Death row inmate’s lawyers keeping Ga. honest?

• Dan Machold/Flickr

Attorneys representing death row inmate Andrew Grant DeYoung — the same lawyers who informed Attorney General Eric Holder that the Georgia Department of Corrections was improperly importing lethal injection drugs — filed a lawsuit last week again alleging that rules are being skirted.

As we mentioned last month, the GDOC was looking into replacing the increasingly difficult-to-acquire sodium thiopental with the more-accessible drug pentobarbital in its three-drug lethal injection cocktail. Georgia’s supply of sodium thiopental was confiscated by the Feds when it was discovered they’d come from an unlicensed UK company.

DeYoung’s attorneys say if the state wants to change the lethal injection cocktail, they have to do so according to the Administrative Procedure Act, and in a way that allows for public input. According to an AJC article, the suit says that the GDOC “evidently has no intention of following the procedures that are required even when agencies promulgate rules governing, for instance, dog catchers, cosmetologists and pest exterminators. Rather, Corrections has ignored the requirements of the Administrative Procedure Act in its efforts to rapidly implement a new lethal-injection procedure, even during a federal investigation.”