Georgia eyes new drug in execution process

By Bill Rankin

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Stripped of its supply of a key lethal-injection drug, Georgia may soon switch to a new drug so it can resume executions of condemned inmates.

The new drug, the barbituate pentobarbital, has already been used for executions in Ohio and Oklahoma.

Rob Jones, the Department of Corrections’ general counsel, said Georgia prison officials traveled to those states last month to review their methods. Georgia is one of several states looking at pentobarbital as a replacement to sodium thiopental, which has been used for years for lethal injections but is no longer manufactured in the U.S.

“Nothing has been finalized at this point, but we are fairly close to making a decision,” Jones said.

In March, Drug Enforcement Administration officials confiscated Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental after lawyers for a death row inmate questioned whether the drug was counterfeit or had been adulterated.

Attorneys representing Cobb County killer Andrew Grant DeYoung, whose final appeals are pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, had asked the Justice Department to investigate Georgia’s importation last year of sodium thiopental. They accused the Department of Corrections of violating federal drug laws when it purchased its supply from a pharmaceutical company that operated in the back of a storefront driving school in London.

Because of the seizure, the state has not been able to set an execution date in one of its highest-profile cases: that of Troy Anthony Davis, whose final appeals were rejected by the high court last month. Davis was sentenced to death after his conviction for killing an off-duty Savannah police officer in 1989. Three other Georgia inmates, including DeYoung, also could have their executions postponed.

Amid the ongoing DEA review, corrections officials have intensified their efforts to replace sodium thiopental with pentobarbital.

In March, Ohio became the first state in the country to use pentobarbital as the sole drug used in the lethal-injection process when it executed Johnnie Baston, convicted of killing a store owner during a 1994 robbery.

There were no complications with the execution, Ohio prison spokesman Carlo LoParo said.

“It’s humane,” he said of pentobarbital. “Our research and the research of others indicates it is gram for gram just as effective as sodium thiopental.”

Oklahoma uses pentobarbital as one of three drugs in its execution process. Georgia’s lethal-injection procedure has used a three-drug cocktail, with sodium thiopental used as the first drug.

Jones said Corrections has yet to decide whether pentobarbital, if the state elects to use it, will be the sole drug or one of three. “We want to carry out this procedure in the most humane way possible and to ensure it will be a pain-free procedure,” he said.

Texas also plans to use the drug and Louisiana and Mississippi are considering it, according to the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington.

Pentobarbital is made at a plant owned by the Danish company, Lundbeck, which says the drug’s primary purpose is to treat epileptic seizures.

Lundbeck also has said it does not condone the use of pentobarbital for executions, and Denmark’s foreign minister, Lene Esperson, recently told the Danish Parliament that it is “deeply regrettable” it is being used for lethal injections. Espersen said she would ask states to refrain from using pentobarbital in executions. Denmark does not have the death penalty.

William Montross, a lawyer for the Southern Center for Human Rights in Atlanta, criticized Corrections for “tinkering with death behind closed doors and out of the view of the public,” noting what happened when the agency imported sodium thiopental last year from the company in London.

“We know that the manufacturers of these drugs don’t want them used to kill people,” Montross said. “Maybe this time, the department will buy the drugs at a souvenir stand in Paris and get them into the country through a shipping port in Havana.”