If Capital Punishment Is So Great, Why Are Death Penalty States So Shady About It?

Not proud of killing people who (may) have killed people to show killing people is wrong?

Lethal injection table. Photo: Ken Piorkowski, Creative Commons License

Last Wednesday, the state of Idaho tried and failed to execute 73-year-old Thomas Eugene Creech, a serial killer who was sentenced to death after killing a fellow inmate in 1981.

Also last Wednesday, the state of Texas successfully executed Ivan Cantu, widely believed to have actually been innocent.

One thing that both of these incidents have in common, aside from the fact that neither of them should have happened, is the lack of transparency regarding how the death penalty sausage is made. We don’t know where they get the drugs for lethal injections, the quality of those drugs, or who is inserting the IV, which means there is more or less zero accountability for how they go about trying to kill people.

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Both Idaho and Texas have secrecy laws surrounding the death penalty to ensure that those who participate in executing people don’t have to face any consequences, but these same laws also prevent any kind of quality control in these executions.

There have been at least 15 botched executions so far this century, most of which have been related to the lethal drugs not working as intended or because the people inserting the IV couldn’t figure out how.

Via AP:

Idaho long kept the identities of execution team members and drug suppliers secret but judges were still able to force disclosure of the information if it was relevant to lawsuits or appeals. The new law prohibits state officials from disclosing the information, even if under court order. […]

In Texas, condemned inmates sued in 2014 over the state’s refusal to provide information about execution drug suppliers that they said they needed to verify quality. In response, lawmakers banned the disclosure of such information, saying suppliers could face harm, and the Texas Supreme Court upheld the law in 2019.

The secrecy prevents the public from fully understanding how the death penalty is administered and unnecessarily complicates legal cases, said Deborah W. Denno, founding director of the Neuroscience and Law Center at Fordham Law School.

“If you’re confident in your product, you’re going to be very open and transparent,” she said. “Usually when people are secretive, that does not mean good things.”

You think?

The secrecy laws in Idaho were instituted after a judge forced the state to reveal the identity of a pharmacist who supplied them with lethal injection drugs. Nothing actually happened to this pharmacist, mind you. They were not threatened, they were just criticized by people who oppose the death penalty and think it should not exist.

At the time, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Greg Chaney (R-Caldwell), said that unless the laws were passed and “confidentiality” was granted to people and companies who participate in executions in order to prevent citizens from “naming and shaming” them, it would make it super hard for the state to kill people.

“As a functional matter, a ‘no’ vote on this ends the death penalty in Idaho; only firing squad and lethal injection are in our constitution as appropriate means of execution,” Chaney said.

And what does that tell you?

The fact is, consumers should have every damned right to know if people and companies are participating in something they find abhorrent. They should have every right to “name and shame” people who participate in executions — particularly those whose drugs or inability to insert an IV have led to executions being botched. Because most botched executions are not like Thomas Eugene Creech’s, in which the people inserting the IV just gave up and said “we can’t do this” because they couldn’t find a vein due to his age and the fact that he suffers from type 2 diabetes, hypertension, and edema. Many of them have involved excruciating pain over several hours, which some might say violates the Constitution. You know, that whole bit about how we’re not supposed to do “cruel and unusual punishment” to people?

But just to be clear, here: People are allowed not only to participate in capital punishment in secrecy, to prevent consumers from (fairly!) criticizing them, but they are also allowed to fuck up without consequences … and the states themselves are allowed to fuck up without consequences. That doesn’t seem right!

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I don’t think the death penalty should exist. I would very much like to avoid supporting any company involved with it, and I think I should have that right — just as I can decide to stop supporting businesses based on their political donations, their environmental record, the way they treat their workers, or just because the bears in their commercials are making toilet paper seem sexual in a way I find deeply unsettling. That is my right as a consumer.

It should also be the right of those condemned to die and their lawyers to be aware of the lethal injection supply chain, for the purposes of quality control. If these states can’t execute people without being shady about it, that seems like a them problem.

PREVIOUSLY:

US Government Simultaneously Very Good And Very Bad At Killing People

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Katie Hobbs Cancels Scheduled Execution Just Because Arizona Keeps Botching Them