Court filings suggest Georgia prison officials don’t know what turned execution drug ‘cloudy’

ATLANTA – Court documents filed Friday suggest Georgia prison officials still don’t know what caused a lethal injection drug to turn “cloudy,” halting an execution at the last minute, even though they said earlier they had found the most likely cause.

State officials on March 2 called off the scheduled execution of Kelly Renee Gissendaner.

The Georgia Department of Corrections said in a news release April 16 that an analysis by a pharmaceutical expert showed the problem was likely caused by shipping and storing the drug at a temperature that was too low. But a court filing Friday shows that a separate test done by the department and completed on April 3 found that storage at a cold temperature had no effect on a new sample of the drug.

In April, the department released a short video showing a syringe of clear liquid with chunks of a white solid floating in it.

“After viewing a video of the solution and learning about the shipment and storage of the solution, my assessment of the formulation indicates that pentobarbital had precipitated or fallen out of solution,” University of Georgia College of Pharmacy professor Jason Zastre wrote in a sworn statement released by the department.

The most likely cause of the formation of solids is that the solution was shipped and stored at a temperature that was too low, Zastre wrote. Another possible cause could be that the pharmaceutical solvent used to dissolve pentobarbital sodium during the compounding process could have either absorbed some water or evaporated during preparation, he wrote.

The Department of Corrections’ chief of special projects, William King, conducted the in-house test, which came to light Friday as part of a response to a lawsuit filed by Gissendaner’s lawyers.

Corrections officials did not make the results of that test public when they announced “the most likely cause” of the cloudiness in the drug.

When asked why the department did not release the results of its own test at that time, department spokeswoman Gwendolyn Hogan said in an email Friday, “The Department had no intent to mislead. Our agency reported to the courts to inform them of the experiment that we conducted and the outcome.”