TENNESSEE GOVERNOR HALTS ALL EXECUTIONS
Tennessee’s governor Monday ordered a halt to all executions through the end of the year and opened an investigation into why the state had failed to properly test lethal injection drugs that were set to be used on a prisoner last month.
The execution of that prisoner, Oscar Smith, was halted about an hour before he was scheduled to be killed because the drugs were not tested for endotoxins, contaminants that could cause unforeseeable side effects if injected. The moratorium will delay the execution of Smith and four other men who had been scheduled to die this year.
The failure to test for the toxins, which experts said could cause respiratory failure or other distressing symptoms before death, was the latest in a string of errors and challenges for states seeking to carry out the death penalty while lethal drugs are harder to procure. A judge in Oklahoma is currently weighing whether a drug used during executions in several states, including Oklahoma and Tennessee, is constitutional, and South Carolina is preparing to carry out its first execution by firing squad after saying it could no longer acquire lethal injection drugs.
Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee, a Republican, said Monday that Ed Stanton, a former federal prosecutor in Tennessee, would lead an investigation into why the drugs used for lethal injection were not tested for the endotoxins.
Smith’s attorneys, who had called for a moratorium and investigation, welcomed the governor’s move.
“The use of compounded drugs in the context of lethal injection is fraught with risk,” said Kelley Henry, the top death penalty lawyer in the Federal Public Defender’s Office in Nashville. “The failure to test for endotoxins is a violation of the protocol. Gov. Lee did the right thing by stopping executions because of this breach.”
Wendy Galbraith, a professor of pharmaceutical sciences at the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center, said she was alarmed that a pharmacist had apparently not tested the drugs for endotoxins, given that it is a standard part of compounding drugs and takes only about 20 minutes to complete.
“It’s so simple,” Galbraith said, noting that the U.S. Pharmacopeia, or USP, issues standards for pharmacists, including for testing for endotoxins, and that “every pharmacist follows the USP.”