Judge halts Texas execution, says state must come clean over drugs

A federal judge in Houston has stopped the scheduled execution of a serial killer until Texas officials provide his attorneys with information about who supplied a new batch of lethal injection drugs.

U.S. District Judge Vanessa Gilmore on Wednesday issued a temporary injunction preventing the execution of Tommy Lynn Sells. The convicted serial killer was set to die Thursday.

State officials have insisted the identity of the supplier must be kept secret to protect it from threats of violence. U.S. capital punishment states are facing a scarcity of such lethal ingredients as increasing numbers of pharmaceutical firms refuse to take part in the execution process.

But attorneys say the name is needed to verify the quality of the drug and keep the inmate from unconstitutional pain. Another inmate set to die next week, Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, is also involved in the lawsuit.

It's not immediately certain if lawyers for the state will appeal Gilmore's ruling.

Since obtaining a new supply of the drug pentobarbital two weeks ago, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice had cited unspecified security concerns in refusing to disclose the source and other details about the sedative it plans to use to put inmates to death.

The inmates "are entitled to discover how the state plans to put them to death," said attorneys Jonathan Ross and Maurie Levin.

Last week, they won an order from a state court that directed prison officials to identify the new provider of pentobarbital, but only to attorneys for the two prisoners. The Texas Supreme Court put that order on hold on Friday and set a deadline for briefs that will arrive after the Sells and Hernandez-Llanas' scheduled execution dates.

The federal lawsuit filed Tuesday asked the court to compel the agency to immediately disclose the drug source information so the sedatives can be tested to determine they are "safe and will reliably perform their function, or if they are tainted, counterfeited, expired, or compromised in some other way."

It also seeks a court order halting the two executions so the inmates are "able to litigate their right to be executed in a manner devoid of cruel and unusual pain," the lawyers said.

State attorneys have argued the new drugs have been tested and fall within acceptable ranges for potency. Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected similar arguments from a Missouri death row inmate who was later put to death.

But in a brief filed Tuesday with the state attorney general's office, Patricia Fleming, an assistant general counsel for the Texas prison system, argued that a supplier in another state received a specific threat of physical violence.

"An individual threatened to blow up a truck full of fertilizer outside a pharmacy supplying substances to be used in executions," Fleming wrote.

As such, she argued, an open-records request filed by an attorney for a condemned inmate seeking the drugmaker's identity should not be granted.

Questions about the source of drugs used by states to carry out lethal injections have arisen in several states in recent months as numerous drugmakers — particularly in Europe, where opposition is strongest to capital punishment — have refused to sell their products if they will be used to carry out executions.

That has led several U.S. prison systems to compounding pharmacies, which are not as heavily regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as more conventional pharmacies.

A batch of pentobarbital purchased by Texas from such a compounding pharmacy in suburban Houston expired at the end of March. That pharmacy refused to sell the state any more drugs, citing threats it received after its name was made public. That led Texas to its new, undisclosed suppler.

Al Jazeera and wire services