ATLANTA — The worldwide shortage of a drug used in executions reverberated this week in two of the most active death-penalty states as Texas announced it would replace the anesthetic in its three-drug regimen and federal agents seized Georgia’s supply.
The seizure on Tuesday of the powerful barbiturate — sodium thiopental — at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson, site of the state’s death row, has at least temporarily blocked future executions, although none are now scheduled.
In Texas, where the administrative change was announced Wednesday, lawyers for an inmate scheduled to die next month are preparing to challenge the substitution of the new drug.
The moves in both states continue the fallout from the January announcement that Hospira Inc., the only American producer of sodium thiopental, had stopped making the anesthetic. The shortages began after the company suspended production in 2009 because of problems obtaining an ingredient. They now have become dire because the drug’s shelf life is typically no more than two years.
Many of the 34 states with the death penalty (Illinois repealed its law last week) have been scrambling for months to find stores of sodium thiopental or to replace it with other drugs with similar effects. Several states have delayed executions because of its unavailability. Texas has 314 inmates on death row; Georgia has 99.
In most state lethal injection protocols, sodium thiopental is first used to anesthetize the inmate, and then other drugs are administered to paralyze the body and stop the heart.
Tuesday’s seizure by the Drug Enforcement Administration presumably responded to a February complaint lodged by a lawyer for Andrew Grant DeYoung, who faces execution for killing his parents and sister in 1993.
The lawyer, John T. Bentivoglio of Washington, wrote Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Feb. 24 that Georgia’s Department of Corrections appeared to be importing sodium thiopental from a British distributor. Because the state does not have a federal license to import controlled substances, that would violate the Controlled Substances Act, Mr. Bentivoglio charged.
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