The execution process in Indiana and Missouri may become more transparent as a result of public-access lawsuits filed in the two states. In Indiana, a Marion County trial judge ruled on November 30, 2018 that the state must release pre-2017 records concerning the drugs obtained by the state for executions and the companies that produced them. Three days earlier, the ACLU of Missouri announced the settlement of a lawsuit filed on behalf of investigative journalist Chris McDaniel that ensured that the Missouri Department of Corrections could no longer retaliate against reporters or news outlets by excluding them from witnessing executions.

The Indiana ruling came in a public records suit brought by a lawyer, A. Katherine Toomey, in which Circuit Court Judge Sheryl Lynch had previously ordered the state to disclose documents on the details of Indiana’s execution protocol. To evade compliance with the court’s 2016 order, at 2 a.m. on the final day of the 2017 legislative session, the legislature inserted a two-page secrecy provision into the state 175-page budget bill. That provision exempted the records Toomey had sought from public disclosure. David Dickmeyer, arguing on behalf of the state, told Judge Lynch that the new law constituted a “special circumstance” requiring the court to change her prior ruling. The secrecy provision was necessary, he asserted, because releasing the records would subject the state’s drug supplier to “public shaming, public protests, hate mail and lawsuits.” Judge Lynch disagreed, writing, "The General Assembly may not change the result of [the public records] litigation. While other requests may be precluded by the Statute, blocking Toomey’s request after this Court had already ordered the Department to produce the documents violates ... Indiana’s Constitution.”

The Missouri litigation challenged the state’s procedure for designating execution witnesses, which granted the director of the Department of Corrections sole discretion to select media witnesses. McDaniel—who as a reporter for St. Louis Public Radio and then BuzzFeed News had exposed questionable conduct by the Missouri Department of Corrections and reported that the state’s previously secret drug supplier had committed more than 1,800 health and safety violations—had applied to be a media witness for 17 executions. The corrections department ignored the applications and provided no reason for refusing to select McDaniel as a witness. In announcing the settlement, the ACLU of Missouri, which represented McDaniel, said: “The government cannot give or deny access to a reporter based on government officials’ feelings about an individual’s reporting.” Under the settlement, media witnesses will now include reporters designated by the Associated Press, the Missouri Broadcaster’s Association, and the Missouri Press Association, along with a fourth reporter from a local agency. “Executing inmates is the most serious power state governments have,” said McDaniel. “And the public has a right to know the details of how the government is using that power.”

An op-ed by Los Angeles Times opinion writer Scott Martelle took issue with the secrecy surrounding recent U.S. executions. “Secrecy advocates argue that the drugmakers must remain in the shadows to keep opponents of the death penalty from protesting them,” wrote Martelle. “In other words, if the states can’t conduct the people’s business in secret, the people might rise in opposition to the business the state is conducting. So much for open governments and public accountability.” The op-ed cited McDaniel’s investigation of the safety violations committed by the compounding pharmacy that produces Texas’s lethal-injection drugs and DPIC’s report on secrecy, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States. “Remember, executions are conducted in the name of the people, who have a right to know how the state performs the abominable act. This retreat into secrecy is an act of shame, not openness,” Martelle wrote.

Texas plans to execute Joseph Garcia on December 4, 2018, for the murder of a police officer during a robbery in which Garcia neither killed anyone nor intended or expected that a killing would take place. His case renews questions about a Texas law called the “law of parties” that allows defendants to be sentenced to death based upon the actions and intent of others, if the defendant played even a small role in a crime that resulted in someone’s death.

Garcia was one of the “Texas 7,” a group of men who escaped from a maximum-security Texas prison on December 13, 2000. After escaping, the men robbed a sporting goods store, where some of the men were confronted by police officer Aubrey Hawkins. Garcia graphically described the robbery in a radio interview with David Martin Davies for the Texas Public Radio program, Texas Matters. Garcia admitted to participating in the escape and the robbery but insisted he never fired his gun and was still inside the store when he heard gunfire break out. He tried to stop the shooting, and during the confusion in which Officer Hawkins was killed, Garcia himself came under fire by others in the group. “I don't know what caused them to start firing at the officer. By the time I got out there on the back dock, it was over,” he said.

Under Texas’s law of parties, accomplices who participated in one felony can be held responsible for other felonies committed by other participants. Since Garcia participated in robbing the store, he was eligible to be charged with the capital murder of Officer Hawkins, whether or not he fired a gun. In the Texas Matters interview from death row, Garcia questioned the reasoning behind his death sentence. “Why am I here? Why am I on death row? You know, I don't get it,” Garcia said. “Why are you trying to kill me for the actions of somebody else?”

Texas Rep. Harold Dutton (D – Houston) has filed legislation to end the law of parties. “We shouldn’t use the law of parties to convict anybody of capital murder,” he said. “I think we ought to reserve that for the person who actually did the murder.” Garcia’s lawyers have challenged the constitutionality of executing a person who neither killed nor intended that a killing take place. Texas prosecutors have argued that the Supreme Court should not hear the issue because Garcia’s prior lawyers should have raised the issue years ago. Three of the Texas 7 have already been executed, and a fourth killed himself to avoid capture.

Twenty months after the Unites States Supreme Court unanimously struck down Texas’s non-scientific standard for evaluating intellectual disability in death penalty cases, the landmark case in which it made that decision is back before the Court. On December 7, 2018, the Court will conference Moore v. Texas, to decide if it will review whether the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals (CCA) once again unconstitutionally relied on lay stereotypes and non-clinical criteria in rejecting Bobby James Moore’s claim that he is not subject to the death penalty because he is intellectually disabled. A diverse group of prominent voices, including the district attorney’s office that originally prosecuted Moore, argue that Moore clearly satisfies the clinical definitions of intellectual disability and may not be executed.

Sentenced to death more than 38 years ago, Moore has a long history of intellectual and adaptive impairments that have been documented since his childhood, including IQ scores ranging from the low 50s to the low 70s. The American Psychological Association and American Bar Association filed briefs on November 7 supporting Moore’s claim and the urging the Supreme Court to again reverse the Texas court. They were joined by a group of prominent conservatives—including former Solicitor General Kenneth Starr, Congressman Bob Barr, conservative strategist Richard Viguerie, and David A. Keene, the longtime chair of the National Conservative Union, among others—whose brief, also filed November 7, described the Texas court’s decision as a threat to the integrity of the judicial process. They wrote: “Quoting a Supreme Court decision highlighting the errors made by the CCA in its previous review of this case, but proceeding to make those same errors on remand, is inimical to the rule of law.”

Moore initially presented his claim that he is intellectually disabled and therefore ineligible for the death penalty under the 2002 U.S. Supreme Court ruling Atkins v. Virginia to a Harris County, Texas trial court. Following contemporary medical diagnostic criteria, the court agreed that Moore was intellectual disabled and ruled that his death sentence should be vacated. However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals reversed, applying an idiosyncratic standard based on unscientific stereotypes, including the behavior of a fictional character from the novel Of Mice and Men. After the U.S. Supreme Court reversed and remanded for a new decision “informed by the medical community’s diagnostic framework,” the Harris County District Attorney’s office conceded that Moore qualified as intellectually disabled. Nonetheless, in a ruling three dissenters criticized as an “outlier,” a sharply divided (5-3) Texas Court of Criminal Appeals in June 2018 again upheld Moore’s death sentence.

In a November 28 op-ed in The Washington Post, Starr, who served as United States Solicitor General under President George H.W. Bush from 1989-1993, urged the Supreme Court to “save[] Bobby Moore from execution … again.” Starr wrote, “The job of a judge is to follow the law … [and] carefully apply the precedent of the Supreme Court. … If the system were working as it should, Moore’s case would have been a routine matter of the Texas court applying the Supreme Court’s decision and current medical standards as directed and prohibiting Moore’s execution.” Quoting then-U.S. appeals court Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, Starr said: “As a lower court in a system of absolute vertical stare decisis headed by one Supreme Court, it is essential that we follow both the words and the music of Supreme Court decisions.”

Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver also asked the Supreme Court to block Moore’s execution. In a November 19 op-ed in the Los Angeles Times, Shriver criticized the Texas court’s reasoning as “absurd, wrong and harmful.” “But most important,” Shriver wrote, the standard the court applied was “not how the medical community diagnoses intellectual disability…. Pervasive stereotypes about intellectual disability are inaccurate and harmful. In this Texas court case, they are a matter of life or death. Let’s finally recognize the complexity of people with intellectual disability,” Shriver said. “The world will be much richer for it.”

As federal prosecutors dropped the death penalty against a Navajo man accused of killing a police officer on Navajo land, the U.S. Supreme Court heard argument in a separate case on the status of a treaty establishing the borders of the Creek Nation reservation that could determine whether Oklahoma has jurisdiction to carry out the death penalty against a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) tribe. The two cases highlight issues of Native American tribal sovereignty with potentially profound implications for the administration of capital punishment under state and federal death penalty laws.

On November 27, 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral argument in Carpenter v. Murphy, Oklahoma’s appeal of a lower federal court decision that overturned the conviction and death sentence of Patrick Murphy, a citizen of the Creek Nation, for a murder the federal court ruled was committed in Indian Country, on lands within the boundaries of the Creek Nation reservation established by treaty in 1866. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit ruled in August 2017 that because the homicide with which Murphy was charged “was committed in Indian country, the Oklahoma state courts lacked jurisdiction to try him.” Under the federal Major Crimes Act, the court said, Murphy could be prosecuted by federal authorities, but not by the state. Because of tribal opposition to the death penalty, Murphy would not face capital prosecution under the act. Muscogee (Creek) Nation Principal Chief James Floyd hailed the Circuit court’s decision as “affirm[ing] the right of the Nation and all other Indian Nations to make and enforce their own laws within their own boundaries.”

In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only Congress had authority to disestablish or diminish an Indian reservation. Congress has never explicitly disestablished the Creek reservation. However, Oklahoma appealed the court’s ruling, arguing that the admission of Oklahoma into the Union in 1907 superseded the treaty and disestablished the reservation. Arguing for Murphy, Ian Gershengorn told the Court that the tribe has never ceded authority over the lands and “for the last 40 years, … when the Creek Nation adopted a constitution in 1979, they asserted political jurisdiction to the extent of their 1900 boundaries.” The Court’s decision in the case could affect criminal prosecutions in an 11-county region of eastern Oklahoma.

In New Mexico, federal prosecutors on November 19 withdrew their notice of intent to seek the death penalty against Kirby Cleveland in the killing of a tribal police officer. In January 2018, U.S. attorneys announced they would capitally prosecute Cleveland, prompting opposition from the Navajo Nation, which holds the official position that “capital punishment is not an acceptable form of punishment.” Navajo Nation Attorney General Ethel Branch stated in a letter, “The death penalty is counter to the cultural beliefs and traditions of the Navajo People who value life and place a great emphasis on the restoration of harmony through restoration and individual attention.” The U.S. Attorney’s Office had argued that because the murder involved the death of a police officer, the tribe’s position was not binding on the federal government. The case was further complicated by the fact that the state of New Mexico abolished the death penalty in 2009, so a death-penalty prosecution was counter to the policy of the state in which the crime took place.