Federal judge demands details of Arizona execution drugs

• A federal judge on Wednesday ordered the state to specify what drugs it will use for executions.
• The order comes after the state Department of Corrections released a new execution protocol.

A U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday ordered the State of Arizona to specify what drugs it will use for lethal injections before he will reinstate a lawsuit that could allow the state to resume executing death row prisoners.

The Arizona Department of Corrections on Friday released a new execution protocol, or guidelines, laying out four different drug combinations that it could use. It was mandated by a lawsuit over the botched 2014 execution, which took nearly two hours, of Joseph Wood.

Judge Neil Wake, however, insisted that Arizona tell him by Nov. 18, what drugs it has on hand, which of the four methods it intends to use and whether the drugs are actually available to carry out executions. Two of the drugs listed in the new protocol are unavailable to prisons in the U.S.

The lawsuit was filed shortly after Wood's death by the Federal Public Defender's Office in Phoenix and a coalition of media outlets, including The Arizona Republic. It seeks more transparency in how executions are performed in Arizona.

In a hearing Oct. 29, 2014, Wake told the Arizona Attorney General's Office and Corrections that it could not execute prisoners until the lawsuit was settled. And he told them that the lawsuit would not resume until an investigation into Wood's death was completed and the state wrote a new protocol.

The investigation was concluded in December, and it laid no blame for the prolonged death. Wood gasped and snorted as the executioner injected him with 15 lethal doses.

Arizona Department of Corrections moves to resume executions with new drugs

The protocol was published Friday, and the state moved to reinstate the case so that it could move closer toward future executions.

In the hearing last year, Wake noted that in several past executions, Corrections changed its methods at the last minute when they discovered that drugs had passed expiration dates or were unavailable. In 2011, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration confiscated an illegally obtained anesthetic called sodium thiopental the day before it was to be used in an execution.

Furthermore, Wake, who has handled several cases involving death drugs, told the state in a 2014 hearing that he was tired ofhow the stateforced "crisis litigation," by withholding information until shortly before the executions. The defense attorneys then have little more than a month at most, and days at worst, to make their cases against the procedures.

In Wednesday's order, Wake said that he did not want to issue an "advisory opinion on protocols that cannot or will not be implemented`."

"Additionally," Wake wrote, "if the Arizona Department of Corrections does not currently posses the required lethal drugs for a particular protocol, or any of its four alternative protocols, Defendants shall show cause why the Court can or should adjudicate any protocol that cannot be implemented or why this action is ripe for consideration."

Two of the drugs listed in the new protocol are not available to Corrections because pharmaceutical firms will not sell one of them, the barbiturate pentobarbital, for use in executions and the other, thiopental, cannot be legally imported into the U.S.

Nonetheless, Corrections attempted to import thiopental, again this summer, and it was confiscated at Sky Harbor Airport by U.S. Food and Drug Administration officials.

Inmates on Arizona's death row