Texas 'Has No Plans' to Use Drug From Botched Oklahoma Execution

[TexasTowelie]

Update: After Tuesday night's botched execution in Oklahoma, Texas corrections officials say they have no plans to use midazolam in future executions. Midazolam was the first component of a three-drug cocktail administered to death row inmate Clayton Lockett yesterday. Read more about the execution here.

As KUT first reported in February, the state has supplies of midazolam on hand. But the Texas Department of Criminal Justice says in a statement that it "has no plans to change our procedures. Texas does not use the same drugs as Oklahoma as we use a single lethal dose of pentobarbital and we have done so since 2012.”

Attorneys for death row inmates in Texas have unsuccessfully tried to find out who is selling compounded pentobarbital to the state. They're suing in civil court and making a case to the Open Records Division of the Office of the Attorney General that TDCJ should disclose its source.

The botched execution in Oklahoma is "what litigators and inmates have been talking about," says Maurie Levin, a lawyer who represents death row inmates. "The possibility that something like this will happen when there's no transparency or openness, and when the prisons proceed with executions in this unbelievably unacceptable, secretive manner."

More at http://kut.org/post/texas-has-no-plans-use-drug-botched-oklahoma-execution .

[Warpy]

1. Midazolam is really the wrong drug for this if the state is determined to murder its citizens

chemically. In fact, the triple drug idea is incorrect. One overdose of the right drug would do it. And the doctor who proposed Versed should lose his license over unfamiliarity with that particular drug.