Article Media
San Francisco – Today, the ACLU of Northern California (ACLU-NC) posted records handed over by the United States Customs and Border Protection (CBR) on highly irregular activities by officials from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to speed the entry of controlled substances to be used in executions in Arizona and other states.
"These records raise serious questions about whether officials at the FDA have broken the law," said Natasha Minsker, Death Penalty Policy Director with the ACLU of Northern California.
In January, the FDA claimed to have had a "long-standing" hands-off policy on the import of Class 2 drugs used in execution, including the anesthetic sodium thiopental that is required by California's three-drug lethal injection protocol. California, Arizona, Nebraska, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Georgia all scrambled to acquire fresh supplies of lethal injection drugs after the sole U.S. manufacturer of the sodium thiopental announced that it would stop making it in late 2010. Corrections agencies, including California's Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR), rushed to restock their supplies of the sedative in order to carry out executions.
The documents handed over to the ACLU yesterday detail FDA involvement in the import, transport, inspection and delivery of the drugs to Arizona officials. The 111-page batch of documents include 19 pages that are completely blacked out with most of the other pages also heavily redacted. The records all relate to the shipments of sodium thiopental to Arizona and come from the Washington, D.C. office of Customs and Border Protection.
"These records show FDA officials doing everything they can to get these drugs into the country as fast as possible with no regard to legality, safety or transparency," Minsker added. "One day they make promises that the drugs will not be inspected or detained, while the next day an FDA official claims he will ';personally' inspect them to speed their entry in time for scheduled executions."
In related news, the ACLU learned that the CDCR has distributed to select individuals copies of laboratory test results of imported sodium thiopental obtained by the CDCR.
"We are shocked and puzzled that the CDCR has not given us these results which we asked for months ago. That is a violation of both the letter and spirit of the law. The people of California demand transparency and scrupulous adherence to the law when it comes to the maximum punishment. We want to know what they are hiding and why, especially if we are wasting $1 billion every five years to prop up the hollow promise of the death penalty in our state."
Since October 2010, the ACLU of Northern California has requested all public records relating to California's acquisition of lethal injection drugs. The ACLU specifically asked for all lab results in February 2011.
Learn more:
