Mississippi Death Row Inmate Thomas Edwin Loden Jr To Be Executed Wednesday

A death row inmate, 58, is suing Mississippi over its use of three drugs for lethal injections, but a federal judge ruled last week that he will not block the state from carrying out the scheduled execution.

Thomas Edwin Loden Jr. is scheduled to be executed on Wednesday. It was recently set by the Mississippi Supreme Court, reported the Associated Press. A stay for Loden Jr. as part of a lawsuit challenging Missisisppi’s lethal injection protocol was denied by U.S. District Court Judge Henry Wingate, reported Mississippi Today.

He has been on death row since 2001, when he pleaded guilty to rape, capital murder, and four counts of sexual battery against a teen girl.

In 2015, lawyers for the Roderick & Solange MacArthur Justice Center sued the Mississippi prison system on behalf of two death row inmates. They said that the state’s lethal injection protocol is inhumane. Later, Loden and two more Mississippi death row inmates joined as plaintiffs. In November 2021, Mississippi carried out its most recent execution. It was the state’s first execution in nine years.

In July 2021, the Mississippi Department of Corrections revealed in court papers that it had acquired three drugs for the lethal injection protocol. One was midazolam, which is a sedative. The other was vecuronium bromide, which paralyzes the muscles; and the third was potassium chloride, which stops the heart. The drugs listed in the court records were the ones used for the execution last year, said Mississippi Corrections Commissioner Burl Cain.

He did not say where the department obtained them, but in a sworn statement on Nov. 30, he shared that the state has sufficient quantities of the three drugs for another execution. Mississippi and other states have had trouble finding drugs for lethal injections in recent years. It happened since pharmaceutical companies in America and Europe started blocking the use of their drugs for executions.

A MacArthur Center lawyer, Jim Craig, told Wingate during a Nov. 28 hearing that since 2019, only Oklahoma, Alabama, Tennessee and Mississippi have done executions using a three-drug protocol. During the hearing, a Mississippi special assistant attorney general Gerald Kucia told Wingate that the U.S. Supreme Court has never blocked a method of execution.

Meanwhile, according to Mississippi court records, Loden kidnapped Leesa Marie Gray on June 22, 2000. She was stranded on the side of a road in northern Mississippi’s Itawamba County. The records said that he spent four hours repeatedly raping and sexually battering the 16-year-old before suffocating and strangling her to death, reported My Journal Courier.