Supreme Court Orders Alabama to Unseal Execution Documents

The U.S. Supreme Court has ordered the unseal­ing of court doc­u­ments relat­ed to Alabama​’s May 30, 2019 exe­cu­tion of Christopher Price. On June 24, the Court grant­ed a motion filed by National Public Radio (NPR) and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press (RCFP), to unseal all Supreme Court plead­ings in the case of Price v. Dunn, in which — based on redact­ed fil­ings — the Court per­mit­ted Price’s exe­cu­tion to pro­ceed. The Court did not issue an opin­ion in con­nec­tion with the order. 

Price had chal­lenged Alabama’s lethal-injec­tion pro­to­col, argu­ing that exe­cu­tion with the state’s mida­zo­lam-based three-drug exe­cu­tion pro­to­col was uncon­sti­tu­tion­al­ly tor­tur­ous and that nitro­gen hypox­ia was avail­able to the state as a less painful method of exe­cu­tion. Key doc­u­ments from Price’s lethal-injec­tion chal­lenge had been redact­ed, pre­vent­ing the media and the pub­lic from obtain­ing access to infor­ma­tion about Alabama’s exe­cu­tion pro­to­col and the lethal-injec­tion drugs it planned to use. Under the Supreme Court’s order, Alabama will have to release the redacted information. 

The motion filed by NPR and RCFP argued that unseal­ing the doc­u­ments was nec­es­sary to uphold demo­c­ra­t­ic prin­ci­ples. ​“Public scruti­ny of the courts is fun­da­men­tal to a demo­c­ra­t­ic state,” the motion said. “[P]roviding pub­lic access to the entire­ty of the brief­ing in this mat­ter fur­thers demo­c­ra­t­ic inter­ests in trans­paren­cy, judi­cial legit­i­ma­cy, and an informed citizenry.” 

The Alabama Department of Corrections did not oppose the jour­nal­ists’ motion, not­ing that orders by oth­er fed­er­al courts already ​“require the ADOC to dis­close its exe­cu­tion pro­to­col in sub­stan­tive part.” Those orders were issued after a group of media out­lets sued to unseal court records relat­ed to the con­fi­den­tial set­tle­ment of a civ­il-rights law­suit filed by Doyle Lee Hamm after Alabama failed for two-and-a-half hours to car­ry out his exe­cu­tion in February 2018. Alabama’s brief in response to the NPR motion assert­ed that the state had ini­tial­ly request­ed that the doc­u­ments be redact­ed ​“to keep con­fi­den­tial cer­tain infor­ma­tion that, if released, could pose a secu­ri­ty risk to the Alabama Department of Corrections (ADOC), its per­son­nel, inmates, and vis­i­tors to its facil­i­ties.” The state claimed that these secu­ri­ty con­cerns moti­vat­ed its past efforts to keep the con­tents its exe­cu­tion protocol secret. 

A num­ber of death-penal­ty states lim­it the infor­ma­tion that is pub­licly avail­able about their exe­cu­tion pro­to­cols. Other states, includ­ing Texas, Ohio, Mississippi, and Missouri, have also claimed that secre­cy is nec­es­sary for the secu­ri­ty of drug sup­pli­ers and mem­bers of the exe­cu­tion team. However, media inves­ti­ga­tions and FBI records have shown that claims of threats were false or greatly exaggerated. 

The Supreme Court did not issue an opin­ion with its order, but it has ruled in favor of judi­cial trans­paren­cy many times in the past, say­ing that access to court records ​“enhances the qual­i­ty and safe­guards the integri­ty of the fact-find­ing process” and allows ​“the pub­lic to par­tic­i­pate in and serve as a check upon the judi­cial process — an essen­tial com­po­nent in our struc­ture of self-gov­ern­ment.” In 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts proud­ly called the judi­cia­ry ​“the most trans­par­ent branch in government.”