The State of Texas is suing the Food and Drug Administration, seeking to force it to release some 1,000 vials of a lethal injection drug that officers seized at Houston Intercontinental Airport two years ago, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
The feds claimed at the time that the state had purchased the drugs under false pretenses
.Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center tells News Radio 1200 WOAI that the seizure, and the lawsuit, demonstrates the challenges that states like Texas have today in acquiring the drugs needed to carry out executions.
"The attempts to use medicine to carry out executions have put the United States, and Texas, on the map worldwide as human rights abusers," Dunham said.
Specifically, most companies that manufacture drugs these days are international conglomerates which are either headquartered in Europe or have major operations in Europe. The European Union has forbidden any products made in Europe from being used for executions. That has left the State of Texas in a bind, forcing it to acquire execution drugs from so called 'compounding pharmacies,' where they are manufactured from other producs, or, in the case of the 1,000 doses of sodium triopental which is at issue in the lawsuit, acquire the drugs under misleading pretenses.
Dunham says Texas, unlike Arkansas, is not running out of lethal injection drugs, and doesn't use sodium triopental for that purpose in any case, the drugs were meant to be a backup.
"It wanted to obtain as much sodium triopental as it could as a stopgap measure, and as a way of insuring that it would not have a problem if its supplies of pentobarbital become unavailable," Dunham said.
The Texas Department of Corrections as a matter of policy does not comment on the supply of pentobarbital it has on hand.
IMAGE; GETTY