Print 
PDFFrom The Guardian:
Texas, the powerhouse of the death penalty in America which last year executed more than twice the number of prisoners than any other state, is running out of supplies of lethal drugs and may be incapable of carrying out further death sentences beyond June.
The state prides itself on its robust approach to the death penalty, and last year administered the ultimate punishment to 13 death row inmates. The nearest competitor on the league table of judicial killings was Alabama, with six.
Yet Texas has only sufficient quantities in its stores of pentobarbital – the middle drug of the triple lethal injection – to serve in six more executions. That number of executions are scheduled to take place on the state’s books over the next four months.
The dwindling supplies in the nation’s most prolific death penalty state underline the crisis that is sweeping the 34 states that still have the death sentence on their books. Last summer, Lundbeck, the Danish company that makes pentobarbital under the trademark Nembutal, placed strict restrictions on its distribution to prevent it falling into the hands of US executioners.
Georgia, the state that caused outrage in September when it put to death Troy Davis despite considerable doubts about his guilt, is also running low on stocks of the drug it used to kill him. It has only enough pentobarbital to kill four more prisoners – the same number of executions as it carried out in 2011.
(7)