Arizona tried to illegally import a lethal injection drug, but federal agents stopped the shipment at the Phoenix airport, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.
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Sodium thiopental is an anesthetic that’s no longer used – or manufactured by FDA-approved companies – in the United States, though it’s still in use in the developing world. The shipments were seized in the U.S.at the airport by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) before they could reach their intended destinations.
Key details are blacked out of the Arizona documents, which were released as part of a lawsuit against the corrections department over transparency in executions.
Arizona and other states have struggled to acquire lethal injection drugs as more countries refuse to sell the cocktails needed for executions.
States have had to change the combinations of drugs used in lethal injections or put executions on hold. Presumably, the states trying to import it meant to use it as the first drug – the sedative step – in their three-drug protocol for administering lethal injection.
The state is waiting on the FDA to weigh in on its request to bring in the drugs from overseas. However, Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark could not say whether the state had purchased or received any drugs from overseas.
News reports from this past summer indicate that Ohio hoped to import the same illegal drug – sodium thiopental – to be used for the same goal.
It has also said that when it resumes executions, it will employ different chemicals from those used in Wood’s execution, which did not involve sodium thiopental.
Wood, convicted of killing his ex-girlfriend and her father, snorted repeatedly throughout the 90 minutes it took for him to die. Authorities later revealed he was given 15 doses of midazolam and a painkiller.
The suspension comes on the heels of the state’s January 2015 lethal injection protocol revision, which requires the use of either thiopental sodium or pentobarbital to put inmates to death.
Earlier this month, an Arkansas judge halted the upcoming executions of eight death row inmates who are challenging a new law that allows the state to withhold any information that could publicly identify the manufacturers or sellers of its execution drugs. He was supposed to die with one dose.
Ohio abandoned the two-drug method after McGuire’s execution and announced it would use either of two older drugs that it had previously obtained for capital punishment, but of which it did not now have supplies.
“Ohio has no intention of breaking any federal laws or violating any court orders in an attempt to procure the legal drugs necessary to carry out constitutionally approved and court-ordered death sentences”, Gray stated.
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Jon Paul Rion represents the family of executed inmate Dennis McGuire in their lawsuit against the state.
