Texas has enough lethal injection drugs to execute four inmates

Texas now has enough lethal injection drugs to execute all four death row inmates set to die this month, following earlier reports that the state only had sufficient supplies to kill one — a convict scheduled to be killed later Thursday. 

“The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has obtained a new supply of pentobarbital which will allow the agency to carry out executions that are scheduled for the month of April,” a Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) spokesman told Al Jazeera in an email.

“The drugs were purchased from a licensed pharmacy that has the ability to compound. We continue to explore all options including the continued used of pentobarbital or alternate drugs to use in the lethal injection process.”

The TDCJ spokesman did not specify the state’s supplier of the lethal injection drug. The state has lodged an appeal to overturn a ruling requiring it to disclose the source of its lethal injection drugs. 

Diann Rust-Tierney, the director of advocacy group the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said Texas is having a hard time “scoring more drugs” largely due to the medical community’s stance on capital punishment.

“I think the market has spoken. These companies that are making the drugs that are engaged in life-affirming activities want to be associated with those things. They don’t want their product misused by departments of corrections,” she said. 

In 2011, Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck, following cues from a British counterpart, moved to block its products from being used in the cocktail of lethal drugs administered to kill death row inmates.

Texas on Thursday was set to execute Kent Sprouse, a 42-year-old convicted of killing a police officer and a bystander at a Dallas gas station during a robbery in 2002. Sprouse’s legal team argued in attempts to appeal his 2004 sentencing that he was mentally ill at the time of the crime, local newspaper The Dallas Morning News reported.

The Supreme Court is set to rule later this month on whether Oklahoma’s use of lethal injection procedures violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment after a series of botched executions that resulted in lengthy and uncessarily painful deaths.

Sister Helen Prejean, a Roman Catholic nun whose autobiographical account of her relationship with a prisoner inspired the 1995 film “Dead Man Walking,” told Al Jazeera that if the United States sees a change in federal policy on capital punishment, it will come from the people, not the courts.

“The people of the United States are gradually waking up. The people will lead and the Court will follow,” she said.

“One day, we are going to look back, like we look at slavery, and we’ll ask ourselves what we’ve done and realize there was a cognitive distancing,” she added, “I compare [the death penalty] to the days when slave mothers were taken from their children. ‘Send the father off.’ ‘Send the mother off.’ – it’s enabled by not being attuned to human suffering. We are still in that stage in the courts.”