New Revelations Regarding the Virginia Execution Tapes Now Largely Removed from Public Viewing

Over a decade ago, four audio tapes and hun­dreds of exe­cu­tion doc­u­ments were donat­ed to the Library of the University of Virginia by a for­mer Virginia cor­rec­tion­al employ­ee. National Public Radio (NPR) aired excerpts from those long-hid­den tapes in January 2023. Shortly there­after, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from the Virginia Department of Corrections (VDOC) then request­ed the return of all the mate­ri­als. NPR now reports that only two of the six box­es of mate­r­i­al remain avail­able for view­ing at the prison, by way of a pub­lic records request. The entire­ty of the four tapes pre­vi­ous­ly aired by NPR can be heard in full on NPR’s web­site, as well as doc­u­ments that jour­nal­ists pho­tographed pri­or to the doc­u­ments’ removal.

Among the doc­u­ments NPR recent­ly shared with the pub­lic are a col­lec­tion of Polaroid pho­tos (pic­tured) tak­en pri­or to a prisoner’s exe­cu­tion, legal mem­os, autop­sy reports, court records, death cer­tifi­cates, and hand­writ­ten notes. Originally kept secret due to pur­port­ed con­cerns that activists would use them to stop future exe­cu­tions, a rep­re­sen­ta­tive from VDOC told NPR via email that the files con­tain ​“sen­si­tive health, secu­ri­ty, and per­son­nel infor­ma­tion about for­mer inmates, vic­tims, and VADOC employ­ees, which makes them pri­vate in nature.” 

According to NPR, their inves­ti­ga­tion ​“can now reveal the tapes show the prison neglect­ed to record key evi­dence dur­ing what was con­sid­ered one of Virginia’s worst exe­cu­tions, and staff appeared unpre­pared for some of the jobs they were tasked to do in the death chamber.”