In a world where it’s harder and harder for death penalty states to get their skeleton-like hands on execution drugs, Texas may be filling that very bad void.
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As in other death penalty states, Texas prison officials had turned to unregulated compounding pharmacies after drug manufacturers, largely due to mounting pressure from anti-death penalty activists, stopped selling states drugs for use in lethal injections.
“The TDCJ is compounding or producing pentobarbital within its department for use in executions”, wrote Patti Palmer Ghezzi, an assistant federal public defender for Glossip.
In 2013, Virginia gave Texas a supply of pentobarbital when its caches were running low.
The Oklahoma court filing stems from a lawsuit filed on Glossip’s behalf challenging that state’s use of midazolam, a sedative, that his lawyers argue subjects death row inmates to cruel and unusual punishment.
“It puts a whole new spin on the efforts by state departments of corrections for secrecy in the execution process”, Dunham said Friday. Looks like Texas is ready to play that role, unfortunately. Clark denied the allegation, saying the state agency has no authority to manufacture its own drugs.
In 2013, Virginia performed the same favor for Texas, according to Texas prisons spokesman Jason Clark. It could do so, they argue, by purchasing pentobarbital from Texas, like Virginia, or by “compounding or producing pentobarbital in the same manner as does TDCJ”. But the court documents which first revealed the deal with Virginia offer a possible explanation of how Texas has overcome its problems and recently stockpiled enough of the sedative to share it.
The El Salvador-born 49-year-old was on death row in California for a 1990 murder when Virginia prosecutors took him to the east coast in 2006 to face trial for other homicides.
Virginia Department of Corrections spokeswoman Lisa Kinney said the agency intended to use midazolam as part of Prieto’s three-drug lethal injection, but that the state’s supply of midazolam is set to expire a day before Prieto’s execution.
States have struggled to obtain execution drugs for years after makers enacted more stringent guidelines to keep them away from states that would use them for executions.
Texas has executed ten men so far this year using pentobarbital. Unlike traditional pharmacies, compounding pharmacies aren’t as strictly regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.
Clark said that the dispatched drugs “have been tested for potency and purity and will expire in April 2016”. When the Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy backed out as Texas’s supplier, it became pretty clear that even pharmacies that might provide the drugs in secret wouldn’t do so in public.
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Virginia, where lawmakers unsuccessfully tried to pass an execution-drug secrecy law earlier this year, has identified its drug suppliers in the past.
