For a future look at the Texas Supreme Court, and the criminal justice process in general.
- Click here for the article.
For years, the state of Texas has fought to keep the identity of an execution drug supplier a secret. On Wednesday, the Texas Supreme Court will hear arguments over whether that company's identity should finally be revealed.
Three lawyers who represent death row inmates are seeking to name a pharmacy that supplied pentobarbital — the sole drug used in Texas executions — in 2014, at a time when multiple states had "botched"executions with new drug combinations and struggled to find lethal doses. The Texas prison system has claimed before lower courts that the information should be withheld from public disclosure because it would endanger the supplier. A district and an appellate court both sided with the death penalty lawyers, rejecting the claim that disclosure would put the company in danger.
Originally, the Texas Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, indicating that the state soon would be forced to reveal the pharmacy's identity. But the justices changed their minds after the state filed a motion for a rehearing and focused on a broader claim: that naming the pharmacy could cut off the state's supply of drugs and end the death penalty in Texas, which has executed by far more inmates than any other state.
“This lawsuit is a collateral attack on the death penalty,” former Texas Solicitor General Scott Keller wrote in his last-shot petition in July. “If allowed to stand, the court of appeals’ decision directs the public unmasking of a supplier of Texas’s lethal-injection drugs, which jeopardizes the State’s ability to carry out the death penalty.”
For more, click here.
