HUNTSVILLE, Texas (AP) — A serial killer has been put to death in Texas after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected his lawyers' demand that the state release information about where it gets its lethal injection drug.

Tommy Lynn Sells was executed Thursday evening. He became the first inmate injected with a dose of newly replenished pentobarbital that Texas prison officials obtained to replace an expired supply of the sedative.

His attorneys had hoped the courts would force prison officials to reveal more information about the pharmacy that supplied the drug. They argued the new pentobarbital could lead to unconstitutional pain.

The state prison agency wants the information kept secret to protect the pharmacy from threats of violence.

Sells was sentenced to death for fatally stabbing a 13-year-old South Texas girl in 1999. Court records show he claimed to have committed as many as 70 killings in states including Alabama, California, Arizona, Kentucky and Arkansas.Sells' execution is the fifth lethal injection this year in Texas, the nation's busiest state for the death penalty.

Source: AP, April 3, 2014