Media allowed in lethal injection hearing
FDA tried to close session on fight over Texas use of drugs
A federal judge in Texas has ruled that an upcoming court date in the state’s lawsuit over lethal injection drugs will stay open to the public, despite the federal government’s efforts this year to keep it secret.
The one-page decision, issued Monday, came just over a month after the Houston Chronicle and three other media outlets filed a motion to intervene in the ongoing
litigation in the hope of securing access to a September status conference that’s part of the ongoing lawsuit over 1,000 vials of lethal injection drugs imported from India.
The Texas Tribune, the Dallas Morning News and BuzzFeed all joined with the Chronicle in filing the motion.
The legal wrangling began in 2015, when the Texas Department of Criminal Justice tried ordering an execution drug — the barbiturate sodium thiopental — from an overseas supplier.
The FDA confiscated the drugs at Bush Intercontinental Airport, saying they were improperly labeled and not approved
for injection in humans.
But the state called that an “unjustified seizure” and filed suit, demanding the now-expired drugs back and asking the court to lift the FDA’s ban on importation of sodium thiopental when it’s for law enforcement use.
The case languished in court, and earlier this year when Texas asked to keep it moving ahead, the feds opposed, saying they were trying to “explore possible options for resolving this lawsuit.”
When the court scheduled a conference to discuss the status of the case, the FDA filed a motion asking the court to close the hearing to the public.
The four media outlets in June opposed that — and five days later, the government responded saying it did “not intend to press its request” any more.
Currently, the status conference in question is slated for Sept. 13 in Galveston in front of U.S. District Judge George C. Hanks Jr.
Sodium thiopental has been used in more than 400 Texas executions, but in 2011 dwindling supplies forced the state to replace it with pentobarbital as part of a three-drug cocktail.
The following year, Texas switched from a three-drug mix to a single dose of pentobarbital.
On Monday, in a separate legal
matter, Texas joined 14 other states in a brief opposing drug companies’ efforts to prevent the use of their products in executions. That filing is part of an ongoing case in Nevada, where a drugmaker halted the planned execution of Scott Dozier by filing a lawsuit claiming some of the drugs were improperly obtained.
Despite the ongoing struggles to get lethal injection supplies, Texas has always been able to get execution drugs to keep its death chamber active. Currently, the state has 21 doses of drugs and eight executions on the calendar.