Three southern states have taken action to limit the public’s access to information relating to executions by increasing secrecy surrounding lethal-injection drug suppliers. On April 12, 2019, the Texas Supreme Court reversed an earlier decision that would have disclosed the source of lethal-injection drugs used to carry out executions in Texas in 2014, asserting that disclosure “would create a substantial threat of physical harm to the source’s employees and others.” On April 9, Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson signed into law one of the most expansive and punitive execution secrecy laws in the nation, concealing the identity of lethal-injection drug suppliers from the public and criminalizing disclosure of execution-related information. Act 810 exempts lethal-injection records from the state’s Freedom of Information Act and makes the intentional or reckless disclosure of the exempted information a felony. In Louisiana, amidst partisan feuding over the reasons the state has not carried out executions, a bill that would make secret the source of execution drugs was referred to the House Committee on Administration of Criminal Justice on April 8, the first day of the 2019 Louisiana state legislative session. Democratic Governor John Bel Edwards, who voted against a similar bill five years ago while serving as a state legislator, indicated that he would likely sign the measure. Louisiana’s legislature is also considering two bills that would abolish capital punishment.

The Texas Supreme Court decision marked the culmination of several years of litigation over the state’s lethal-injection secrecy policy. A Texas district court and a state court of appeals both ordered disclosure of the drug supplier’s identity, and the Supreme Court initially upheld those lower court rulings. The state asked for a rehearing, arguing that disclosure would have “potentially devastating consequences” to public safety. The rehearing took place after BuzzFeed News revealed through investigative reporting that the state had obtained lethal-injection drugs from Greenpark Compounding Pharmacy, a Houston based compounding pharmacy with a history of safety violations. When the compounder’s identity was revealed, activists peacefully protested outside the pharmacy. Attorney Ari Cuenin, arguing for the state, said that protests, along with alleged threats, had convinced pharmacies not to provide drugs to the state. The state called the pharmacy a “soft target” in an “urban area, whose only defense is its anonymity.”

A number of states have asserted that anti-death-penalty activists have intimidated pharmacies and major pharmaceutical companies into refusing to supply drugs for executions and have argued in legislative debates and in litigation that these alleged threats justify execution secrecy. In its secrecy bill, the Arkansas legislature alleged without evidence that “there is a well-documented guerilla war being waged against the death penalty” and that “[a]nti-death penalty advocates have pressured pharmaceutical companies to refuse to supply the drugs used by states to carry out death sentences.” In fact, calling the use of their medicines in execution contrary to their medical mission, several drug companies have sued Arkansas or filed friend-of-the-court briefs alleging that the state engaged in misrepresentations and subterfuge to improperly obtain their drugs. Independent media and law enforcement investigations have concluded that the alleged threats against drug manufacturers and suppliers have been unfounded or grossly exaggerated. A 2016 BuzzFeed News investigation revealed that FBI records debunked an alleged threat that Texas and Ohio claimed established the need for secrecy. That supposed threat was an email from a university professor who provided his name and phone number and warned an Oklahoma pharmacy to take safety precautions. The email was one of three pieces of evidence, along with a blog post and comments left on the website of a previous supplier, that the Texas court relied on in its decision. “There is no evidence of a history of specific threats to that particular pharmacist or pharmacy because the source's identity has been kept confidential,” the court wrote. “Thus, the question before us in this case is whether the mere fact that the public knows that the Department is receiving lethal injection drugs from some source, whoever it might be, is enough to conclude that a substantial threat of physical harm will come to bear on the source of the drugs if the identifying information is made public.”

A civilian federal appeals court has dealt another blow to the Guantánamo military commission death-penalty proceedings, striking more than two years of decisions in the USS Cole bombing prosecution of Abd Al-Rahim Hussein Muhammed Al-Nashiri because of a military judge’s undisclosed conflict of interest. Al-Nashiri faces capital charges for his alleged role in the suicide bombing attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in October 2000 in which 17 U.S. Navy sailors were killed and another 39 were injured.

A unanimous three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit issued a writ of mandamus vacating all orders issued by Colonel Vance Spath (pictured) between November 19, 2015 and his retirement in 2018 because Spath had not disclosed to defense counsel that he had applied for employment with the Department of Justice (DOJ) as an immigration judge while continuing to preside over pretrial proceedings against Al-Nashiri, who is being prosecuted by the DOJ. During the time period in which he was seeking employment with the DOJ, Spath issued numerous oral rulings from the bench and more than 450 written orders. The panel wrote that “[r]equiring Al-Nashiri to proceed under the long shadow of all those orders, even if enforced by a new, impartial military judge, would inflict an irreparable injury unfixable on direct review. Al-Nashiri thus has no adequate remedy for Spath’s conduct other than to scrub Spath’s orders from the case at the earliest opportunity.” The court, which has appellate authority over the Guantánamo U.S. military commissions, also vacated all military appeals decisions by the United States Court of Military Commission Review involving orders issued by Spath.

The long-delayed Guantánamo military commission proceedings against Al-Nashiri have been beset by controversy. Captured in 2002, Al-Nashiri was subjected to 14 years of "physical, psychological and sexual torture" in secret CIA-run detention centers. His lawyers unsuccessfully sought to have him tried in civilian court rather than in a military tribunal as a result of the torture. In October 2017, after Spath refused to allow Al-Nashiri’s defense lawyers to investigate the discovery of eavesdropping devices in a meeting room reserved for attorney-client communications, his entire civilian legal team resigned from the case. Judge Spath then held Brigadier General John Baker, the Chief Defense Counsel for the Military Commissions Defense Organization, in contempt after Baker said he had lost confidence in the integrity of “all potential attorney-client meeting locations” at Guantánamo and refused to reverse his decision authorizing the defense team to withdraw. The civilian Convening Authority of the Guantánamo tribunals, Harvey Rishikof, then intervened to release Baker from detention. The resignations left Al-Nashiri's defense solely in the hands of a single military lawyer, Navy Lt. Alaric Piette, who had never tried a murder case. Spath repeatedly denied Piette’s request for a continuance until expert death-penalty counsel could be appointed, instead telling Piette to “engage in self help” by attending special training to become “more comfortable handling capital matters.” Then, in February 2018, Spate indefinitely halted all pretrial proceedings in the case, and in July 2018 announced his retirement from military service. A Freedom of Information Act request by reporter Carol Rosenberg discovered that Spath had been seeking to become a DoJ immigration judge during this period.

In vacating Spath’s rulings, the federal appeals court wrote: “We do not take lightly the crimes that Al-Nashiri stands accused of committing. To the contrary, the seriousness of those alleged offenses and the gravity of the penalty they may carry make the need for an unimpeachable adjudicator all the more important.”

In a contentious ruling issued in the early morning hours of April 12, 2019, the U.S. Supreme Court vacated a stay of execution issued by lower federal courts and cleared the way for Alabama to execute Christopher Price (pictured). The Court’s 5-4 decision, issued after 2:00 a.m. Eastern time, came after Alabama had postponed Price’s execution minutes before the midnight Central time expiration of his death warrant, with the lower court stay of execution still in effect. Joined by the three other liberal and moderate justices, Justice Breyer authored a scathing dissent that exposed sharp divisions in the Court over the manner in which it considers execution-related challenges in death-penalty cases.

Scheduled to be executed April 11, Price challenged Alabama’s lethal-injection protocol as unnecessarily torturous and –as required by Supreme Court case law – proposed an alternative method of execution. Price selected nitrogen hypoxia, the alternative method of execution made available in Alabama’s death-penalty statute. The Alabama Attorney General’s office opposed Price’s motion, arguing that lethal gas was not available to Price because he had failed to select it during the 30-day window created when Alabama added lethal gas to its execution statute. The district court agreed and denied Price’s claim, prompting an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit. The circuit court ruled that once Alabama had codified lethal gas as an alternative method of execution under its statute, it could not claim that gas was unavailable to execute Price. However, the circuit court rejected Price’s stay motion, saying he had failed to meet the additional burden imposed by the U.S. Supreme Court that he prove that execution by nitrogen hypoxia would significantly reduce the risk of unnecessarily severe pain during the execution.

Following the 11th Circuit’s ruling, Price returned to the district court with uncontroverted affidavits from medical experts who said nitrogen gas posed a significantly reduced risk of severe pain compared to the state’s lethal-injection protocol. Based on this evidence, the federal district court granted Price a stay of execution. Later in the day, without ruling on the merits of the district court’s order, the 11th Circuit imposed its own stay of execution to consider jurisdictional issues presented by the district court stay. Alabama then filed an emergency motion in the U.S. Supreme Court seeking to vacate the stay, leading to the overnight ruling by the Court.

In a one-paragraph order vacating the stay, the majority said that Price had not timely selected lethal gas during a 30-day window created when Alabama added lethal gas to its execution statute and then waited until February 2019 to challenge the state’s method of execution. As a result, the majority viewed Price’s lawsuit and pre-execution filings as untimely. Justice Stephen Breyer – joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan – wrote an impassioned dissent. “Should anyone doubt that death sentences in the United States can be carried out in an arbitrary way,” he wrote, “let that person review the … circumstances as they have been presented to our Court this evening.” Breyer highlighted the uncontested evidence presented in the courts below: that Alabama’s lethal injection protocol will likely cause Price “severe pain and needless suffering”; that lethal gas is a readily available method, and that lethal gas is likely less painful than Alabama’s lethal injection protocol. Breyer also criticized the majority’s substitution of its judgment for the district court’s finding that Price had been “proceeding as quickly as possible on this issue since before the execution date was set” and was not attempting “to manipulate the execution.” Breyer expressed deep concern for the majority’s insistence on vacating a stay despite his request to consider the issue at a prescheduled conference to be attended by all the justices that morning. “To proceed in this way calls into question the basic principles of fairness that should underlie our criminal justice system,” Breyer wrote.

Alabama has not yet set a new execution date.

The Missouri Supreme Court has ordered a new sentencing trial for Marvin D. Rice (pictured), a former sheriff’s deputy whose trial judge sentenced him to death despite the votes of 11 of his 12 jurors to sentence him to life. On April 2, 2019, the court vacated the death sentence imposed by St. Charles County Judge Kelly Wayne Parker in 2017 under the state’s controversial “hung jury” sentencing provision. Under that law, the trial judge has authority to independently evaluate the evidence and determine the sentence to be imposed whenever the jury vote for life or death is not unanimous. Rice, a former Dent County deputy sheriff and state correctional officer, was charged with murdering his ex-girlfriend, Annette Durham, during a custody dispute over their son and killing her boyfriend, Steven Strotkamp. The jury convicted Rice of capital murder for killing Durham but was deemed hung when a single juror held out for death. It convicted him of second-degree murder in Strotkamp’s death and agreed to a life sentence for that murder. Parker disregarded the jury’s vote and imposed the death penalty for Durham’s murder.

No state in the United States authorizes a judge to override a jury's recommendation of a life sentence and all three states that previously permitted the practice ended it in the past three years. Missouri law, however, considers a non-unanimous vote a nullity rather than a recommendation, entrusting the sentencing decision to the judge. Rice challenged the constitutionality of the statute under the U.S. Supreme Court’s January 2016 ruling in Hurst v. Florida that “[t]he Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death.” Rice also argued that the prosecutor’s repeated comments about his decision not to testify at trial violated the Fifth Amendment, which bars the use of a defendant’s silence against him. The Missouri court granted a new sentencing trial on the Fifth Amendment issue, avoiding having to decide the constitutionality of the state statute.

No jury has sentenced anyone to death in Missouri since 2013. However, since that time, Missouri judges have sentenced two defendants to death under the hung jury provision. In addition to Dent, a trial judge sentenced Craig Wood to death in 2018 after his jury split 10-2 in favor of a death sentence. As in Dent’s case, Wood’s lawyers have argued that allowing a judge to impose a death sentence when a jury does not reach a unanimous sentencing decision is unconstitutional. In 2016, the Florida Supreme Court and the Delaware Supreme Court struck down provisions in their death-penalty laws permitting judges to impose death sentences based upon non-unanimous jury recommendations for death. Alabama still permits that practice if ten or more jurors have voted for death.