrictions on sales of the medicines, or will they try to procure Nembutal through circuitous routes?
Legitimate channels through which the drug can be obtained are fast closing. A ban has been imposed since last December across the European Union on selling the constituent parts of the lethal injection to US prisons.
The UK's Telegraph has, "Drug shortage threatens Texas death sentences," by Amy Willis, reporting from Los Angeles.
The drug shortage means the state, the powerhouse of judicial killings in the US, is only able to carry out its scheduled executions until June, human rights group Reprieve has calculated.
Reprieve said Georgia is also suffering a supply crisis with only 17 vials of pentobarbital remaining.
Six executions are scheduled in Texas over the next four months but beyond that quantities of pentobarbital, one of three drugs needed to carry out the lethal punishments, will no longer be sufficient.
Texan officials refused to confirm any shortages of the drug citing “security reasons”.
Earlier coverage of the Texas drug switch and TDCJ secrecy is at the links. Related posts are in the lethal injection, international, and TDCJ indexes.
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