US death penalty states face a deepening crisis in their struggle to procure medical drugs for use in lethal injections, with new evidence that the increasingly random methods being used are subjecting condemned prisoners to prolonged and possibly excruciating deaths. 
 
 
 
 A Guardian survey of death sentences carried out over the past three years by Texas – the most prolific of all execution states – has found that the procedure now takes on average twice as long as under previous protocols. A study of Texas department of criminal justice records and eyewitness media reports mainly from the Associated Press shows a notable lengthening of the death process following the switch in July 2012 from the conventional three-drug cocktail to a single drug, pentobarbital. 
 
 Ten executions prior to the change took on average 10 minutes to complete, ranging from nine to 11 minutes between the administration of the lethal injection and the declaration of death. 
 
 The next 23 executions using only pentobarbital took on average 20 minutes, with the full range between 12 to 30 minutes. 
 
 Suzanne Basso is scheduled next Wednesday to become the 510th prisoner to be executed by Texas in the modern era. Texas has eight executions set between next week and 29 May. A spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice declined to comment. 
 
 As with most other death penalty states, Texas has dwindling supplies of fatal drugs caused by a worldwide ethical boycott of US departments of corrections by pharmaceutical companies and countries. It was revealed last October that after running low on its pentobarbital stock because of the boycott, Texas turned to a pharmacy near Houston to make a compounded version of the drug. Four men have been executed using this compound pentobarbital, with a declaration of death taking between 11 and 19 minutes. 
 
 Lethal injection is the only execution method allowed under Texas law. In 1982, Texas became the first US state to use it. Until July, 2012 it used a combination of a muscle relaxant (pancuronium bromide), an anesthetic (sodium thiopental) and a drug used to stop the heart (potassium chloride). In 2011 sodium thiopental became unavailable because of a European boycott and was replaced with pentobarbital. 
 
 On Wednesday night, Missouri put to death convicted murderer Herbert Smulls, 56, using a batch of 10mg of pentobarbital it obtained from a compounding pharmacy 400 miles away in Oklahoma. Missouri authorities had sought to keep the identity of the Tulsa-based Apothecary Shoppe secret, provoking protests from Smulls's lawyers who said that they were being prevented from protecting him against possible cruel and unusual punishment. 
 
 The sourcing of the drugs from an out-of-state pharmacy that was not licensed in Missouri was also legally questionable, the defence lawyers said. 
 
 Cheryl Pilate, a member of Smulls's legal team, told the Guardian after the execution that her client's first amendment rights had been violated. “If they are going to put these compounding pharmacies behind a wall of secrecy and protect them from public scrutiny, that's just not going to work. We live in a society that believes in the people's right to know what their government is doing in their name, and that gives individuals the right to protect themselves against the wrongful actions of the state – both of which were violated in this case. 
 
 Pilate was aware of the identity of the compounding pharmacy that had supplied the lethal pentobarbital, but was ordered by a federal court to abstain from carrying out any legal investigation into the quality of the drug or the standards maintained by the drug outlet. 
 
 On Wednesday night, the New York Times editorial board lambasted states for using the largely unregulated compounding industry to deliver “new and untested drug protocols developed on the fly and under a cowardly shroud of secrecy”. 
 
 Surveys in several states have pointed to widespread problems in the potency and purity of drugs produced by compounding pharmacies, which are only lightly regulated and do not have to answer to the federal Food and Drug Administration. A survey revealed that one in four samples from Missouri failed to meet adequate standards. 
 
 Following the death of Smulls, the spotlight now turns to Louisiana, which has scheduled the execution of child-killer Christopher Sepulvado for next Wednesday. With only six days to go, the department of corrections has still not succeeded in obtaining a supply of lethal chemicals for use in the procedure. 
 
 Local newspapers revealed that Louisiana has also tried to procure compounded pentobarbital from the Apothecary Shoppe, despite the fact that the pharmacy is not licensed in Louisiana and is therefore not lawfully allowed to distribute in the state. The Apothecary Shoppe initially denied to the Guardian any involvement with departments of correction in any state, but once its name had been made public the pharmacy declined to answer any further questions relating to death penalty drugs. 
 
 In the absence of a ready supply of pentobarbital, Louisiana has turned to a two-drug method for killing Sepulvado that has only been used once before, in a case in which the prisoner endured an abnormally long and apparently traumatic death. Dennis McGuire took up to 25 minutes to die on 16 January having been injected with an experimental cocktail of midazolam and hydromorphone. 
 
 For up to 15 minutes he was seen gasping for air, writhing, and trying to sit up. A Catholic priest who witnessed the events described what he saw as “ghastly and inhumane”, and McGuire's family is suing the state for undue cruelty. 
 
 Sepulvado, 70, was put on death row for the 1992 killing of his six-year-old stepson Wesley Mercer. The condemned man's lawyers are calling for the execution to be postponed to give them more time to investigate the impact of the experimental two-drug protocol, the source of the lethal drugs and whether or not Sepulvado faces possible cruel and unusual punishment which is banned under the eighth amendment of the US constitution. 
 
 Gary Clements, one of the lawyers representing Sepulvado, said they were totally in the dark about what drugs Louisiana would use should the execution go ahead next week. “We have been left with no knowledge of what they are going to, and so we have no idea whether this rushed new plan will meet any basic dignified standards.” 
 
 Clements added that he was puzzled that Louisiana had opted to copy Ohio's botched experiment. “Why would they to for inspiration to a place where the only time this method was used in the history of the United States it led to a gruesome spectacle?” 
 
 The increasingly desperate attempts by death penalty states to acquire medicines to kill their inmates is the result of an ethical boycott led by the European Commission and many of the major pharmaceutical giants that have expressed their disgust at products created to heal patients being used instead to kill. The boycott has starved states of their supply of drugs such as sodium thiopental – a barbiturate that was until 2011 widely used in triple lethal injections – and now its replacement, pentobarbital. 
 
 
 
 “The whole idea of the three-drug process is that it would be quick,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. “If it should get a lot longer the purpose of doing [lethal injections] for appearance would disappear … if they get longer I think everybody gets a bit uncomfortable.” 
 
 
 
 Dieter said it was likely that there would have to be substantial evidence that death by lethal injection had become excessively long and painful before a court might consider taking action and public opinion would turn. A lengthier execution does not automatically equate to more suffering if the inmate quickly loses consciousness, he pointed out. 
 
 
 
 Dr Joel Zivot, assistant professor of anesthesiology and surgery at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta, said that it is difficult, if not impossible, to draw definitive conclusions about the suffering of prisoners because of a lack of research and since “lethal injection is in no way a medical act … this is medicine that's now used for non-medical purposes.” 
 
 
 
 Zivot said it is theoretically possible that using pentobarbital “could result in a situation where a person could be aware and struggle for a period of time” and that no one “can ever guarantee that there won't be the potential for cruelty” in the lethal injection process. 
 
 
 
 When drugs are used to paralyse prisoners during executions, he said, a lack of movement and the outward appearance of calm should not be viewed as clear evidence that the person is not alert and not experiencing pain. 
 
 
 
 A person's age and weight could be factors in the length of time it takes for a fatal dose of pentobarbital to complete its work. Texas reportedly uses 5g per execution, with another 5g available in the death chamber if necessary. 
 
 In two examples which indicate how execution lengths have varied widely since the move to single-drug, 33-year-old Mario Swain was put to death on 8 November, 2012, for the murder of a woman a decade earlier. It reportedly took 30 minutes for Swain to be pronounced dead. Only two weeks earlier, on 24 October, 40-year-old Bobby Hines was declared dead after twelve minutes. 
 
 The growing randomness of execution protocols forced by the boycott has led to parallels being drawn with 1972, when the US supreme court imposed a moratorium on the death penalty across the country. The highest judicial panel in the nation ruled in Furman v Georgia that capital punishment was so inconsistent in its application in different parts of the US that it was unconstitutional. 
 
 The court lifted the moratorium in 1976 after death penalty states promised to adhere to new guidelines. One of the changes that emerged was the use of pharmaceuticals in lethal injections that were first used to kill Charles Brooks in Texas in 1982. 
 
 The current mayhem over lethal injections has led some prominent public figures to say that the US supreme court should consider imposing a new moratorium. Former president Jimmy Carter told the Guardian last year: “It’s time for the supreme court to look at the totality of the death penalty once again.” ||||| Louisiana prison officials have looked into illegally obtaining a lethal-injection drug from an Oklahoma pharmacy for the Feb. 5 execution of convicted child killer Christopher Sepulvado, according to just-released state documents. 
 
 The Tulsa-based compounding lab, called The Apothecary Shoppe, is not listed in the state pharmacy board’s online database of suppliers licensed to provide drugs to any pharmacy in Louisiana. That would make the sale of pentobarbital from that business to the Louisiana State Penitentiary Pharmacy an illegal transaction under state law. 
 
 A September email shows that The Apothecary Shoppe asked the state to complete a non-disclosure agreement. The document spells out the confidentiality agreement between the pharmacy and the signatory. 
 
 Although the Department of Corrections said Friday that the state didn’t have any pentobarbital, it was in the “process of procuring” it, department attorney James Hilburn wrote in a court document. 
 
 No other recent purchase records were made available, nor any other records that show written communication with any other pharmacy regarding pentobarbital, according to state documents given to Sepulvado’s lawyers and records obtained by The Lens. 
 
 The Apothecary Shoppe is one of three pharmacies suspected of supplying pentobarbital for the recent Oklahoma execution of Michael Lee Williams, who reportedly said “I feel my whole body burning” as he was killed in early January, said Sophie Cull, the former director of the Louisiana Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.* 
 
 That same pharmacy is suspected of being the source of Missouri’s pentobarbital, according to Cull, and it is not licensed to sell drugs in that state, either. 
 
 An investigation by St. Louis Public Radio and the St. Louis Beacon found that Missouri’s pentobarbital was supplied by one of three compounding pharmacies in Oklahoma not licensed to sell drugs in the state. A follow-up by The Pitch found that of the three possible pharmacies, only The Apothecary Shoppe performed sterile injectable compounding, or made drugs suitable for injections. 
 
 Questions regarding the type and mix of lethal injection drugs have arisen since Dennis McGuire “appeared to gasp several times and took more than 15 minutes to die” when he was executed Jan. 16 with a mix of sedative midazolam and the painkiller hydromorphone. 
 
 The state on Friday gave Sepulvado’s lawyers the email with The Apothecary Shoppe’s confidentiality agreement. The document was attached to a Sept. 5, 2013 email from Deril J. Lees, pharmacy manager of The Apothecary Shoppe, to Seth Smith, deputy warden of the Elayn Hunt Correctional Center. 
 
 “Please find the attached NDA [non-disclosure agreement] and return it,” Lees told Smith in the letter. 
 
 The agreement is blank in some parts, but filled out with the name “Georgia Department of Corrections” in others. 
 
 The confidentiality agreement was first received by The Lens from the state Wednesday in a heavily redacted format, in response to a public-records request for any correspondence regarding the procurement of pentobarbital. 
 
 Sepulvado’s lawyers received a non-redacted copy of the document late Friday. 
 
 The document was given to lawyers filing a lawsuit on behalf of Sepulvado and death row inmate Jessie Hoffman. Hoffman filed the lawsuit in December 2012, and Sepulvado intervened January 2013, after the state refused to disclose how they would execute him. In February 2013, the state announced a change from a three-drug mixture of lethal injection drugs to the single drug. 
 
 Sepulvado and Hoffman’s lawsuit contends that condemned inmates have a right to know how they’ll be executed. 
 
 Sepulvado, who has had several execution dates come and go in the past year, received another death warrant in January after the U.S. Fifth Circuit of Appeals in December upheld a decision that the state’s lethal injection secrecy did not violate his due-process right. 
 
 But in January, U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Riedlinger in Baton Rouge ruled that the state needed to release additional information about the execution process, including where it would be obtaining its lethal injection drug and if the protocol would be changing. 
 
 Getting that information from the state has been tricky, said Michael Rubenstein, a lawyer for Hoffman. 
 
 “We had to push hard,” Rubenstein said. “They’ve had a total lack of transparency.” 
 
 Rubenstein said Friday afternoon that his team had to travel to Baton Rouge to pick up the documents that death-row lawyers demanded as part of discovery for the federal lawsuit. The state blamed the cold weather for not being able to deliver them on the date demanded by Riedlinger, Rubenstein said. 
 
 Even then, however, the state gave an “incomplete” version of the documents, Rubenstein said. Among the items missing were where the state planned to find the drug. 
 
 “DOC is in the process of procuring at least 15 grams of pentobarbital,” the initial state document read. “Defendants will supplement this answer as necessary.” 
 
 The agreement naming The Apothecary Shoppe was found in a second delivery of records, obtained by death penalty lawyers late Friday night, among more than a thousand other documents, the lawyers said. 
 
 Cull agreed that the state lacks transparency. 
 
 “The procurement of pentobarbital by the Louisiana Department of Corrections continues to be shrouded in secrecy, insulating the State from public or legal scrutiny,” Cull said in an email to The Lens. 
 
 “The State’s failure to guarantee the efficacy of compounded drugs results in the unacceptable risk that an execution may be slow and tortuous, in violation of the U.S. Constitution’s ban on cruel and unusual punishment.” 
 
 Calls and emails to the Louisiana Department of Corrections, The Apothecary Shoppe and the head of the Louisiana Board of Pharmacy were not immediately returned. 
 
 *Correction: This story originally referred to Sophie Cull as the director of the Louisiana Coalition for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. She’s now the former director. (Jan. 27, 2014) ||||| The death chamber at the Southern Ohio Corrections Facility is seen in Lucasville, Ohio, in 2005. The family of Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire is suing the state and a drug company after he was injected with a mixture similar to the drugs Louisiana plans to use on Christopher Sepulvado. (Photo: Kiichiro Sato, AP) Story Highlights The Louisiana case is one of several challenges to new lethal injection drugs across the USA 
 
 European drugmakers stopped selling drugs for executions, prompting a shortage 
 
 Some states are considering reverting to the electric chair or firing squad 
 
 The execution of a Louisiana man scheduled for this week has been postponed for three months while attorneys on both sides grapple with what combination of lethal drugs will lead to his death. 
 
 After meeting with a federal judge in Baton Rouge on Monday, attorneys for both sides agreed that the lethal-injection execution of Christopher Sepulvado, scheduled for Wednesday, should be delayed to further review the drug protocol. 
 
 The delay is the latest in a nationwide series of controversies and legal disputes over a shortage of lethal injection drugs. Prisons have had to reformulate their lethal drug recipes after European drugmakers stopped shipping barbiturates and sedatives used in executions, raising a constitutional question of inmates' right to be free of cruel and unusual punishment. 
 
 A hearing on the constitutionality of Louisiana's proposed new protocol — a mixture of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, a painkiller — is scheduled for April 7, where lawyers for the inmate will present pharmacologists and other experts to challenge the state's lethal cocktail, said Gary Clements, a lawyer for Sepulvado. 
 
 "We have severe questions," Clements said. "We want to make sure they're giving us all the information they have." 
 
 Sepulvado, 70, was convicted of the 1992 murder of his 6-year-old stepson in Mansfield, La. Prosecutors said he beat the boy and stabbed him with a screwdriver before dunking him in a scalding hot bath. 
 
 In a statement issued Monday, officials of the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections said, "The Department has been committed throughout the entire process to following the court's direction and carrying out the sentence humanely and in accordance with the law." 
 
 Other states are facing similar challenges. The family of an Ohio inmate executed last month is suing the state and a drug company, claiming Dennis McGuire was a victim of "cruel and unusual punishment" when he appeared to "writhe in pain" for 26 minutes before succumbing to the injected drugs. McGuire was injected with a similar mixture of midazolam and hydromorphone. 
 
 And the Georgia Supreme Court is reviewing a case of a death row inmate who is challenging a state law shielding the identity and methods of companies that make the state's lethal injection drugs. 
 
 The new combinations of drugs raise questions of inmates' rights to know what drugs will lead to their deaths and avoid "cruel and unusual punishment," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., organization that opposes the death penalty. But prisons are being guarded with that information so as to not scare away more drugmakers, he said. 
 
 "Citizens, even convicted inmates, have an elementary right to know what's being done to them," Dieter said. "You have a right to humane treatment." 
 
 For the past 30 years, U.S. prison officials used mostly sodium thiopental to carry out more than 1,000 lethal-injection executions, he said. But in 2011, U.S. manufacturer Hospira stopped making the drug, citing complaints from officials in Italy, where the drug was made, that it was being used in capital punishment. Most prisons switched to pentobarbital until its Danish maker, Lundbeck, restricted its sale for executions, Dieter said. 
 
 Louisiana ran out of its stock of pentobarbital and said last week it would switch to the midazolam-hydromorphone combination, prompting the court hearing. 
 
 As prisons' drug stocks dwindle, some states are considering reverting to previous methods, such as the electric chair or even a firing squad, said Tania Tetlow, a Tulane University Law School professor and former federal prosecutor. States switched to the more palatable lethal injection in the 1970s, but the electric chair and firing squad were never ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, she said. 
 
 As more states wrestle with lethal injection legality, the high court may revisit the death penalty issue, Tetlow said. "It's an awkward conversation to have," she said. "Even people who support the death penalty don't want to talk about the means." 
 
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– A new drug for fatal injections is not only hard to find, it takes twice as long to kill people. US death penalty states like Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana are struggling to find lethal drugs for capital punishment, thanks to a worldwide ethical embargo against pharmaceutical companies selling drugs to US departments of corrections, the Guardian reports. So those states are turning from a three-drug cocktail to one drug, pentobarbital—which takes an average of 20 minutes to kill rather than the cocktail's 10. But does the prolonged death equal inhumane treatment of the prisoner? An anesthesiologist says it's hard to know—there isn't enough research yet—but the way states are procuring pentobarbital raises additional questions. Texas, Missouri, and Louisiana simply asked pharmacies to make the drug (the New York Times slammed such states for entering "a largely unregulated world" of pharmaceuticals). But Louisiana is stuck: It couldn't get any pentobarbital to execute child-killer Christopher Sepulvado on Wednesday, The Lens reports. Officials could try some other drug combination, as Ohio did in executing inmate Dennis McGuire last month—but he spent 26 minutes gasping for breath, the AP reports, and his last words were, "I feel my whole body burning."