Judge will allow execution of Texas inmate
HOUSTON — A federal judge on Friday denied a request to stop the execution of a Texas inmate who had alleged in a lawsuit that the drugs he is to be injected with next week were exposed to extreme heat and smoke during a recent fire, making them unsafe.
The Texas attorney general’s office says testing done after the fire on samples of the state’s supplies of pentobarbital, the drug used in executions, showed they “remain potent and sterile.”
Jedidiah Murphy, 48, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday. He was condemned for the fatal October 2000 shooting of 80-year-old Bertie Lee Cunningham, of Garland, a Dallas suburb, during a carjacking.
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in federal court in Austin, Murphy’s attorneys contend that during an Aug. 25 fire that caused “catastrophic damage” to the administration building of a prison unit in Huntsville, execution drugs were exposed to excessive heat, smoke and water.
Records from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice show the agency kept pentobarbital at the Huntsville Unit, 70 miles north of Houston.
According to a copy of a Huntsville Fire Department report included in the lawsuit, a prison guard and a fire captain entered the burning building to check “on the pharmacy,” but had to leave because “the area was about to be overtaken by fire.”
When pentobarbital is exposed to high temperatures, it can quickly degrade, compromising its chemical structure and sapping potency, the lawsuit said.
“This creates substantial risks of serious, severe, and super added harm and pain,” according to the lawsuit.
But in an order issued Friday evening, U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman denied Murphy’s request to stay his execution, saying the test results of the pentobarbital samples undermine Murphy’s claims that all of TDCJ’s execution drugs were damaged in the fire.
“As a result, Murphy’s claim that the so-called ‘fire-blighted’ pentobarbital is sure or very likely to cause serious illness or suffering is meritless,” Pitman wrote in his 10-page order.
Murphy’s lawyers also allege the criminal justice department is using expired execution drugs, a claim made by seven other death row inmates in a December lawsuit.
Pitman said there was no validity to these claims as well and there was nothing to support Murphy’s allegations “that TDCJ’s current execution method is sure or very likely to cause needless suffering and illness.”
In responding to Murphy’s lawsuit, the Texas attorney general’s office submitted a laboratory report of test results completed in late September of two pentobarbital samples. One sample had a potency level of 94.2% while the other was found to be 100% potent. Both samples also passed sterility tests and had acceptable levels of bacterial toxins, according to the report.
In the December lawsuit filed by the seven death row inmates, a civil judge in Austin preliminarily agreed with their claims. But her order was stopped by Texas’ top criminal appeals court. Five of the inmates have since been executed.
Court documents from the lawsuit by the seven inmates showed that the compounding pharmacy or pharmacies that supply the state with pentobarbital filled an order Jan. 5.
Like other states in recent years, Texas has turned to compounding pharmacies to obtain pentobarbital after traditional drug makers refused to sell their products to prison agencies in the U.S.