Texas on Wednesday is scheduled to carry out the first execution in the US after the the botched lethal injection of Christa Pike in Tennessee last week.
Lawyers for Jamaal Howard, a Texas man on death row for capital murder, sought to halt the execution, arguing there are similar risks as in the case of Pike, but a Texas court denied the stay request on Wednesday.
Howard, ۴۶, was found guilty of capital murder in ۲۰۰۱ for robbing a convenience store in Silsbee, a town north of Beaumont, and fatally shooting ۴۲-year-old clerk Vickie Swartout.
His legal team has also argued that, at the time of the crime, Howard was intellectually disabled and thus ineligible for the death penalty, as the supreme court ruled in ۲۰۰۲.
Pike survived two doses of barbiturate pentobarbital, the same sedative Texas officials plan to administer to Howard. Pike had complained her arms felt like they were going to explode as she was given the drug.
She regained consciousness on Tuesday. Her lawyers say she has pneumonia and is unable to move her arms.
Pike’s was the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, and governor Bill Lee has barred any further lethal injections for the rest of the year. He has also ordered a probe into why Pike’s execution failed. Pike’s lawyers had previously argued her blood disorder would make a lethal injection painful. Speculation has also swirled over the quality of the pentobarbital.
“There is a similar risk,” Howard’s attorneys wrote in the Wednesday motion filed with Texas’s court of criminal appeals, “that Texas’s execution drugs are likewise degraded, as they are far past the original beyond-use dates that the pharmacopeia allows for drugs of this kind.”
The motion said Howard’s attorneys had filed requests for information about the lethal dose of pentobarbital the Texas department of criminal justice planned to use.
The Texas attorney general opinion is not expected to be returned until after Wednesday, meaning Howard cannot litigate whatever decision the state might make on releasing that information, they say.
Last week, the fifth circuit court of appeals declined a request to stop Howard’s execution.
Texas officials did not immediately return a request for comment Wednesday morning.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
