Oklahoma asks not to delay executions over drugs

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) - The Oklahoma attorney general’s office has defended a new three-drug procedure the state intends to use for two executions this month, citing testimony from an anesthesiologist who has successfully used the first drug in neurosurgeries.

In a court filing Monday, state prosecutors asked the Oklahoma Court of Criminal Appeals to deny requests by Clayton Lockett and Charles Warner to stay their executions, which the state plans to carry out at the end of the month.

According to the state’s filing, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts testified that he has used midazolam, the first drug of three in the procedure the state has indicated it will use, as “’the first and primary drug to induce anesthesia’ in neurosurgeries during a drug shortage” and that a 50mg dose prevented his patients “from perceiving the noxious stimuli associated with neurosurgery.” The Florida Supreme Court rejected Eighth Amendment challenges to their execution protocol based on that testimony.

Lawyers for the inmates contended in their request for a stay that the state has not provided adequate time for them to research the method of execution, a three-drug combination of midazolam, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride, which has only been used in executions in Florida and not in the same doses. Whereas Florida used 500mg of midazolam, Oklahoma’s procedure calls for 100mg, which the state suggests is more than enough to make the inmate unconscious.

The state also cited recent decisions in the 5th and 8th U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeals in similar cases challenging state secrecy that sided with the states and the denial by the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in those cases. The state contends it has offered all the information necessary to the inmates, and that they do not need to involve the drug supplier.

“The identification of the source of the drugs is irrelevant and will provide virtually nothing beyond the information being disclosed by the state,” the lawyers wrote in their filing.

Lockett and Warner sued the state in February over the “veil of secrecy” surrounding state execution procedures. In March, Oklahoma County District Judge Patricia Parrish ruled the state’s secrecy surrounding a statute protecting the identity of drug suppliers was unconstitutional. The attorney general’s office has said they will appeal that ruling.