May 30, 2012, 12:05 AM
California prison officials are trying to keep possession of a scarce lethal injection drug, contesting a federal court order making it illegal to use “foreign manufactured” sodium thiopental. In late 2010, California was one of several states scrambling for thiopental, an...
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October 10, 2011, 12:05 AM
A nonpartisan analysis of a California ballot initiative to abolish the death penalty found that it could save the state and counties in the "high tens of millions of dollars" every year. The Legislative Analyst’s Office review of the proposed initiative, which hasn't...
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May 23, 2011, 12:05 AM
The highest levels of the United States government were initially unsure how to respond last year when California and other states began a worldwide scramble for a scarce lethal injection drug, e-mails between federal officials show. Ten states went abroad to purchase sodium thiopental, an...
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March 23, 2011, 12:06 AM
UPDATE: Records obtained by the ACLU of Northern California from the Food and Drug Administration confirm that California prison officials were among those who purchased sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma. On Dec. 9, Benjamin T. Rice, an attorney for the state, notified an FDA official in New...
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January 11, 2011, 12:05 AM
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation doesn’t have to release the names of its lethal injection drug suppliers, a state judge ruled on Monday. But prison officials might have to produce their communications with former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and his aides about...
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January 7, 2011, 12:05 AM
California’s corrections department appears to have received a key lethal injection drug via a London wholesaler working out of a driving school’s office. The Arizona Department of Corrections bought sodium thiopental from Dream Pharma Ltd., according to a Sept. 28 invoice obtained...
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January 3, 2011, 12:06 AM
California is carrying the weight of decades-old public safety woes into the new year. Not that the state is becoming a more dangerous place. To the contrary, crime rates across nearly all major categories and in almost every region are retreating, as they have for several years. Many of...
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December 17, 2010, 12:05 AM
The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation has a secret lethal injection drug supplier. This anonymous exporter is a British company (price quotes are in “pounds sterling”), apparently based in London. It has experience moving pharmaceuticals through U.S. Customs...
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December 9, 2010, 12:05 AM
California has amassed a stockpile of a key lethal injection drug, making the state medically capable of resuming executions, though not legally permitted to do so. That duality is likely to persist. The California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation is tangled in multiple...
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November 19, 2010, 12:06 AM
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit this week seeking to force the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to release records detailing how the agency obtained a key lethal injection drug. Officials have refused to disclose the source of the state's 12 grams...
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November 12, 2010, 12:05 AM
Sodium thiopental, the anesthetizing agent used in the nation’s three-drug lethal injection cocktail, is hard to come by these days. Attorney General Jerry Brown recently disclosed that the state has enough for just four executions. Death penalty opponents want to know where it came from...
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November 3, 2010, 12:06 AM
The to-do list for California's new attorney general is already 30,000 tasks long. That is the number of cases open within the California Department of Justice – a sprawling docket of criminal prosecutions, civil litigation and technical legal questions that require official opinions...
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