USA - Missouri. The US supreme court granted a stay of execution for Herbert Smulls, because the state had refused to disclose the source of the drugs

The US supreme court granted a stay of execution for Herbert Smulls, after his lawyers protested that the state had refused to disclose the source of the drug due to be used to kill him. Justice Samuel Alito signed the order that was sent out on Tuesday night. Smulls's lawyers had made last-minute pleas on Tuesday to spare his life, focusing on the state's refusal to disclose from which compounding pharmacy they obtain the lethal injection drug pentobarbital. Missouri has argued the compounding pharmacy is part of the execution team and therefore its name cannot be released to the public. Smulls was convicted and sentenced to death for killing Stephen Honickman, a jeweller, and badly injuring his wife during a July 27, 1991 robbery. The 56-year-old had been scheduled for lethal injection at 12.01am local time on Wednesday. Earlier, Smulls' lawyers protested that the secrecy surrounding Missouri's source for the pentobarbital that was due to be used in the execution was hampering their efforts to defend him. At worst, the lawyers contended, Smulls could be subjected to cruel and unusual punishment by being executed with drugs that have been only lightly regulated and have not been subjected to public scrutiny. State authorities have tried to obscure the identity of the compounding pharmacy that supplied the drug, going to such lengths as making the name of the business, like the execution team, protected from disclosure under Missouri law. But Cheryl Pilate, one of the defence lawyers fighting for Smulls's life, named the Apothecary Shoppe, a compounding pharmacy in Tulsa, as the source of the lethal injection drug. "We have studied publicly available documents - information that any citizen can obtain - and concluded that the Apothecary Shoppe was the source," Pilate told the Guardian.