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California | San Quentin begins prison reform - but not for those on death row

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California is transferring everyone on death row at San Quentin prison to other places, as it tries to reinvent the state's most notorious facility as a rehabilitation centre. Many in this group will now have new freedoms. But they are also asking why they've been excluded from the reform - and whether they'll be safe in new prisons. Keith Doolin still remembers the day in 2019 when workers came to dismantle one of the United States' most infamous death chambers.

Missouri: Judge Rejects Execution Delay Over Use of Compounded Drug

Lawyers for a Missouri inmate said Monday that they would appeal a decision not to grant a delay in his execution, arguing that the drug to be used was likely to be substandard, and thus could cause him severe pain, because it was produced in a compounding pharmacy not subject to federal drug safety regulations.

The condemned man, Herbert Smulls, 54, is scheduled to be put to death on Wednesday for the 1991 killing of a jewelry store owner. The decision to deny the stay was handed down late Monday by a federal district judge in Kansas City.

In her decision, Judge Beth Phillips ruled that simply speculating about unknown dangers associated with the drug was not enough to prove that it would cause “needless suffering.” But the judge also acknowledged that it had been impossible for Mr. Smulls to find out more information, saying it “weighs heavily on the court.”

Mr. Smulls’s lawyers say that Missouri’s Department of Corrections procured the drug, pentobarbital, from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma and wanted more time for the pharmacy to be investigated.


Source: The New York Times, January 27, 2014

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