TEXAS – On Tuesday, April 19, Alabama turned over its supplies of sodium thiopental to the Drug Enforcement Administration, becoming the latest state to face setbacks due to a nationwide shortage of the drug. Georgia, Tennessee and Kentucky have also relinquished their supplies amid claims from attorneys for death-row inmates that states acquired the drug in violation of federal import laws.
TEXAS – A Texas man became the state’s first inmate put to death using a new three-drug cocktail. Cary Kerr, 46, expressed love and thanks to friends and relatives, then insisted he wasn’t responsible for the crime outside Fort Worth. “I am an innocent man,” Kerr said. “Never trust a court-appointed attorney.” The three-drug cocktail in his lethal injection used the sedative pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental. Texas recently switched because sodium thiopental is no longer available. Pentobarbital had already been used for recent executions in Oklahoma and Ohio and survived legal challenges there. He was pronounced dead at 6:19 p.m. CDT, nine minutes after the drugs began flowing into his arms.
SACRAMENTO – California state senators are proposing to do away with the prison system’s watchdog, the inspector general’s office. It has exposed poor practices in the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, investigated wrongdoing by employees, and serves as one of the few checks on a federal court-appointed receiver who controls inmate medical care. Critics in the Senate say it has also been slow to react and has grown too cozy with the department it oversees. “You had some pretty bad things going on in CDCR and the inspector general just missed them,” said Sen. Ted Lieu, D-Torrance. Lieu’s proposed legislation would transfer prison audits to the Bureau of State Audits.
SACRAMENTO – Governor Brown has reviewed 130 decisions by the Board of Parole Hearings granting release to murderers sentenced to life with possible parole and has approved 106, or 81 percent, according to the governor’s office. He has vetoed 22 paroles and sent two back to the board for new hearings. “I’m obviously going to interfere less with the parole board than my predecessors, because I’m bound to follow the law,” Brown said. And the statistics from his first four months in office bear him out. Former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved about 30 percent of lifers’ paroles. Schwarzenegger’s predecessor, Gray Davis – who declared early in his term that “if you take someone else’s life, forget it”, – vetoed 98 percent of murderers’ parole cases he considered.
SACRAMENTO – Terry Lane, a former California correctional officer, was sentenced to 45 days in jail Friday for smuggling cell phones to state prison inmates. He was fined $5,700, which the Sacramento County district attorney’s office said is the amount of bribes he accepted from inmates for bringing in the phones. He also was placed on three years’ probation. Prosecutors charged that he had brought in multiple phones over a three-month period. Lane, 25, of San Jose, pleaded guilty Friday to felony conspiracy to aid a state inmate’s unauthorized communication. The conspiracy charge carried a maximum sentence of three years in state prison. Possessing a cell phone behind bars violates prison rules but is not illegal. Inmates can lose early release credits, and employees caught smuggling phones can lose their jobs.
SACRAMENTO – Medical care remains below acceptable levels in more than two-thirds of California state prisons despite the billions of dollars spent by taxpayers, the prison system’s independent inspector said in a report Wednesday.