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Texas execution appeal on drug secrecy grounds rejected by US supreme court Texas execution appeal rejected by US supreme court
(1 day later)
The US supreme court on Monday refused an appeal from a Texas death row inmate whose attorneys had demanded that state officials disclose the source of drugs intended to execute him. The US supreme court on Monday declined to review the intellectual-disability claim of a Texas inmate who is also seeking to force the state to disclose information about the drugs it plans to use to kill him.
Robert James Campbell, 41, had avoided execution on 13 May when the 5th US circuit court of appeals stopped his punishment less than three hours before he could have been put to death. That court agreed to give Campbell's lawyers time to pursue claims that he's mentally impaired and ineligible for the death penalty. That issue is still pending. Robert Campbell was to become the first prisoner put to death in the US since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in April, but a federal appeals court issued a stay only around three hours before he was due to be injected with a lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital.
At the time of the reprieve, Campbell's appeal seeking identity of the supplier of the pentobarbital used by the Texas department of criminal justice for executions was before the supreme court. Campbell was sentenced to die for the 1991 rape and murder of Alexandra Rendon, a 20-year-old Houston bank teller.
Campbell was sentenced to death for the 1991 abduction, rape and slaying of a 20-year-old Houston bank teller, Alexandra Rendon. The federal court decided that Campbell’s claim that he is intellectually disabled – and so not eligible to be executed –deserves more examination after earlier evidence about his IQ test scores appeared to have been incorrect, incomplete or withheld by officials. His lawyers also argued his trial counsel had been inadequate.
The ruling, one of three Monday involving condemned Texas prisoners, was in line with similar rulings from the high court, which so far has not halted an execution based on a state's refusal to reveal its lethal injection drug supplier. On Monday, the US supreme court opted not to review this aspect of the case, a decision that Rob Owen, Campbell’s lawyer, said was “entirely expected and unsurprising” due to ongoing litigation elsewhere. An earlier wire report inaccurately said the ruling was related to Texas’s refusal to disclose information about its execution drugs.
Death penalty states have been scrambling to find drugs after several manufacturers refused to sell their products for use in lethal injections. However, that appeal is still pending, and a decision could be announced within a week – though the supreme court is yet to halt an execution based on a state’s secrecy over its drug supply.
The secrecy argument also was used by lawyers ahead of a bungled execution in April in Oklahoma, though that inmate's collapsed veins, not the drug, have been cited as the likely culprit. Last month, in a ruling that was a blow to campaigners seeking transparency in the lethal injection process, Texas attorney general Greg Abbott decided that prison officials do not have to publicly reveal details about the state’s supplier of execution drugs.
Last month, the Texas attorney general's office, ruling in an open records case from attorneys for a death row inmate, said Texas can keep its execution drug supplier secret. The ruling cited arguments from law enforcement that suppliers face serious danger if they are identified. The ruling issued by Abbott’s office means that the Texas department of criminal justice can continue to withhold information about where it obtained its latest stock of pentobarbital. The decision – which is also being appealed – reversed previous instructions from Abbott in 2012 that state officials could not redact fundamental details about their supply and suppliers from documents requested by the public under Texas’ open-records laws.
Texas law enforcement officials have refused to say what threats they have found, calling any details about them "law enforcement sensitive information" and refusing to say if any pharmacies were in danger or what the agency was doing to investigate. Earlier this year the TDCJ began doing precisely that, arguing that facts and circumstances have changed and releasing the information –even privately to lawyers for death row inmates – would put its suppliers at risk of harassment or threats from anti-death penalty groups and jeopardise its ability to source more drugs in the future.
Lawyers for death row inmates insist they need the information to verify the drugs' potency and protect inmates from unconstitutionally cruel and unusual punishment. In common with other states, Texas has changed its protocol and resorted to increasingly furtive measures since a Europe-led boycott cut off supplies of its previous drugs of choice. It currently uses a single-drug protocol of pentobarbital bought from a compounding pharmacy in the state.
In another case Monday, the supreme court refused to consider an appeal from a man sent to Texas death row for strangling and trying to rape a woman jogging near her Houston home nearly 17 years ago. Attorneys for death row inmates have argued that states’ lack of transparency about drug origins and quality means prisoners are unable to verify that they will not endure unduly painful deaths that would violate the US constitution’s prohibition of “cruel and unusual punishment”.
Arthur Lee Burton, 44, had appealed a lower court's rejection of his arguments that his admission to a prison sociologist that he killed Nancy Adleman, a 48-year-old mother of three, was improperly obtained. Burton's original sentence was thrown out by the Texas court of criminal appeals. He received another death sentence at a new punishment trial in 2002. Burton also had argued his legal help at his trial and in earlier appeals was deficient. Texas found a new supplier in March this year but declined to identify it to lawyers for a death row inmate, prompting litigation. After the issue bounced around several courts, a federal appeals court ultimately upheld the state’s secretive approach in April, ruling that lawyers for Tommy Lynn Sells were merely speculating that Texas’s drugs might be unsuitable.
In the third case, the high court upheld the murder conviction and death sentence given to Kwame Rockwell of Fort Worth for a 2010 convenience store holdup that left two men dead. Rockwell, now 38, was convicted in 2012 of the fatal shooting of Daniel Rojas, 22, a store clerk. Evidence showed a 70-year-old deliveryman, Jerry Burnett, also was fatally shot. • Editors' note: this story has replaced an Associated Press report that erroneously said the supreme court ruling was related to Texas’s refusal to disclose information about its execution drugs.
None of the three – Campbell, Burton or Rockwell – has an execution date.