New Law to Allow Record Number of Executions in Total Secrecy

by Kerry-anne

The US state of Tennessee is seeking to execute record numbers of death row inmates this year, and a new law means these deaths will take place in almost total secrecy.

As the Times Free Press reports:

Never before has Tennessee asked to execute so many of the condemned.

Officials, believing they are free of the latest round of challenges to Tennessee's death penalty, recently asked the state Supreme Court for execution dates for 10 death row inmates.

The new law will keep almost all of the details of these state sanctioned killings secret to the public, outside the reach of the media and even the Freedom of Information Act.  Basic details such as who put the inmate to death and the method of their execution will become privileged information.

As The Tennessean comments:

The state of Tennessee doesn't want you to know how it will kill the condemned.

It doesn't want you to know who will flip the switch, sending a lethal dose of pentobarbital through the veins of death row inmates. And it doesn't want you to know how it obtained that pentobarbital — which isn't available from any legal drug manufacturer — as well. State correction officials have even banned the media from visiting inmates on death row.

This new shroud of secrecy over Tennessee's death row was enabled by a law passed last year. But 11 death row inmates have sued the state, arguing that this information should remain in the public domain, as part of the critical role of citizen oversight of the death penalty.  In fact, advocates of transparency argue the sole purpose of this law is to keep those critical eyes away.

“Tennesseans should be concerned because these executions are ostensibly for them,” assistant public defender Kelley Henry, who represents several of the inmates, pointed out. “They are carried out in the name of the people.

“The people have a right to know that the Department of Corrections isn’t torturing citizens using public funds.”

The first of Tennessee’s 10 scheduled executions is set for April 22nd.

Tennessee is not alone in passing this kind of law.  Legislatures in Georgia, Oklahoma and Missouri all passed similar laws after manufacturers began refusing to sell traditional execution drugs to U.S. states in a public bid to end their complicity in the death penalty. New drugs have been criticized for being extremely cruel. In one case, it took an inmate 26 minutes to die an excruciating death.  The new laws will make it all but impossible for such details to come to light, and the advocacy of human beings being put to death by the state an ever more difficult task.

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