Execution drug is challenged in court

• Ban paralyzing agent that could mask pain, ACLU and others say.

A week before California plans to execute Donald Beardslee, a federal appeals court on Wednesday weighed a request to bar use of a chemical that would render the condemned man incapable of crying out in pain. Two of three judges sitting in an emergency session of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals expressed concern over the state's refusal to explain its use of a paralyzing chemical called Pavulon, the second of three drugs administered in the lethal-injection process. "You're putting us in an awkward position," Judge Sidney Thomas of Billings, Mont., told the state's lawyer, Senior Assistant Attorney General Dane Gillette. "Some other states don't use it." Gillette said no explanation was necessary, but Judge Wallace Tashima of Pasadena joined Thomas in pressing for one, while the third judge, Richard Paez, also of Pasadena, focused on the state's refusal to divulge how it administers the sedative used at the start of the lethal-injection procedure. It's supposed to render the prisoner unconscious but, argued lawyers on Beardslee's side of the case, it may not do so. A conscious inmate would experience asphyxiation from the Pavulon and then a searing sensation throughout his veins from the last chemical in the series, potassium chloride. Defense lawyers, the anti-capital punishment group Death Penalty Focus and the American Civil Liberties Union argued that the purpose of including Pavulon was to keep the public in the dark about whether the state's lethal-injection method is humane. [more]