DALLAS (AP) — Texas can keep secret the name of its
supplier for its execution drugs, the state attorney general determined
after law enforcement argued that suppliers face serious danger.
In
the decision, Attorney General Greg Abbott’s Office cited a "threat
assessment" signed by Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven
McCraw that says pharmacies selling execution drugs face "a substantial
threat of physical harm."
Thursday’s decision was a reversal for
the state’s top prosecutor on an issue being challenged in several death
penalty states. It came the same day that Missouri Attorney General
Chris Koster said his state should consider creating its own laboratory
for execution drugs rather than relying on "uneasy cooperation" with
outside sources.
Under Abbott, who is also the Republican nominee
for governor in the nation’s busiest death penalty state, the Texas
Attorney General’s Office had since 2010 rejected three similar attempts
by the Texas Department of Criminal Justice to keep secret its source
of the drugs used to carry out lethal injections.
While courts
have consistently refused to stop executions over the privacy issue,
lawyers for death row inmates say they need the information to verify
the drugs’ potency and protect inmates from unconstitutionally cruel and
unusual punishment.
The assessment cited by Abbott’s office is a
one-page letter dated March 7 in which McCraw says a Houston-area
compounding pharmacy that was publicly identified as Texas’ previous
drug supplier received threats that "should be taken seriously." His
letter did not specify those threats, and a DPS spokesman last month
said he was not aware of any investigation into threats made against the
supplier, the Woodlands Compounding Pharmacy.
"Pharmacies by design are easily accessible to the public and present a soft target to violent
attacks," McCraw said.
Unlike
some states, Texas law doesn’t specifically say whether prison
officials must disclose where they buy lethal injection drugs. The
opinion from Abbott’s office says that "in this instance and when
analyzing the probability of harm, this office must defer to the
representations of DPS, the law enforcement experts charged with
assessing threats to public safety."
Defense attorney Maurie Levin called Abbott’s decision "deeply disturbing and frankly quite
shocking."
In
Missouri, Koster’s suggestion that the state create its own lab raises
several questions, including whether Missouri can do so without approval
from the Legislature. A state-operated lab would be a first.
"As a
matter of policy, Missouri should not be reliant on merchants whose
identities must be shielded from public view or who can exercise
unacceptable leverage over this profound state act," Koster said.
Earlier
this month, The Associated Press and four other news organizations
filed a lawsuit against the Missouri Department of Corrections, claiming
the state’s refusal to provide information on the execution drug
violates the public’s constitutional right to have access to information
about the punishment.
Death penalty states have been scrambling
to find new sources of drugs after several drugmakers, including many
based in Europe, refused to sell drugs for use in lethal injections.
That’s led several states to compounding pharmacies, which are not as
heavily regulated by the Food and Drug Administration as more
conventional pharmacies.
Courts up to the U.S. Supreme Court have
yet to halt an execution based on a state’s refusal to reveal its drug
supplier. The secrecy argument also was used ahead of a bungled
execution last month in Oklahoma, though that inmate’s faulty veins, not
the execution drug, were cited as the likely culprit.
___
Graczyk reported from Houston. Associated Press writer Jim Salter in St. Louis contributed to this
report.
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