For Texas' Death Row, A Lethal Injection Supply Problem...Drug Manufacturer Bails...

By PATRICK ALCATRAZ
Editor

AUSTIN, Texas - Back when I wrote for The Houston Post's State Desk, a job that had me cutting a newshound trail across the Lone Star State, the road sometimes took me to Huntsville, where I'd sit-in on an execution at the state's Death Row Unit. It was sort of dramatic, especially when watching some tough guy fade into the beyond with either a sigh or a kick of the leg. But it also was boring, the chemicals used to kill them doing their job without a sound, without exacting any pain.

The end, it is said in crime, comes too quickly.

Well, maybe not now.

Officials with the Texas Department of Corrections are not saying it's the end of death-by-lethal-injection, but their supplier has said it will no longer produce the drug used to kill the state's most vicious criminals.

Texas, say officials, has a supply that'll last only until May.

The drug is sodium thiopental, one of three in the chemcial cocktail that relaxes a Death Row convict and anesthesizes him before the combination stops his/her heart. The maker of sodium thiopental, Hospira, Inc. of Lake Forest, Illinois, had recently stopped manufacturing the drug and was planning to turn the operation over to a company in Italy. Itlay, however, eventually said it could not export any drug that would be used to kill anyone, prisoners especially.

"There are currently four executions scheduled in Texas - two in February, one in May and one in July," Michelle Lyons, communications director at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, told the New York Times in a story published in Saturday's edition. "At this time, we have enough sodium thiopental on hand to carry out the two executions scheduled in February. In March, our supply of this particular drug is set to expire."

Texas, she went on, will explore the use of other drugs. Officials in Ohio and Washington face the same problem, as do their counterparts in Arizona, where 134 people are on that state's Death Row. Arizona reported a supply for five executions, although a spokesman there said no executions are scheduled anytime soon.

Pentobarbital, a drug used by veterinarians to put animals to sleep, is being considered as an alternative to sodium thiopental. Pentobarbital has been used in cases of euthanasia in Oregon, but has been described as being too strong - cruel - by opponents of the Death Penalty.

It is these objections to the killing that forced Hospira, Inc. to stop providing the needed drug. Officials for the company cited pressure from civic and activist organizations. Texas, which ranks atop the list of states using lethal injection, executes its Death Row inmates in Huntsville, north of Houston.

Hospira no longer has a facility in the U.S. to manufacture the drug, said spokesman Daniel Rosenberg. The company acknowledged that it produced the drug primarily for medical purposes, but was unable to stop states from using it to kill prisoners. The plan to import it was quashed by Italy, when that government denied an export permit to the company that would have provided it to Hospira, Inc.

According to the U.S. government, 34 of the 35 states that use the death-by-lethal-injection method had been using sodium thiopentol. On average, some 56 inmates are put to death every year. The lack of sodium thiopental delayed scheduled executions in Oklahoma and California last year.

As the shortage was announced early last year, California and Arizona began importing sodium thiopentol from England, but the Brits later halted export of the drug, also citing their desire to not export drugs to be used in lethal injections.

To date, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican who has roundly endorsed the Death Penalty, has said nothing about what Texas might do if it is unable to find an acceptable substitute...

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