In his Sidebar col­umn in the N.Y. Times, Supreme Court reporter Adam Liptak recent­ly dis­cussed the con­cerns about states deny­ing death row inmates infor­ma­tion about how they will be exe­cut­ed. Liptak high­light­ed the recent exe­cu­tion of Michael Taylor in Missouri, where the state has made the phar­ma­cy pro­vid­ing the drugs for lethal injec­tion part of its ​“exe­cu­tion team,” thus obscur­ing any fail­ings the phar­ma­cy may have. This secre­tive approach drew crit­i­cism from a minor­i­ty of judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, and a dis­sent from three Justices of the U.S. Supreme Court. Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have grant­ed Taylor a stay of exe­cu­tion to con­sid­er his due process rights to infor­ma­tion about the state’s method for killing him. As Liptak said, “[I]t is hard to see how death row inmates can argue that a giv­en method of exe­cu­tion vio­lates the Eighth Amendment’s pro­hi­bi­tion of cru­el and unusu­al pun­ish­ment if they are barred from know­ing what the method is.” Though Taylor was exe­cut­ed, oth­er death row inmates are rais­ing sim­i­lar claims that may come before the Supreme Court.

(A. Liptak, ​“Deciding if Inmates Get to Know How They’ll Be Executed,” New York Times, March 10, 2014). See U.S. Supreme Court and Lethal Injection.

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