'Texas 7' death row inmate asks for reprieve after media report on state's execution supplies

Death row inmate Joseph Garcia is photographed during an interview at Polunksy Unit on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2018, in Livingston. Death row inmate Joseph Garcia is photographed during an interview at Polunksy Unit on Wednesday, Oct. 31, 2018, in Livingston. Photo: Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Photo: Yi-Chin Lee, Houston Chronicle / Staff Photographer Image 1 of / 8 Caption Close 'Texas 7' death row inmate asks for reprieve after media report on state's execution supplies 1 / 8 Back to Gallery

With less than a week before his scheduled execution, attorneys for a "Texas 7" escapee on death row are begging the governor for a reprieve in light of media reporting regarding the source of the state's execution drugs.

Joseph Garcia is slated to die on Tuesday, close to two decades after busting out of a maximum-security prison with six confederates who went on to pull off a cross-state crime spree that left dead a suburban Dallas police officer.

The condemned prisoner already has at least two appeals pending as well as a request for clemency, but the BuzzFeed News report published late Wednesday offered new fuel for his efforts to avoid execution.

Citing unidentified documents, the report names the Houston compounding pharmacy believed to be one of two that mixes up the batches of pentobarbital used in the Huntsville death chamber.

READ MORE: ‘Texas 7’ escapee fights death sentence as Dec. 4 execution nears

But aside from identifying Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy as the alleged source of the drugs, the news report also lays out a slew of documented safety violations that landed the Braeswood business on probationary status two years ago.

It's those problems that Garcia's legal team raised in their Wednesday letter asking Gov. Greg Abbott for a 30-day reprieve to investigate the claims about the drug supply. The state has previously confirmed that it uses a compounded form of the powerful barbiturate, which could indicate that Texas is turning to a compounding pharmacy to mix up the drugs - as opposed to getting them directly from a drug manufacturer.

"The fact that Texas may be relying on a compounding pharmacy for pentobarbital, which is a sterile injectable, subjects our client, Joseph Garcia, to the unreasonable risk of a cruel execution," the defense lawyers Mridula Raman and Jessica Salyers wrote in the letter to the governor.

"His concerns are not mere speculation; the pharmacy from which Texas may have obtained its supplies of sterile-injectable pentobarbital has been repeatedly cited by the FDA and the Texas State Board of Pharmacy for safety violations in its compounding practices."

In 2016, according to state records, the Texas State Board of Pharmacy found that the company had mixed up the wrong drug for three kids. In a warning letter two years later, the FDA dinged the Houston business for "insanitary conditions" that could have contaminated drugs.

"Given the gravity of the allegations that counsel has recently learned about Texas's questionable practices regarding the procurement of pentobarbital and the danger of a constitutional violation during Mr. Garcia's execution," his lawyers wrote, "it is imperative that counsel have the opportunity to investigate the allegations against TDCJ and challenge as appropriate Texas's lethal injection protocol."

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice and the governor's office both did not respond to the Chronicle's requests for comment. Greenpark said they'd performed testing for the prison system, but denied the claim that they compound lethal injection drugs for the state, according to BuzzFeed.

When a Chronicle reporter stopped by the Houston store on Thursday, employees did not offer comment but said they would notify the owner.

READ MORE: With 7 execution dates on the calendar, Texas just got more lethal injection drugs

At the time of the notorious escape that eventually landed Garcia on death row, he was already in prison for a crime out of Bexar County, where he stabbed a man at least a dozen times. Since then, he's repeatedly framed the slaying as self-defense and not murder.

In December 2000, he was serving time at the Connally Unit when he teamed up with six fellow prisoners to plot the biggest break-out in Texas prison history.

In a carefully orchestrated plot months in the making, the seven inmates took hostages, busted into the prison armory, stole weapons and stormed out of the unit in a prison truck. After pulling off two robberies in the Houston area, they headed north - away from the helicopters and police hoping to find them.

There, on Christmas Eve, the men held up a sporting goods store in Irving and made off with $70,000 and 44 guns. As they were leaving, they ran into a cop.

The escapees surrounded Officer Aubrey Hawkins' patrol vehicle and shot him 11 times - but Garcia has long maintained that he was still inside the building when the gunfire started.

Because the state didn't prove that he was one of the shooters, he was convicted under the controversial "law of parties," a statute that can hold non-shooters responsible for slayings they could have anticipated.

Afterward, the crew fled and were captured a month later in Colorado, living in a trailer park and posing as Christian missionaries. Though one of the men killed himself rather than surrender, the other six were captured and sent to death row. Three have since been executed.

In addition to his latest request for reprieve, Garcia has two pending appeal - one out of Bexar County and the other from Dallas - in addition to a long-shot request for clemency that's currently in front of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles.

If those efforts all fail, Garcia will become the 12th Texas prisoner put to death this year.