Virginia Increases Execution Secrecy After Difficulty Setting IV in Last Execution

After prison per­son­nel took more than a half hour to set the IV line dur­ing Virginia​’s January 18 exe­cu­tion of Ricky Gray, the Commonwealth’s Department of Corrections has changed its exe­cu­tion pro­ce­dures to con­duct more of the exe­cu­tion prepa­ra­tions out of view of witnesses. 

Prior to the change, wit­ness­es watched as the pris­on­er entered the exe­cu­tion cham­ber and was strapped to the gur­ney. A cur­tain was closed while staff placed intra­venous lines and elec­trodes for a car­diac mon­i­tor, then reopened when the exe­cu­tion was ready to be carried out. 

The cur­tain was closed for 33 min­utes dur­ing Gray’s exe­cu­tion, rais­ing con­cerns that some­thing had gone wrong in the place­ment of the IV. The ACLU of Virginia said, ​“the length of time Gray was behind the cur­tain, as well as the pres­ence of a doc­tor who con­firmed his death using a stetho­scope rather than by view­ing a heart mon­i­tor as the pre­vi­ous pro­to­cols required, sug­gest some­thing unusu­al hap­pened dur­ing the process of killing him.”

Under the new pro­to­col, wit­ness­es will no longer be able to view the pris­on­er enter­ing the cham­ber, so they will not know when the process begins. 

In 2015, the American Bar Association adopt­ed an Execution Transparency Resolution call­ing for exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols to be pro­mul­gat­ed ​“in an open and trans­par­ent man­ner” and to ​“require that an exe­cu­tion process, includ­ing the process of set­ting IVs, be view­able by media and oth­er wit­ness­es from the moment the con­demned pris­on­er enters the exe­cu­tion cham­ber until the pris­on­er is declared dead or the exe­cu­tion is called off.” In response to the Commonwealth’s change in pol­i­cy, the ACLU of Virginia urged Governor Terry McAuliffe to halt all pend­ing exe­cu­tions and ini­ti­ate a pub­lic review of the execution protocol. 

“It seems that, when con­front­ed with ques­tions and crit­i­cism over issues with the writ­ten pro­to­cols and actu­al prac­tice of exe­cut­ing peo­ple in Virginia, the DOC and the administration’s pos­ture is to ignore these con­cerns and then tight­en the veil of secre­cy even fur­ther to avoid uncom­fort­able ques­tions in the future,” the ACLU stat­ed in a let­ter to the gov­er­nor. The Virginia ACLU’s Director of Public Policy and Communications, Bill Farrar, told WVIR-TV, ​“We have secrets upon secrets upon secrets with Virginia’s process of exe­cut­ing peo­ple in this state and it needs to stop.”