Marie French
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
JEFFERSON CITY — The Missouri Department of Corrections protects the identities of its executioners and pays them in cash instead of with checks for good reason, the director testified at a legislative hearing on Monday.
Executions wouldn’t happen otherwise, said Director George Lombardi.
“Anybody that’s been involved in this process would not be involved if we didn’t do it that way,” Lombardi said. “It would be a de facto abolishment of the death penalty.”
At a two-and-a-half-hour hearing, Lombardi defended the state’s embattled execution process, while fielding questions from lawmakers about transparency and legal issues. Many of the legislators asked about a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma that produces the state’s execution drug. The pharmacy is not licensed to do business in Missouri, leading to questions about the department has acted legally to buy the drugs.
Rep. Jay Barnes, R-Jefferson City, chairman of the government accountability committee, said regardless of opinions on the death penalty itself, executions should be carried out in compliance with all laws and the Constitution.
Joseph Luby, an attorney with the Kansas City-based Death Penalty Litigation Center, said the secrecy surrounding the department’s procurement of the lethal-injection drug pentobarbital prevented public scrutiny. Luby said defendants were unable to demonstrate whether the drug caused pain beyond what’s allowable according to previous U.S. Supreme Court decisions.
“The more general problem is just that there are all kinds of shenanigans that stem” from the secrecy, Luby said, calling some of the department’s actions “sleazy.” He pointed to the cash delivery for a no-bid contract on the drug, calling the employee who carried the exchange out a “drug mule.”
Lombardi said the cash payment has been part of the process since Gov. John Ashcroft’s administration in the 1980s and early ‘90s. He said, like anonymity for the supplier, it was necessary for the death penalty to be carried out.
Minority whip Rep. John Rizzo, D-Kansas City, pressed Lombardi and representatives from the attorney general’s office on the way the pharmacy providing the drug was selected, whether any laws were violated in obtaining the drug and why executions proceeded despite pending lawsuits.
Luby said three executions had been carried out while lawsuits over the method of execution were still pending. He said the inmates were being “picked off” by the state.
“This is a uniquely Missourian pattern of behavior,” Luby said. “The prisoners are being executed before the stay motions are definitively ruled.”
Lombardi said the officials from Gov. Jay Nixon’s and Attorney General Chris Koster’s offices were on hand at executions to make sure all legal roadblocks were removed.
David Hansen, an assistant attorney general for Missouri, said attorneys representing people on death row were trying to delay executions by filing lawsuits all day on execution dates.
If executions never proceeded while litigation was still pending, Hansen said, the death penalty would be effectively ended.
Lombardi said the department was required to carry out executions and that the protocols had been altered several times in order to carry it out. He said the only alternative besides using the pentobarbital from the Oklahoma compounding pharmacy would be the gas chamber – but the state does not have a working one.
Lombardi said the department had been “besmirched and vilified” in the press because of the executions and said that there was much more to his staff. He pointed out Missouri’s low rate of recidivism.
“I’ve got the best staff,” Lombardi said. “It reflects on the Department of Corrections and our personnel and that’s not what we’re about.”