Jeremy Kohler
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
ST. LOUIS — The Missouri Department of Corrections said Tuesday that it planned to go ahead with the execution of Michael A. Taylor on Feb. 26, even though its access was cut off to a sedative it had planned to use for the lethal injection.
The unanswered question was how.
An Oklahoma pharmacy agreed Monday not to provide Missouri corrections officials with pentobarbital and acknowledged it had not already provided the drug for the execution. Taylor had sued the pharmacy after attorneys and other death penalty opponents had publicly named the pharmacy as the source of Missouri’s execution drug.
Taylor’s attorneys said in documents filed in federal court that they believed the state had no pentobarbital. But on Tuesday, a spokesman for the Department of Corrections said in an email that Missouri was “prepared to carry out the execution … following the established execution protocol” using pentobarbital.
He would not say directly whether the state had the drug on hand.
Taylor is sentenced to die for the 1989 kidnapping, rape and murder of 15-year-old Ann Harrison of Kansas City.
There was an indication the department had a backup plan to use other drugs. On Jan. 15, a department official acknowledged in a deposition that the state had supplies of the sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone to use “as a backup.” But the official acknowledged that those drugs were not part of the established execution protocol.
Midazolam and hydromorphone have been used only once before in an execution, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based nonprofit group that provides information about capital punishment. In January, the state of Ohio — which, like Missouri, has scrambled to secure execution drugs — used them on convicted killer Dennis McGuire.
McGuire appeared to gasp several times and took an unusually long time to die — about 25 minutes. Afterward, McGuire’s attorney, Allen Bohnert, called the death “a failed, agonizing experiment” and added: “The people of the state of Ohio should be appalled at what was done here today in their names.”
Louisiana had planned to use the two drugs to execute killer Christopher Sepulvado on Feb. 5. But state corrections officials and Sepulvado’s lawyers agreed to postpone the execution until no sooner than May 4 to give the lawyers time to investigate potential risks of great harm to Sepulvado.
Taylor’s lawyers have asked the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Missouri to stop his execution.
“Though Missouri has indicated it has midazolam and hydromorphone, its execution protocol does not permit administration of those drugs,” they wrote. “Even if it did, Taylor would warrant a stay because those drugs have already inflicted unconstitutional pain and suffering in an execution and the states using them have thus temporarily halted executions.
“In any event, switching the protocol or the pentobarbital supplier now — a week before the scheduled execution — would violate Taylor’s right to due process of law.”