22 August 2017 :

Texas replenishes execution drug supplies. The last doses of the state's execution drugs, pentobarbital, were set to expire in January, just days before a scheduled execution. A new record indicates that the supply won't expire until July 2018, well past all scheduled executions. It's unclear whether the state purchased more of the drug or just established a new expiration date, and Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman Jason Clark declined to clarify. Since 2012, the state has used a single-drug protocol, administering a lethal dose of the barbiturate pentobarbital. On Thursday, the US Food and Drug Administration told Texas and Arizona that over a thousand vials of drugs they ordered for executions in their states would not be released to them. the Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the Arizona Department of Corrections ordered sodium thiopental from India in 2015. The drugs were and seized by U.S. Customs. The confiscated shipments have been refused because they seem to contain unapproved new drugs and misbranded drugs. A records request last month showed that eight pentobarbital doses were set to expire in July 2017 and another 10 in January. 1 of those doses was used in the July 27 execution of Taichin Preyor, leaving 9 that expire just after the new year. And now, instead of 8 doses expiring on July 20, 2017, state logs list eight doses received that day as "return from supplier" and set to expire on July 20, 2018. "Given the documents supplied by TDCJ designating that these vials were returned to the supplier and then the reemergence of vials with a brand new expiration date exactly one year out, an educated guess is that they're using the same drugs that they previously stated already expired," said Maurie Levin, a Texas death penalty lawyer with experience in lethal injection litigation. "But because they insist on keeping this information secret, we don't know what they're doing."