A discreet delivery stopped outside the Idaho maximum security prison near Boise in the exhaustive search for the lethal injection drugs 1 1 hour ago. Just outside the prison doors, the director said he met two people who transported Pentobarbital, six vials of the liquid placed in cardboard boxes in the back seat of his car.
Then, four months later, the Guardian organized another truck, meeting two people parked at a rural intersection in Pleasent Valley and Ten Mile Creek Roads, a mile of the Idaho maximum security institution.
The director, Tim Richardson, would remember in a statement in October that he chose to take the second transaction “outside the site” so that “he would not attract attention.”
“It is for you not to have, I think, a visual of what you are doing,” he said, according to a transcription.
The details of the agreement, revealed for the first time in judicial documents related to litigation in the cases of two inmates convicted of death, Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto, shed light on how Idaho acquired their lots of lethal inject drugs while trying to maintain confidentiality.
Creech, 74, who was convicted of five murders in three states, was ready to die by lethal injection in February 2024, but was canceled after prison staff could not properly attach lines IV after 42 minutes. The failed execution has caused a legal dispute to prevent the State from trying again.
Pizzuto, 69, convicted of four murders in two states, faced the execution in March 2023, but a federal judge arrested him. Pizzuto challenges the use of pentobarbital by the State due to its medical condition, which according to the Pizzuto legal team includes advanced bladder cancer.
In the judicial documents reviewed by NBC News, as is what Richardson is, now a director in a different Prison Center of Idaho, was ordered by lawyers representing the State’s correction department to not respond, including the identities of those who provided drugs, if they were the same people every time and the type of vehicles they used.
A 2022 IDAHO Law protects the identities of the State Execution Team and lethal injection drug suppliers. Correction officials say that this secret facilitates obtaining the pentobarbital, given that the State has not been able to execute anyone since 2012 in the middle of a national shortage of lethal inject drugs. Idaho in 2023 also legalized the execution through the dismissal squad when you cannot get drugs.
Meanwhile, the main pharmaceutical companies have explicitly warned states that do not use their drugs for executions, citing ethical and legal concerns. Pharmaceutical distributors can buy companies from companies, and in turn, hospitals, clinics, nursing homes and other legitimate clients could be sold.
But when it comes to providing prisons that may want to use a medication manufactured for executions, pharmaceutical companies have demanded the states for the return of their chemicals.
“What we know at this time is that each medication manufacturer of any medication that can be used potentially for lethal injection, including pentobarbital, has not only opposed its use, but has put contractual restrictions in its sales,” said Corinna Barrett Lain, professor at the University of Richmond of the right that studies the injection executions. “They have every right to do it as a private company that can lose a lot of money if their drugs are used in lethal injection. They are risking the possibility of failed executions with their drugs, which leads them to possible financial and legal damages. It is terrible for business.”
Idaho’s correction department did not immediately respond to a request for comments on where their most recent pentobarbital purchases come from. The state attorney general’s office declined to comment this week, citing the pending litigation.
Like other states, Idaho has resorted to the so -called pharmacies composed of their lethal injected medications, doing so for executions in 2011 and 2012. But the alternative has caused concerns about quality and safety, since compound medications are not approved by the Food and Medicines Administration.
In judicial documents, Idaho’s correction officials suggested that the Pentobarbital acquired by the State in 2023 and 2024 did not aggravated, but was manufactured by a pharmaceutical company approved by the FDA.
“I think they were probably manufactured,” Richardson said in his deposition on the delivery of October 2023, and added: “They were in an original manufacturer box.”
He agreed that the second installment he acquired during a meeting on the road in February 2024 was the same.
In another judicial presentation in October, the current current Warden of the Idaho Security Institution, Randy Valley, described the state’s pentobarbital supply as obtained from “a manufacturer approved by the FDA”, and revealed that the State received a new lot of “additional six vials of 2.5 grams of pefobarbital manufactured certified” that same month.
The judicial documents indicate that the State has spent $ 200,000 in total for three separate purchases of pentobarbital, supplies that all expired after not using following the failed execution of CREECH.
In exhibitions presented in the case of Pizzuto, two pharmaceutical companies that manufacture injectable pentobarbital – Hikma, whose headquarters of the United States is in New Jersey, and Sagent, based in Illinois, sent letters to Idaho officials demanding that they ensure that their drugs are not used in executions.
Hikma spokesman Steven Weiss told NBC News on Friday that he has sent such cards to Idaho and other states every year during the last eight years “to firmly remind them and our strong objections to the use of our medicines in capital punishment.”
Weiss added that the company was able to determine that the medications bought by Idaho “were not ours”, because “there is information about the invoice that allows us to determine whether or not it was manufactured by us.”
Sagent did not respond to requests for comments on whether his medications may have been bought by the State.
In letters last year to Idaho officials, the medication manufacturer said that “the right to take legal actions” if I learn that Idaho did not comply, and warned that if their “products deviate from legitimate channels, in violation of our distribution controls, they run the risk of being falsified, stolen, contaminated or otherwise damage.”
The company also sent an email to the attorney general with the matter of matter: “Urgent: Pentobarbital search application purchased for capital penalty purposes.”
According to a presentation of the court last month in the case of Pizzuto, Josh Tewalt, the former director of the Idaho correction department, declined “admit” or deny “if the department had obtained execution medications manufactured by a company that opposes the use of its products in executions, citing the state’s right to protect its sources.
Tewalt, the agency director, denied that the State use expired chemicals for execution. He left the agency for a private sector work last month and did not respond to a request for comments.
In clinical environments, pentobarbital can be used for insomnia or to treat seizures in humans, while veterinarians use it as anesthetic or to sacrifice animals.
But in executions, a powerful sedative dose can cause death due to respiratory failure, and for more than a decade, it has become an option for states that seek to avoid the typical three medications protocol. Indiana carried out its first execution in 15 years in December after having bought Pentobarbital for $ 900,000. The drug supplier and the amount of the drug were drafted from the public records under the law of the state shield.
Tennessee next month also plans to make its first execution of lethal injection since 2019, after having bought Pentobarbital in recent years for almost $ 600,000 of an unleasized provider, according to reports.
Utah bought Pentobarbital for his latest execution in 2024. Randall Honey, head of state prison operations, said in a judicial presentation last summer that Utah initially had difficulty obtaining the medication, but that someone who had read news reports contacted officials and put them in contact with a supplier who requested $ 200,000. The medication was “manufactured, not aggravated”, but was paid in “an appropriate and legal way,” according to Honey.
Such high costs were observed in the judicial documents in the case of Creech the past fall, in which Michaela Almgren, associated clinical professor at the Faculty of Pharmacy of the University of South Carolina, wrote that the Idaho purchase of a lot of six Vial of Pentobarbital at $ 50,000 was more than three times the cost in the voluntary market. He also said at that time that only Hikma and Sagent were doing pentobarbital injectable to the size and force that Idaho had obtained.
“It raises the question of the legitimacy of the supplier, since the price of drug vials is so severely inflated,” said Almgren, on behalf of Creech’s legal team, according to the judicial document. “A drug supplier that marks prices 2-3 times higher than expected can be considered suspicious or illegitimate, leading to concerns about ethical practices and even regulatory compliance.”
Pizzuto lawyers suggested in a judicial presentation last week that seems that “the same earnings actor is wandering the country that sells pentobarbital to desperate correctional departments in large frames.”
At least, someone is benefiting at the expense of the manufacturers who say they are against their drugs that are used for executions, said Lain, author of the next book “Secrets of the murderer: the story not told of lethal injection.”
“The narrative of the states is:” Oh, we need secret to protect drug suppliers, “said Lain.” The states are using the secret to rape. Who are you protecting? Because you are not protecting pharmaceutical manufacturers. “
“The State has to follow the law,” he added. “It has to be different from the criminals they are executing.”
