Texas Prisons Deny Making Execution Drugs

Texas and Oklahoma are among a handful of states with laws – being challenged by death penalty opponents – that allow prison officials not to disclose where they get execution drugs.

Lawyers for the state say an Oklahoma inmate scheduled for execution next week isn’t entitled to a hearing on claims that he’s innocent because witnesses who recently emerged are “inherently suspect”. 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”. Clark denied the allegation, saying the state agency has no authority to manufacture its own drugs.

Previously Texas has stated that they have a supplier, but the three bottles sold to Virginian do not list a lab or pharmacy on the label and the invoice lists the TDCJ as the seller. His attorneys point to documents that show the Texas Department of Criminal Justice sold pentobarbital to Virginia in late August.

“The agency earlier this year was approached by officials in Virginia and we reciprocated and gave them three vials of pentobarbital that were legally purchased from a pharmacy”, said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Robert Hurst.

Separately, Glossip’s lawyers are arguing in federal court that one of Oklahoma’s preferred execution drugs, pentobarbital, is available if the state would seek it out. “The agency has not provided compounded drugs to any other state”.

“We do not have a pharmacy license”, he said Friday. Virginia now ranks third in the country for executions, behind Texas and Oklahoma. Prieto already was on death row in California for raping and killing a 15-year-old girl.

Two years ago, The Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy backed out of its deal with the state and demanded prison officials return its vials of pentobarbital, the sedative Texas uses to execute inmates.

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. But since that case has been tied up in appeals, the questions has remained each time Texas somehow finds more pentobarbital to kill death row inmates: Who’s selling Texas the drugs?

Clark said that the dispatched drugs “have been tested for potency and purity and will expire in April 2016”. The last 24, going back to 2013, have used pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy as the lone drug for lethal injections.

The cooperation in Prieto’s case demonstrates the problems states are having in carrying out death sentences, including difficulties obtaining suitable drugs and lengthy legal wranglings. Another man, Justin Sneed, admitted to the killing and said Glossip offered him $10,000 to do it, which Glossip denies.