HUNTSVILLE, TX—Noting that their prison system’s supply of lethal injection drugs continues to dwindle as more manufacturers agree to halt sales, sources within the Texas Department of Criminal Justice confirmed Thursday that they now regret wasting doses of pancuronium bromide on innocent prisoners in 1997, 2000, and 2004. “Using up 100 milligrams of this stuff on a wrongfully convicted inmate wasn’t such a big deal back when we had a steady stream of these chemicals coming in, but now we’d give anything to have fatal amounts of that compound back,” said the department’s executive director, Brad Livingston, emphasizing that, had the agency known it would one day be scrambling to find and acquire suitable substitutes for the deadly cocktail, it would have shown a bit more patience and discretion when handing down death sentences in questionable cases. “In those days, pumping a bunch of this stuff into some guy who was in here due to incompetent public defenders, unreliable testimony, and an implausible timeline of events wasn’t the most economical use of our stockpile, but it just seemed like a drop in the bucket. Now that we’re down to our last few syringes, though, it’s hard not to think about all the paralysis-inducing solution we could’ve saved for actual murderers.” Livingston added that, even in light of recent shortages, he still had no reservations about executing the mentally retarded.

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