Texas only has one dose left of execution drug

A Texas execution chamber.
(Image credit: (Joe Raedle/Getty Images))

On Wednesday evening, a Mexican mafia hitman was executed in Texas, leaving the state with just one more dose of pentobarbital, a necessary component in lethal injection cocktails.

Manuel Vasquez, 46, was sentenced to death for the 1998 murder of a woman who would not pay a gang tax on drug sales, NBC News reports. He was pronounced dead at 6:32 p.m. local time, 17 minutes after the drug was administered. Vasquez was the first of six inmates scheduled to be put to death in Texas over the next few weeks, and state officials said they are working to find more pentobarbital.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.