A federal judge has temporarily halted Mississippi from carrying out executions.
U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate gave the order verbally on Tuesday in response to a suit brought by death row inmates challenging Mississippi's lethal injection methods as cruel and unusual.
On Wednesday, Wingate followed up with a written order, finding that the inmates are likely to succeed on their claim that "Mississippi's failure to use a drug which qualifies as an 'ultra short-acting barbiturate or other similar drug' as required" by state law violates both that law and the U.S. Constitution's due process guarantees.
Under the order, Mississippi is barred from using "pentobarbital, specifically in its compounded form, or midazolam, from executing any death row inmate at this time." Additionally, the state must inform the court of any other execution procedure it wishes to use before executing any inmate.
Mississippi had hoped to execute inmate Richard Jordan on Thursday for a murder as part of a kidnapping in 1976. The state's execution protocol calls for three drugs — a sedative, followed by a paralytic and then a drug to cause cardiac arrest. The protocol is similar to the one approved by the U.S. Supreme Court this year, but inmates counter that the state is lacking safeguards that other states have — such as an EKG to verify the inmate is actually unconscious.
The inmates also say Mississippi is further constrained by state law that mandates executions be performed with an "ultra short-acting barbiturate or other similar drug." In the middle of litigation, the state switched its anesthetic to midazolam, the drug the Supreme Court recently approved. However, it is not a barbiturate.
Mississippi, like many other death penalty states, attempts to keep the supplier of its execution drugs a secret.
Attorney General Jim Hood's office has filed a notice with Wingate's court that it is appealing the ruling.
