Remember that time in high school when your mom found a bag of pot in your room and demanded to know where you got it? And you tried to squirm your way out and avoid giving up where you got it from? Uh, yeah, that totally never happened to me either. But suddenly prison officials in death penalty states around the country are starting to look a lot like teenage stoners, doing everything in their power to protect the source of their execution drugs — their dealers.
You may have followed the ongoing news stories about lethal injection drug shortages – and the ensuing fiascos – in California, Arizona, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Texas and, well, just about any other state that tries to execute people. All of them are struggling to deal with a national shortage of the key execution drug sodium thiopental (so are actual doctors, by the way, who use the drug to save lives). While some states like Oklahoma are desperately trying to come up with “creative”(read: ridiculous and inhumane) workarounds, states that have the drug – California, Arizona, Texas – won’t say where or how they got it.
Amazingly, Arizona got away with all this secrecy last month. Jaffrey Landrigan was put to death on October 26, when — despite protests from his attorneys, a federal district judge and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals — the U.S. Supreme Court allowed his execution to go forward without giving the defense an opportunity to evaluate the lethal injection drugs that would be used on him. The court said the defense had to demonstrate that the drug was dangerous before they could find out anything about it – and that cart somehow pulled the horse all the way to the execution chamber.
But on Friday, the Texas attorney general ordered that state’s corrections department to publically disclose the source of its lethal injection drugs, as well as the expiration date, price and size of their stockpile. Corrections officials had asked the AG to classify the information as a state secret, on the absurd grounds that if anti-death penalty activists learned the information they might become violent.
The AG didn’t buy it, noting that the corrections department couldn’t explain how this information would actually help these “potential terrorists” carry out their violent plots. But even after the order to disclose, corrections officials are keeping mum on the source of the drug. They’ve revealed how much they have, enough to kill 39 people, and the fact that it all goes bad in March of 2011. But in defiance of the attorney general, the source of the drug remains unknown.
Now of course, Texas doesn’t have 39 executions scheduled between now and March. That means that while the state is hoarding this rare drug in the midst of a nationwide shortage, doctors who use it to actually save lives rather than end them are out of luck – or rather, their patients are. But that won’t stop Texas from holding on to its stash, just in case, until it goes bad and becomes completely unusable for any purpose.
California is also keeping the source of its stash secret and can’t even come up with an excuse for doing so. At the same time as Arizona, California obtained a hefty supply of the drug from an unknown manufacturer and, like Arizona, is refusing to tell anyone where they got it.
The ACLU of Northern California filed a Public Records Act request seeking information on the state’s new supply but – big surprise! – the state won’t pony up. Corrections officials responded by withholding all relevant records without even offering a justification, even while admitting that at least some of the records should be made public according to law. That led the ACLU to file a lawsuit asking the courts to force the corrections department to turn over the records. On Friday, the Secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation even told a reporter that he knows the public has a right to see “at least some” of the records. But they still haven’t been produced.
While the ACLU works its way through the courts to ensure transparency and openness when the state takes a life, activists around the world can also work to ensure that sodium thiopental is reserved for its legitimate use: saving lives as a surgical anesthetic. Join hundreds of Change.org readers in telling Hospira, the sole U.S. manufacturer of the drug, to refuse to sell sodium thiopental to state corrections departments and ensure that this scarce drug is used to save lives, not end them.
http://criminaljustice.change.org/blog/view/states_refuse_to_give_up_lethal_injection_dealer
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