The Executioner’s Hood

Many people assume that execution by lethal injection is simple and gentle. It’s neither. An inmate is given three drugs to do three things: (1) Knock him out. (2) Paralyze him so he doesn’t flop around or gasp in a way that upsets witnesses. (3) Kill him. If a step goes awry, an inmate can be paralyzed, inadequately sedated or unable to move or cry out as the poisons do their agonizing work.

The job requires medical competence, but states have had a hard time finding skilled executioners. Most doctors refuse to do the ultimate harm; the American Medical Association and most other professional medical organizations forbid doctors to participate in executions.

A recent spate of botched executions has led some courts and states in the encouraging direction of halting the procedures and reviewing lethal-injection protocols, which have frequently been found to be flimsy and improvised. But other states have gone another, dangerous route. They have thrown a shroud over the procedure — a new executioner’s hood — to hide the system’s flaws and weaknesses.

One truly disturbing example, recounted by Adam Liptak in The Times, involves Missouri, where a doctor was revealed as an unqualified bumbler who admitted having confused the drug dosages in some of the more than 50 executions he had supervised. “It’s not unusual for me to make mistakes,” he said, blaming dyslexia.

We oppose capital punishment for a host of reasons, including that it is unconstitutional. Even those who support executing their citizens must see the need to ensure that the process is not barbarically cruel and is fully open to public scrutiny.

Last month, however, Missouri’s governor signed a law that makes it a crime to reveal the identities of current or former executioners — as The St. Louis Post-Dispatch did in the case of the doctor who claimed dyslexia. It allows executioners to sue those who expose them and forbids medical licensing boards to punish doctors or nurses who participate in executions.

Missouri contends that executioners need protection from retaliation. That is a flimsy argument and not sincerely held, since the state is not trying to extend that privacy shield to the many other government employees — judges, prosecutors, court officials, prison wardens — whose names are public and who are far likelier retribution targets. Under the new secrecy law, Missouri’s capital punishment system may plunge deeper into incompetence and cruelty, and it will be harder for citizens to stop it.