Asking Tough Questions About the Death Penalty

Journalists and prisoners stage a First Amendment challenge to state secrecy regarding executions.

Last week's observance of Veteran's Day brought another opportunity to examine the politics and ramifications of the death penalty, after a new report produced by the Death Penalty Information Center put the number of military veterans on death row at 10% of the entire comdemned prison population.  

Scrutiny of capital punishment is increasingly in the national spotlight and last March, Reason TV profiled the ongoing efforts to demand transparency in government pertaining to executions.  

A portion of the original writeup is below, you can read the full article here:

Americans may shudder at the barbarity depicted in videos showing public executions by the governments of Iran, Saudi Arabia, and China, but the fact remains that alone among all Western countries, the United States is a death penalty country.

Though the death penalty is legal in the majority of American states, only a handful of them actually carry out executions, numbering in the few dozens annually. Part of the reason the American public maintains a steadfast support of its government killing convicted murderers is due to the cloak of secrecy covering executions and that the most common form of execution, lethal injection, is sold to the public as a medical procedure, akin to putting a sick animal to sleep.

But a series of botched executions in 2014 have exposed a problem largely unknown to the American public: The drugs used for lethal injections are experimental, untested, and proving to be ineffective at killing prisoners without excruciating pain.