A court ordered the Tennessee Department of Correction to release a cache of execution records, but it’s unclear whether the agency will have to comply.

The records include expiration dates and quality testing results for the state’s current lethal drug supply. TDOC plans to appeal.

The prison system is scheduled to execute Harold Wayne Nichols on Thursday morning. He was sentenced to death for raping and murdering 20-year-old college student Karen Pulley in 1988.

The legal team for Nichols filed several formal records requests with TDOC this year, seeking to get a clearer picture of how the state’s new lethal injection protocol will be carried out. That included requests for the drug expiration dates and results of recent quality testing. When TDOC refused to fulfill the requests, atto

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