On December 18, Joseph Corcoran is scheduled to be the first person executed by Indiana officials in 15 years. For the first time, the state will use a single drug, pentobarbital, which comes from an unknown source and has been known to cause prisoners “excruciating” pain during executions. But no media witnesses will be present to relay what happens to the public. Indiana is an outlier in its policy decision to completely exclude the press from witnessing executions in the state. But a survey by the Death Penalty Information Center finds that many states now significantly restrict whether and how members of the press may observe and document the execution process.
Unobstructed media access to executions is critical because the media observes what the public cannot. States generally prohibit citizens from attending executions, so the media becomes the public’s watchdog, providing important information about how the government is following the law and using taxpayer funds. “We’re the ones that are there as the eyes and ears of the public, and we’re there to ensure that the state does it correctly,” said Rhonda Cook, a reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who has witnessed 28 executions. Without journalists seeing and hearing every step of the process, the public can only rely on official state accounts, which often refuse to acknowledge problems regardless of the evidence. For instance, without journalists reporting that Alan Miller was “jerking and shaking” and lifting his head off the gurney as he gasped for breath for over five minutes during his September 26 execution by nitrogen gas, the public would only have heard Alabama officials’ incredulous assurance that the execution went “as planned” and was “humane and effective.”
