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 Doyle, 29, was convicted of beating food delivery woman Hyun Cho — a South Korean native — to death in 2003 with a baseball bat,
putting her body in a trash can and stealing her car.
He is scheduled to die by lethal injection at the state's death
chamber in Huntsville at 6 p.m. CDT.
Texas, which has executed more people than any other state since the
U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976, has
obtained a fresh batch of its execution drug pentobarbital, the
Department of Criminal Justice said this month, without revealing
the source.
Many other U.S. states have been struggling to obtain drugs for
executions after pharmaceutical firms, mostly in Europe, imposed
sales bans because they object to having medications used in lethal
injections.
Oklahoma has had to postpone two executions planned for this month
because it could not find drugs. Alabama said this week it has run
out of one of the main drugs it uses, putting on hold executions for
16 inmates who have exhausted appeals and face capital punishment.
Several states have looked to alter the chemicals used for lethal
injection and keep the suppliers' identities secret. They have also
turned to lightly regulated compounding pharmacies that can mix
chemicals.
But an Oklahoma judge ruled on Wednesday the state's secrecy on its
lethal injections protocols was unconstitutional, a decision that
could delay executions in other states where death row inmates are
planning to launch similar challenges.
The decision will have little impact on Texas, which plans to
execute six inmates between now and the end of May, about the same
number as every other state combined for the period, according to
the Death Penalty Information Center, a monitoring agency for
capital punishment.
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If Doyle's execution goes ahead, he would be fourth person executed
in Texas this year and the 512th in the state since the death
penalty was reinstated.
But executions overall have been on the decline in Texas, after
hitting a peak in 2000 of 40. Since 2010, Texas has averaged about
15 executions a year.
The high costs of prosecutions and the availability of a sentence of
life without parole have caused capital punishment convictions to
fall to about 10 or less a year in recent years.
"We are now very selective in what we choose to go after as death
penalty cases, instead of deciding that every single murder that we
try will be a capital case," said Susan Reed, the district attorney
in San Antonio and a death penalty supporter.
(Additional reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio and Heide
Brandes in Oklahoma City; editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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