Lawsuit Aims to Break Arizona's Secrecy Over Experimental Lethal Injections

Major media organizations have levied a federal lawsuit to force Arizona to break its secrecy around lethal injections by revealing the drugs and processes used to kill people, because the public has the “right” to know.

“By withholding information about the source, composition, and quality of the drugs it uses for lethal injection executions, as well as the qualifications of those chosen to administer the drugs, the State of Arizona has closed critical governmental proceedings that have historically been open to the public and undermined the public’s ability to ensure the positive functioning of government,” reads the complaint, which was filed on behalf of the Guardian, the Associated Press, and major Arizona news outlets—the Arizona Republic, KPNX-TV Channel 12, KPHO Broadcasting Corporation, and the Arizona Daily Star.

The legal challenge, reported Friday, is not the first targeting Arizona state secrecy surrounding lethal injections, and it follows similar lawsuits in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Oklahoma. Arizona is one of several U.S. states that have turned to experimental drug cocktails, cloaked in secrecy, to execute people on death row, in response to a European ban on providing supplies for U.S. executions.

On July 23, when Arizona executed Joseph R. Wood, authorities used more than 15 injections of an experimental combination of the drugs midazolam and hydromorphone, which took over two hours to kill him. Witnesses reported a prolonged and seemingly painful death, in which the man gulped and gasped more than 600 times. Before the execution, the state refused to disclose full information about the lethal injection drugs, and the lawsuit notes, “The public still does not know where the drugs came from, how potent they were, or how their quality was assured.”