South Carolina Officials Say They Can’t Obtain Drugs by Friday Execution – By Associated Press (VOA News) / Nov 30 2020
COLUMBIA, S.C. – South Carolina prison officials say they have to delay an execution scheduled for Friday because they won’t be able to obtain the necessary lethal injection drugs.
An attorney 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 of Richard Bernard Moore due to the lack of drugs, which it has not had stocked since 2013. The Associated Press obtained a copy of the letter.
The court scheduled Moore’s execution after he exhausted his federal appeals this month. Moore, 55, has spent nearly two decades on death row following his conviction for the 1999 killing of a convenience store clerk in Spartanburg County. He would be the first person executed in South Carolina in nearly a decade.
The state’s usual injection protocol calls for three drugs: pentobarbital, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride. But the corrections agency has said it has not had the drugs in stock since 2013, when its last supplies expired. The agency has previously said it reserves the right to execute Moore with a single lethal dose of the sedative pentobarbital.
CONTINUE > https://www.voanews.com/usa/south-carolina-officials-say-they-cant-obtain-drugs-friday-execution
