LINCOLN, Neb. - A lawsuit by a former pharmacy director for the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services says she was fired, in part, for refusing to order a lethal injection drug from a source not approved by the Food and Drug Administration.
The lawsuit is the latest dust-up over the state's attempts to secure sodium thiopental, one of three drugs used in Nebraska's lethal injection procedure.
According to the Lincoln Journal Star, Dianne Booker said she refused the department's request to find a supply of sodium thiopental, noting there is no FDA-approved distributor for the drug and that she could lose her pharmaceutical license by getting it from an unapproved source.
Sodium thiopental is no longer manufactured in the United States and is in scarce supply worldwide.
The legality of Nebraska's supply of the drug has been questioned for more than a year. The state's first batch was ruled last year to have been illegally imported from a source in India. The state obtained a new batch from another Indian source last year, but the Swiss manufacturer of the drug, Naari AG, said that the sodium thiopental Nebraska bought was a sample intended only to be used for evaluation purposes as an anaesthetic in Zambia.
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Nebraska Attorney General Jon Bruning has defended the state's purchase of the lethal injection drug as legal.
Booker's lawsuit says the Correctional Services Department ordered her to obtain "by any means" a supply of the drug in the fall of 2010. When she refused, the lawsuit says, her supervisor took over the search. Several months later, she was demoted after taking medical leave, and she was fired in October after having earlier reported security breaches by her superiors, according to her lawsuit.
Booker said her firing violated both her civil rights and the Family Medical Leave Act.
