DPIC Releases New Report, ​“Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States”

The Death Penalty Information Center has released a major new report, Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States, exam­in­ing the scope and con­se­quences of secre­cy in the appli­ca­tion of the death penal­ty in the United States. 

The report, released on November 20, 2018, tells the sto­ry of the expan­sion of exe­cu­tion secre­cy and the ques­tion­able prac­tices that states have attempt­ed to keep from pub­lic view. It details how, in their efforts to obtain exe­cu­tion drugs, states have used secre­cy laws to con­ceal evi­dence that they have bro­ken state and fed­er­al laws, delib­er­ate­ly induced con­tract breach­es, lied to or mis­led legit­i­mate drug sup­pli­ers, con­tract­ed with shady inter­na­tion­al sup­pli­ers and ques­tion­able domes­tic phar­ma­cies, and swapped drugs with each oth­er with­out prop­er stor­age and trans­port con­trols. As a result, an increas­ing num­ber of exe­cu­tions have been botched: in 2017, more than 60% of exe­cu­tions car­ried out with mida­zo­lam pro­duced eye­wit­ness accounts of the exe­cu­tion going amiss. 

The report also describes how secre­cy laws have under­mined the reli­a­bil­i­ty and legit­i­ma­cy of court pro­ceed­ings in which pris­on­ers have chal­lenged state exe­cu­tion prac­tices as vio­lat­ing the Constitution’s ban on cru­el or unusu­al pun­ish­ments. ​“State offi­cials have sup­pressed infor­ma­tion that could prove pris­on­ers’ claims while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly argu­ing those claims should be reject­ed because they are unproven,” the report explains. 

“Over and over again, states have vio­lat­ed the law in the name of car­ry­ing out the law,” DPIC Executive Director Robert Dunham said. ​“And when the pub­lic has uncov­ered infor­ma­tion the states have tried to con­ceal, it has exposed an ever-expand­ing scope of mis­con­duct and incom­pe­tence. ​‘Trust me, I’m the Government,’ is not an accept­able jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for execution secrecy.”