“You guys in AZ are life-savers,” Scott Kernan, California’s undersecretary for Corrections and Rehabilitation said in an email to his Arizona counterpart Charles Flanagan after taking delivery from him of a small amount of the knock-out drug sodium thiopental. “Buy you a beer next time I get that way.”
Scott Kernan was arrested in 2009 for suspicion of drunk driving. Kernan started work for the agency in 1983 as a correctional officer and later worked as a warden.
Go here to read a bunch of emails from California prison officials to various places around the US and abroad trying to get a supply of lethal injection drugs. At one point, they complain about Texas not sharing its supply of drugs. The emails were obtained by the ACLU of Northern California through a public information request.
From the ACLUNC website:
On November 17, 2010, the ACLU-NC filed a suit under the California Public Records Act to demand records from the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) about its recent acquisition of sodium thiopental, a controlled substance used as part of California’s lethal injection protocol for executing death row inmates.
On December 8, 2010 the ACLU-NC received documents from the CDCR, which we have scanned and provided here in batches of about 50 pages. All documents are posted as received from the CDCR, in the order received, with the following exceptions: