The Georgia Department of Corrections has yet to follow through on a promise to tell the federal court the results of tests on lethal injection drugs to confirm that it was cold storage — and not contamination — that caused clumps in a specially-made batch of pentobarbital they had planned to use to put a woman to death.
The main DOC attorney, Robert Jones, wrote in affidavits filed with the U.S. Supreme Court and the district court in Atlanta the testing would take seven days and the results would be given also to attorneys for Kelly Gissendaner, whose scheduled execution in early March was called off because of precipitates in all the vials of deadly dosages of the barbiturate.
DOC said the test was complete and it would be up to the Attorney General’s Office to release the information. The AG’s office said the test results would eventually be given to the court.
Kelly Gissendaner was scheduled to be executed on March 2 for the 1997 murder of her husband. She did not carry out the murder but planned it so her lover, Gregory Owen, could kill Douglas Gissendaner.After the scheduled hour of her death had passed, DOC called it off because of solids floating in the vials.
DOC later reported than a lab had determined low temperatures allowed the solids to separate from the liquid solvent. DOC said it would do more testing by putting vials of the drug in refrigerators at different temperatures to see if they could recreate what happened on March 2.
Jones wrote in three affidavits filed with the two courts: “This test should confirm whether the problem with the drugs that were to be used in the Gissendaner execution was that they were stored at too cold a temperature.”
“It is the Georgia Department of Correction’s intention to provide the results of these tests to the court and the opposing party in the case of Gissendaner,” Jones wrote.
Gissendaner’s attorney declined to comment.
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