For months, officials with the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation have faced a stream of questions about their 521 grams of sodium thiopental, a key lethal injection drug.
And now attorneys representing death row inmates want to put former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger under oath to answer questions about how the state wrote up its execution protocol. Attorney General Kamala Harris has moved to block that questioning, the San Jose Mercury News reports.
What do the lawyers want to learn from Schwarzenegger?
Reportedly, they seek details concerning how state officials decided on the three-drug lethal injection cocktail. Sodium thiopental is an anesthetic used to render the condemned inmate unconscious before the second and third drugs paralyze breathing and stop the heart. That decision protocol matters because some attorneys argue the cocktail might not always work as intended.
As The Informant blog at KALW News explains:
In past hearings, lawyers for inmates produced evidence that raised serious questions over whether inmates were actually asleep when they were put to death. Whether issues of properly injecting the drug or the anesthetic’s effectiveness, lawyers said, inmates were likely experiencing serious pain while dying–and no one could tell, because the second drug had paralyzed them. That, inmates’ lawyers contend, is unconstitutional.
California is hardly alone in using that combination of drugs for executions. According to a 2007 study by researchers at the University of Miami:
The intravenous delivery of an anesthetic, a paralytic, and potassium chloride in lethal injection protocols is intended to cause a painless death, which likely accounts for its use in 930 of the 1,100 executions in the United States from the reestablishment of the death penalty in 1976 to May 6, 2008, as well as for its growing use worldwide.
Other questions abound regarding lethal injection in California, where 720 prisoners sit on death row.
Late last year, California secured one of the nation’s largest sodium thiopental supplies. But is it actually sodium thiopental, and was it manufactured properly?
The state has sent a sample to a lab and is awaiting results on that.
Who did they buy it from?
Again, answers are not yet available. A state court judge ruled last month that CDCR could keep the name of its drug supplier secret.
Did officials follow all of California’s purchasing regulations?
Corrections officials have released a horde of internal e-mails to the American Civil Liberties Union in response to a public records lawsuit. Some of the communications suggest the corrections department might have violated procurement rules when the agency spent $36,000 for the sodium thiopental. The ACLU has requested additional records to find the answer.
Regardless of whether the state followed the rules in making the purchase, it clearly overspent. The Lincoln Journal-Star has reported that Nebraska purchased nearly the same amount of sodium thiopental as California, but paid only $2,056 to an Indian pharmaceutical firm.
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