New York (CNN) -- A federal civil complaint in Texas claims the defendants may have falsified prescriptions, lied to pharmacies and perhaps even broken the law, but they're not drug runners.
They're officials from the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, responsible for executing death row inmates.
The complaint, filed in October, is one example of the lengths death-penalty states are willing to go to acquire drugs for lethal injections.
Texas, which declined to comment on the pending case, is among 32 death-penalty states scrambling to find new drug protocols after European-based manufacturers banned U.S. prisons from using their drugs in executions -- among them, Danish-based Lundbeck, which manufactures pentobarbital.
"The states are scrambling to find the drugs," says Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center. "They want to carry out these executions that they have scheduled, but they don't have the drugs, and they're changing and trying new procedures never used before in the history of executions."
