AMERICA'S SECRET DEATH PENALTY DRUGS.

• Author: Ciaramella, C.J.
• Position: CIVIL LIBERTIES

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

In 2016, Virginia passed a law shielding the identities of the pharmacies that provide its death penalty drugs. Its next execution lasted 48 minutes--half an hour longer than officials expected--after the condemned inmate was first injected with Midazolam, a controversial sedative that many states turned to after the European Union banned exports of sodium thiopental in 2011.

Fourteen other states have similar secrecy laws. Officials argue such secrecy keeps the flow of necessary drugs unimpeded--but it also leaves death row inmates, their lawyers, the press, and the public in the dark about how governments are wielding the gravest of their powers. Oklahoma once went so far to avoid leaving a paper trail that a state official drove across state lines and purchased execution drugs from a pharmacy using petty cash, essentially acting as a drug mule.

Other states have looked overseas to solve their death penalty problems. A series of BuzzFeed News investigations revealed that at least three states paid Harris Pharma, a mysterious company...