COLOMBIA, SC (AP) – The South Carolina Supreme Court on Monday suspended the execution of a death row prisoner after prison officials said they failed to obtain the necessary lethal injectable drugs in time.
Richard Bernard Moore was sentenced to death on Friday. The court scheduled the execution earlier this month after Moore ran out of federal resources. Moore, 55, spent nearly two decades on death row after his conviction for the 1999 murder of a convenience store clerk in Spartanburg County. He would be the first person executed in South Carolina in almost a decade.
A lawyer for the state Department of Corrections wrote in a letter to the South Carolina Supreme Court last week that the agency cannot carry out the execution due to a lack of drugs. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter.
The state’s usual injection protocol requires three drugs: pentobarbital sedative, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. But the prison agency said it had not had the drugs in stock since 2013, when its last supplies expired.
The agency said earlier reserved the right to execute Moore with a single lethal dose of pentobarbital if he failed to obtain the other two drugs. Chrysti Shain, a spokesman for the prison department, confirmed on Monday that the agency had not obtained any of the three drugs.
Lindsey Vann, one of Moore’s lawyers, said on Monday that the delay in an execution due to a lack of drugs is unprecedented in the state. In 2017, prison officials said they could not comply with Bobby Wayne Stone’s execution order without the appropriate drugs. At the time, however, Stone had not yet exhausted his resources in court.
The court said on Monday that, according to state law, Moore should be executed by lethal injection in absentia, because he did not choose between that and electrocution within a period earlier this month.
Moore’s lawyers said he did not make a decision because the agency was not transparent with its enforcement protocols. Prosecutors said they had asked the prison for specific details, such as the dosages of drugs used in a lethal injection and the state of the state’s electric chair. They said prison officials responded that they could only provide the information confidentially, which means that lawyers could not examine it by experts or use it in court.
Ensuring lethal injectable drugs has become an increasingly difficult task in the United States, as drug makers have avoided selling to states under pressure from death penalty activists. Prison chief Bryan Stirling, along with the governor and attorney general, defended a bill to protect the identities of the manufacturers who supply these drugs.
State lawmakers have also considered a bill in recent years that requires prisoners on death row to die in electric chairs if the lethal injection is not available.
Moore is one of 37 people, all men, currently on death row in South Carolina. Some prosecutors have sought the death penalty less frequently in recent years, citing the state’s inability to carry out executions.
South Carolina’s last execution was in 2011.
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This version of the story corrects that the deadline for Moore to choose was this month, not last month.
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Michelle Liu is a member of the Associated Press / Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a national nonprofit service program that puts journalists in local newsrooms to report on covert issues.