The US Supreme Court said that it won't stop the execution of a Texas serial killer whose attorneys want the state to release information about where it gets its lethal injection drug.
The plea to the high court from Tommy Lynn Sells' lawyers was rejected about an hour yesterday before his scheduled execution. They made it after a federal appeals court allowed the execution to remain on schedule. A lower court had stayed the execution Wednesday, ordering Texas to reveal more information about its drug supplier, but the ruling was quickly tossed on appeal.
The appeal was one of two that the justices rejected. Another before the court since last month asked for the punishment to be stopped to review whether Sells' legal help at his trial was deficient, and whether a court improperly denied him money to hire investigators to conduct a probe about his background.
Sells was sentenced to death for fatally stabbing a 13-year-old South Texas girl in 1999. Court records show he claims to have committed as many as 70 killings in states including Alabama, California, Arizona, Kentucky and Arkansas. The 49-year-old is scheduled to be lethally injected Thursday evening in Huntsville, Texas.
Questions about the source of execution drugs have arisen in several states in recent months as numerous drugmakers - particularly in Europe, where opposition to capital punishment is strongest have refused to sell their products if they will be used in executions.
That's led several state prison systems to compounding pharmacies, which are not as heavily regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration as more conventional pharmacies.
A batch of pentobarbital, the drug used during executions, that Texas purchased from a compounding pharmacy in suburban Houston expired at the end of March. The pharmacy refused to sell the state any more drugs, citing threats it received after its name was made public.
