AUSTIN, Texas, Feb. 15 (UPI) -- Texas, the U.S. state that carries out the most executions, may be running out of a drug required for lethal injection, an anti-death penalty group says.
Maya Foa of Reprieve, a London-based organization opposed to the death penalty, told The Guardian she estimates Texas has only 27 vials of pentobarbital, known by the trade name Nembutal, on hand. That would be enough for only six executions.
Akorn Inc., the Illinois company that is the only distributor of Nembutal in the United States, has banned future sales for executions, the Austin American-Statesman reported Tuesday.
The Texas Department of Corrections has stopped releasing information on execution drugs following a state Supreme Court ruling last year. The court said the state can withhold information for security reasons that would otherwise be public under open records laws.
Texas has executed more than 450 people under its current death penalty law. Last year, it carried out 13 executions, twice as many as any other state.
