America's Secret Death Penalty Drugs

IN NOVEMBER, THE Omaha World-Herald sent a simple records request to the Nebraska state government.

- C.J. Ciaramella

Along with several other news outlets, the paper wanted to know the source of the drugs to be used in an upcoming execution—the first in the state in more than 20 years.

In the past the Nebraska Department of Corrections would have provided this information, but now it refused. Officials there insisted that the supplier of the drugs the state intended to use, in the name of its citizens, to sedate, paralyze, and stop the beating heart of an inmate were exempt from Nebraska’s public record law.

In December the Nebraska chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued to challenge the denial.

Nebraska is just the latest state to decide the executioner’s black hood of anonymity also covers the pharmacies that mix the deadly compounds used to kill prisoners. As lethal injection drugs have become scarcer and more difficult to obtain, governments have gone to great effort to keep the sources and methods of their death penalty regimes secret. The information that has trickled out through the dogged work of investigative journalists reveals that these states have turned to untraceable cash transactions, unregulated pharmacies, and overseas scammers to buy drugs to fill the veins of condemned inmates. They have even resorted to experimental combinations of drugs, in several cases leading to botched executions.