Tommy Lynn Sells

Appeals court: Texas execution back on – Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas

April 8, 2014

Execution of a Texas death row inmate was back on schedule Monday after a federal appeals court ruled that the state doesn’t have to reveal where it gets its lethal injection drug.

HOUSTON — The execution of a Texas death row inmate was back on schedule Monday after a federal appeals court ruled that the state doesn’t have to reveal where it gets its lethal injection drug.

The ruling from the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, 44, is set for execution Wednesday.

Attorneys for Hernandez-Llanas and another inmate, Tommy Lynn Sells, had filed a lawsuit last week saying they needed the name of the drug supplier in order to verify the drug’s potency. They said they feared the prisoners could suffer unconstitutional pain and suffering if the drug weren’t tested.

The state argued it was protecting the company from threats of violence.

A lower court initially sided with the inmates, but the 5th Circuit reversed that ruling last week for Sells, who was executed Thursday after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the appeals court decision. The appeals court had said it would rule later on Hernandez-Llanas’ case.

The state attorney general’s office had urged the 5th Circuit to lift the lower court order, arguing that the new supply of pentobarbital came from a licensed compounding pharmacy. The state also noted that the drug had been used “painlessly and successfully” on Sells, and that there was “no pharmacy, no drug and no assurance of quality that Hernandez would find satisfactory.”

Attorneys have decided not to appeal Monday’s ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court because the high court turned down the same request from Sells last week, according to Maurie Levin, among the lawyers who filed the drug secrecy lawsuit.

Instead, his lawyers have turned to the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, arguing that his sentence should be commuted to life in prison or his execution at least delayed because of what they say was faulty testimony from psychologists at his trial. The psychologists told jurors that Hernandez-Llanas was not mentally impaired and would remain a future danger, which his lawyers dispute.

Texas executes Tommy Lynn Sells

april 4, 2014

HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A serial killer has been put to death in Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his lawyers’ demand that the state release information about where it gets its lethal injection drug.
Tommy Lynn Sells was executed Thursday evening. He became the first inmate injected with a dose of newly replenished pentobarbital that Texas prison officials obtained to replace an expired supply of the sedative.

Texas Department of Criminal Justice officials pronounced him dead at 6:27 p.m., about 13 minutes after he was injected with a fatal dose of pentobarbital.

As he waited word on his U.S. Supreme Court appeal Thursday, Sells was kept in a small holding cell just outside the execution chamber in Huntsville, said Jason Clark, spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. Sells was quiet, reserved and accompanied by a chaplain. He had access to a phone, Clark said.

His attorneys had hoped the courts would force prison officials to reveal more information about the pharmacy that supplied the drug. They argued the new pentobarbital could lead to unconstitutional pain.

Lawyers for Sells argued, in part, that, “the increasing scarcity of execution drugs — and consequent concerns about the quality and states’ desperate efforts to keep the source of drugs secret — have become the central feature of botched executions and Eighth Amendment concerns.”

The state prison agency wants the information kept secret to protect the pharmacy from threats of violence.
A Val Verde County jury sent Sells, 49, to death row in 2000 for the December 1999 stabbing death of 13-year-old Kaylene Harris in her family’s trailer home near Del Rio. He confessed after a friend who was sleeping over that night survived having her own throat slit and helped identify him to authorities.

He later pleaded guilty in Bexar County to strangling 9-year-old Mary Beatrice Perez, who was abducted from a Fiesta event at Market Square in 1999. District Attorney Susan Reed agreed to drop her bid for a second death sentence, instead settling on life in prison, in exchange for the plea.

Court records show Sells claimed to have committed as many as 70 killings in states including Alabama, California, Arizona, Kentucky and Arkansas.

The families of both slain children were on a list to witness the execution. Kaylene’s witnesses included her father, brother and two grandmothers. Also present were the mother and grandmother of Mary.

Sells’ execution is the fifth lethal injection this year in Texas, the nation’s busiest state for the death penalty.

Source: AP, April 3, 2014

Texas execution to go ahead after court reverses judge’s order within hours – Tommy Sell

april 3, 2014

A federal appeals court on Wednesday threw out a ruling requiring the Texas prison system to disclose more information about where it gets lethal-injection drugs, reversing a judge who had halted an upcoming execution.

Only hours before the appellate decision, a lower-court judge issued a temporary injunction halting the execution of Tommy Lynn Sells, a convicted serial killer who was set to die Thursday.

The case originally included Ramiro Hernandez-Llanas, another inmate scheduled to be put to death next week. But the appellate ruling affected only Sells. The appeals court said it would take up Hernandez-Llanas’ case at a later date.

The case now is likely headed to the US supreme court.

District judge Vanessa Gilmore had issued a temporary injunction on Wednesday ordering Texas to provide the lawyers representing Sells and Hernandez-Llanas with information about the supplier and quality of a new batch of pentobarbital, a barbiturate that is to be used in the lethal injections.

Sells was scheduled to die in the Texas state penitentiary on Thursday, and Hernandez-Llanas six days later. Texas’s previous supply of compounded pentobarbital expired on 1 April, and the state has repeatedly refused to reveal the source of its new drugs, claiming that secrecy is needed in order to protect suppliers from threats of violence and intimidation.

Lawyers for the pair argue that Texas’s attorney general had previously ruled on several occasions that such information must be made public, and also said that failing to provide details about the origin, purity and efficiency of the drugs harmed the inmates’ ability to mount a legal challenge over the possibility that they could experience an excessively painful death in violation of their constitutional right not to suffer a “cruel and unusual” punishment.

In her ruling, Gilmore agreed, and instructed Texas not to execute the men until it has disclosed to the lawyers “all information regarding the procurement of the drugs defendants intend to use to carry out plaintiffs’ executions, including information about the supplier or suppliers, any testing that has been conducted, what kind, by whom, and the unredacted results of such testing.”

In recent years an EU-led boycott has made it harder for states to source their execution drugs of choice, resulting in some states turning to experimental drugs and procedures to replace the sequence of three substances that was commonly used before the boycott. In its executions, Texas now employs only pentobarbital, which is often used to euthanize animals. Last year, it bought a supply of the drug from a compounding pharmacy in suburban Houston.

Death penalty opponents argue that, because compounding pharmacies are not subject to federal oversight, there is a risk of impurities and inconsistencies that could make their products unreliable and cause undue, unconstitutional, of suffering.

Texas officials argued that prior executions using pentobarbital have taken place apparently without the inmates enduring obvious pain and cited a report which says that their latest supply has been “tested by an independent laboratory and found to be 108% potent and free from contaminants”.