With a week and a day until Nevada’s first execution in a dozen years, the Department of Corrections has yet to publicly disclose its lethal injection procedures, according to a lawsuit filed Tuesday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Nevada.
Death row inmate Scott Dozier is scheduled to die July 11.
“The Nevada Department of Corrections has failed to inform the public about almost any details of this most consequential action,” ACLU officials said in a news release, calling the “lack of transparency especially egregious.”
The emergency petition filed in Carson City asks for the prison system to produce public records about the planned execution of Dozier, who waived his appeals nearly two years ago and has asked to die.
“The Nevada Department of Corrections has abandoned even basic principles of transparency and opted for misinformation, stonewalling, and extreme secrecy instead. It’s dangerous for our state to undertake its first execution in 12 years under these conditions,” ACLU of Nevada’s legal director Amy Rose said in the release. “Without transparency and accountability, we are very concerned about the legality of the protocol and the possibility of a botched execution.”
Prison spokeswoman Brooke Santina said officials expect to release the execution protocol Tuesday afternoon.
Last month, the state’s Supreme Court ruled that in a November order District Judge Jennifer Togliatti should not have denied the prison system’s planned use of a paralytic drug to execute Dozier.
Togliatti then signed a new execution warrant.
An attorney for the Department of Corrections has said that the state’s supply of diazepam, an anxiety medication and one of the three drugs in the lethal injection cocktail concocted last year, expired. But Santina said last month that the state has drugs to perform lethal injection.
On Monday, Timothy Filson, the warden at Ely State Prison where Dozier’s execution is set to take place, retired after 28 years with the Department of Corrections, Santina said, without naming the warden who would oversee the lethal injection.
“We will have an experienced warden to take his place at the execution,” Santina told the Review-Journal on Tuesday. “We are prepared to move forward without any issues from the staff.”
Should his wish be carried out, Dozier would be the first inmate executed in Nevada since 2006.
A Clark County jury convicted Dozier in September 2007 of killing 22-year-old Jeremiah Miller at the now-closed La Concha motel. In 2005, Dozier was convicted in Arizona of second-degree murder in another case.