A warden acquired Idaho's lethal injection drugs offsite on a rural road ahead of failed execution
While manufacturers of FDA-approved injectable pentobarbital are warning states not to use the sedative in executions, some states are still buying it — and paying top dollar.
A discreet delivery pulled up outside of Idaho’s maximum-security prison near Boise in the state’s exhaustive quest for lethal injection drugs 1 1⁄2 years ago. Just outside of the prison gates, the warden said he met two people transporting pentobarbital — six vials of the liquid placed into cardboard boxes in the back seat of their car.
Then, four months later, the warden arranged another pickup, meeting two people parked on a rural intersection at Pleasant Valley and Ten Mile Creek roads, about a mile from the Idaho Maximum Security Institution.
The warden, Tim Richardson, would recall in a deposition in October that he chose to take the second transaction “off site” so as “to not draw attention to it.”
“It’s just so you cannot have, I guess, a visual on what you’re doing,” he said, according to a transcript.
The details of the deal, revealed for the first time in court documents related to litigation in the cases of two death row inmates, Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto, shed light on how Idaho procured its batches of lethal injection drugs while attempting to maintain confidentiality.
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