News groups suing over keeping part of executions secret
With the prospect of executions resuming in California, news organizations are suing state prison officials for their plans to conceal some of the lethal injection process from reporters and witnesses, and to pull the curtain if the drugs fail to kill the condemned inmate.
The secrecy, under state regulations adopted last month by Gov. Jerry Brown’s Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, “serves no purpose other than suppressing important information about the execution process from the public and the press,” said the suit, filed Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco.
The plaintiffs are the Los Angeles Times,
public broadcaster KQED and the San Francisco Progressive Media Center, publisher of the online journal 48hills.org.
“The press serves as the eyes of the public,” said Linda Lye of the American Civil Liberties Union, a lawyer for Progressive Media Center. “If the state is going to conduct executions, the media has a right to attend, observe and report on all aspects of the procedure, especially because the new protocol could give rise to complications and botched executions.”
Another attorney, Ajay Krishnan, said the courts “have ruled that executions are public proceedings.”
The lawyers noted that federal courts had struck down in 2002 a San Quentin policy of keeping the death chamber curtains closed while guards strapped the inmate down and inserted injection tubes.
The Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, which runs the prisons, declined to comment on the suit.
California’s last execution was in January 2006. A federal judge then ruled that flaws in staff training and lethal injection procedures had created an undue risk of a botched and agonizing execution. The state has revised its rules several times but has not yet won court approval.
A voter-approved ballot measure in 2016, however, prohibited further state regulatory review of new singledrug execution procedures, and the U.S. Supreme Court has sharply restricted inmates’ ability to challenge potentially painful execution methods. Of the 746 California prisoners on the nation’s largest Death Row, at least 21 have exhausted all appeals of their sentences, and unless Brown or his successor intervenes with commutations, executions are likely to resume within a year.
The lawsuit challenged state regulations that allow witnesses and reporters to observe the Lethal Injection Room in San Quentin, where the inmate is strapped to a gurney, but block their view of the Infusion Control Room, where the chemicals are prepared and injected into tubes that flow into the inmate’s body.
That prevents the viewers from seeing which of two available drugs is being used for the execution, how it is prepared and administered, how many doses are used, how the inmate reacts to each dose, and “how effectively and professionally the execution staff performed,” the suit said.
The state regulations also say that if the inmate has not died after three doses of the drug, the warden must stop the execution and call for medical help for the inmate. At that point, the curtains on the viewing windows are closed, the sound system is turned off, and the witnesses are led away.
“The public is thereby prevented from observing (prison officials’) response when the execution does not proceed as intended,” the suit said. “California must not execute Death Row inmates in a manner that violates the First Amendment rights of the press and the public.”