Texas Provides Virginia Execution Drugs

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has provided the Virginia Department of Corrections with three vials of pentobarbital for an upcoming execution, according to NBC News.

Next week, the state plans to execute Alfredo Prieto, sentenced to death in the killings of two George Washington University students near Reston in 1988.

This summer, a federal appeals court upheld the death sentence, rejecting Prieto’s claim he was ineligible for execution due to an intellectual disability.

Prieto will be the first Virginia inmate to be executed since Jan. 16, 2013, and the 37th inmate executed in the Commonwealth since 2000.

Prieto was reportedly already on California’s death row for raping and killing a 15-year-old girl when a DNA sample made its way into the national database in 2005 linking Prieto to the murders at GW.

According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Prieto’s execution is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 1.

Earlier this week, The Arc of Virginia, a nonprofit that advocates for the intellectually and developmentally disabled, wrote Virginia Gov. Terry McAullife supporting a request for Prieto to return to California and argue he is intellectually disabled, according to the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

“We believe that allowing Mr. Prieto’s execution to go forward on the evidence as it stands is unjustified scientifically and would endorse a misunderstanding of intellectual disabilities that was refuted long ago,” Jamie Liban, the group’s executive director, told the Times-Dispatch.

Cary Bowen, an attorney for Prieto, told NBC Washington he will ask the appeals court to reconsider its decision, and if that fails said he will ask the U.S. Supreme Court to review the decision.