A bill that would have brought
one of the toughest lethal injection secrecy regimes in the country
to Louisiana was pulled by its sponsor just hours before the 2014
legislative session came to an end yesterday.
The bill,
HB 328, has a peculiar genealogy. It started out as a backdoor
reauthorization of the electric chair in the Bayou State. After
a few weeks, the legislature decided Gruesome Gertie
wasn’t worth resurrecting and abruptly changed course.
In April, the legislature rewrote HB 328 to give cover to
Louisiana’s Department of Corrections for the sloppy, illicit
practices officials had attempted to get away with over the past
few months—such as illegally purchasing lethal drugs out of state
(from the dubiously named compounding pharmacy, The Apothecary
Shoppe, in Oklahoma
last year),
changing its drug cocktail protocol without giving sufficient
notice (as in the case of child-killer
Christopher Sepulvado, whose execution has been stayed twice
over this issue), and keeping information about the execution drugs
a secret (even from inmates set to be strapped to the table).
The bill also would have prohibited any public inquiry into botched
executions.
The real reasons for scrapping the legislation—after both houses
of the Louisiana legislature approved it—are still unclear.
Republican state Rep. Joe Lopinto
told reporters yesterday, “We passed a resolution to study
today to study this issue. There’s no reason for us to rush through
and pass piecemeal legislation that will only be a short-term fix
for something that needs a long-term solution.”
A growing number of other states have adopted secrecy measures
regarding the procurement of execution drugs, such as Oklahoma and
Missouri, in response to a shortage of the drugs made by the only
FDA approved manufacturers, who stopped making the drugs available
for executions.
Among the states to adopt secrecy measures is Georgia, which
passed a law that makes the identity of the pharmacy that supplies
the state with its execution drugs a “state secret.” That law has
faced a number of legal challenges from lawyers, but the state
supreme court
upheld the law last month on the grounds that it made
executions “more timely and orderly.” Legal challenges to secrecy
measures are currently pending in numerous other states.
The Guardian, Associated Press, and three local
newspapers have
filed suit over Missouri’s lethal injection secrecy measures,
asserting that the public has the right to know “the type, quality
and source of drugs used by a state to execute an individual in the
name of the people,” under the first Amendment of the U.S.
Constitution.
The fact that Louisiana’s lethal injection secrecy bill was
scrapped yesterday signals that at least some state legislators,
like Lopinto, are willing to reconsider the costs and potential
unintended consequences of allowing states to conduct its most
grisly business behind closed doors. Let’s hope that others follow
suit.
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