Indiana is set to carry out an execution early Thursday, despite concerns raised by the death row inmate’s legal team and opponents of capital punishment who say the lethal injection drugs the state plans to use were purchased from a troubled pharmacy being investigated by the state’s attorney general for potential misconduct and safety violations.
Jeffrey Weisheit, who was convicted of killing two children in a house fire, is scheduled to die before sunrise Thursday.
Weisheit has asked Gov. Mike Braun (R) to halt the execution and launch an independent investigation into what his attorneys said was the state’s $275,000 purchase of pentobarbital from Pharmaneek, Inc. Braun has so far declined to stop the execution.
Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita (R) and the state’s Board of Pharmacy have been investigating the Indianapolis-based business for more than a year.
Rokita’s office has filed a complaint against Pharmaneek, and the company’s license was later placed on probation. The Board of Pharmacy has found further violations and could potentially suspend the company’s license next week.
Indiana officials have not publicly confirmed that the drugs for Weisheit’s execution were purchased from the pharmacy, but they defended their lethal injection processes.
“The Department of Correction is in compliance with Indiana laws that govern the confidential procurement of drugs utilized to carry out a court-ordered execution,” Noelle Russell, a spokeswoman for the state agency, said in a statement. “We remain confident in our process and our ability to humanely carry out the lawfully imposed sentence for the murders of two innocent children.”
Russell said the state had purchased a half-dozen vials of pentobarbital, a drug frequently used in lethal injections, in September and received them last week.
Joseph Perkovich, Weisheit’s attorney, has sought to halt the lethal injection by pointing to the recent botched execution of Christa Pike in Tennessee. The GOP governor there ordered an inquiry and paused executions through the end of the year.
In the request for reprieve, Perkovich said Indiana’s lethal injection protocol compares “unfavorably” with Tennessee’s execution practices and is “more susceptible to catastrophic failures.” The attorney wrote that there were “key similarities” in the way Indiana and Tennessee procured pentobarbital, including for Pike’s execution, which Perkovich said “call into question” whether the states used the same distributor.
“This is an obvious source of extreme concern,” he wrote.
Separately, the father of Weisheit’s young victims — Alyssa and Caleb Lynch — asked Braun to halt the execution.
Weisheit was sentenced to death by an jury in 2013 for the deaths of Caleb, 5, and Alyssa, 8, the children of his live-in girlfriend in southern Indiana. Prosecutors said Weisheit hog-tied and gagged Caleb on a mattress before lighting a railroad flare, trapping the children inside the burning house.
“I request that Jeffrey Weisheit receive life in prison without eligibility for parole,” Steven Lynch wrote in an affidavit to the Indiana Supreme Court. “With the remaining years of his life, he would be able to continue seeking the Lord’s forgiveness and redemption for his actions.”
Braun, an ally of President Donald Trump who took office last year, has resisted calls to intervene, this week denying Weisheit’s clemency application and ordering Indiana prison officials to proceed with preparation for the execution.
The governor has not explicitly denied the reprieve request or commented on the allegations against Pharmaneek.
His office did not answer questions from The Washington Post about his position on an independent investigation into Indiana’s pentobarbital procurement and lethal injection protocols. He also declined to answer questions detailing misconduct allegations against Pharmaneek outlined in public records from the Board of Pharmacy and amplified by Weisheit’s attorney.
Weisheit’s legal team asked the Indiana Supreme Court to halt the execution.
“Going through with an execution is not going to put an end to this. It’s only metastasizing,” Perkovich said at the Indiana statehouse Wednesday. “The governor needs to act now.”
He was joined by death penalty opponents from the Indiana Abolition Coalition and the ACLU of Indiana, who have been lobbying Braun to commute Weisheit’s sentence to life in prison without parole.
”This is obscene if this moves forward,“ Perkovich said. ”This will not be resolved by simply taking his life.”
Earlier in the day, Perkovich sent a letter to the Board of Pharmacy requesting to speak at a disciplinary hearing for Pharmaneek scheduled for Monday morning — although by that point, Weisheit could be dead.
In his letter, Perkovich wrote that the pharmacy had engaged in “unsettling and unethical conduct regarding dealings with the Indiana Department of Corrections to avoid this Board’s disciplinary action just long enough so that it could complete a sale, at an outrageously high mark up, in time for Mr. Weisheit’s execution.”
Pharmaneek did not immediately respond to a request for comment Wednesday, nor did the Indiana Board of Pharmacy.
Pharmaneek had failed state licensing inspections in April 2021 and again in July 2025 due to a whistleblower complaint that prompted an investigation from Indiana’s attorney general office.
Issues outlined in state disciplinary records included allegations that the pharmacy staff was unqualified and working in an insecure and contaminated environment. The complaints alleged that Pharmaneek was mishandling drugs and maintaining poor facilities for drug storage and compounding.
Rokita’s office brought three board charges against the pharmacy in November 2025 and its license was placed on probation in March 2026. Around the same time, the Food and Drug Administration uncovered “egregious failures” during a series of inspections, records show.
After the board concluded that the pharmacy repeatedly violated the terms of its probation, Pharmaneek was ordered in late September to urgently come before the Board of Pharmacy and defend itself against possible license suspension or more serious sanctions.
The next day, the Indiana Department of Correction paid Pharmaneek for six vials of pentobarbital, spending $275,000 for medicine worth about $9,000 on the standard market, Perkovich said.
Pharmaneek’s lawyers then asked for the disciplinary hearing to be delayed more than a month to Nov. 9 — five days after Weisheit’s scheduled execution, documents show.
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