Here's The Bizarre Secrecy Law That Oklahoma Passed So It Can Keep Executing People
Apr 30, 2014, 22:38 IST
The identity of all persons who participate in or administer the execution process and persons who supply the drugs, medical supplies or medical equipment for the execution shall be confidential and shall not be subject to discovery in any civil or communal proceedings.
Amid growing opposition to the death penalty in recent years, U.S. manufacturers of a key ingredient of lethal injections, sodium thiopental, stopped supplying that chemical to state governments by 2011, as Vox has reported. That same year, the European Union (EU) banned exports of the sodium thiopental chemical to discourage the death penalty in other countries. As a result, state governments facing shortages of the chemical are developing their own modified injections with legally available drugs. In some states, including Oklahoma, compounding pharmacies create customized forms of lethal injection drugs with the products available to them, the National Journal has reported. But states have been willing to keep those businesses anonymous because they don't want to be publicly linked to the death penalty. Oklahoma is not alone in the passage of its secrecy law. Georgia, Louisiana, Missouri, and Texas have policies or laws that hide details about the content of lethal injection drugs, according to the Miami Herald. "They choose drugs because they are available, not because they know anything about those drugs," capital punishment expert Deborah Denno told the National Journal. Oklahoma uses a three-drug "cocktail" to execute people, as Reuters has reported: midazolam to make somebody unconscious, vecuronium bromide to halt breathing, and potassium chloride to stop the heart. In the case of Clayton Lockett, whose execution was botched Tuesday, the drugs "weren't working as they were designed to," a state spokesman said. Witnesses reported Lockett had been mumbling, bucking, and clenching his jaw. He died of a heart attack 40 minutes after the botched execution began.