Shouldn’t all executions now be recorded on video?

Tony Mauro has this new Legal Times article about today’s SCOTUS oral argument in Scott v. Harris, entitled “Chase Video Steals Show as High Court Hears Case on Police Force.”  As the title suggests, the article details that, intricate legal doctrines notwithstanding, “what justices kept coming back to was the video of the six-minute chase, taken by dashboard cameras in the police cars involved.”

Besides being a great reminder that facts and hard evidence is always important regardless of the court hearing a case, this article has me wondering why we do not expect jurisdictions to make video records of any and all executions.  Federal judges in California and Missouri and Ohio and other states, not to mention the special commission working in Florida, must wonder about lethal injection realities and struggle to assess needed reforms without the important information and insights that videos of actual executions would surely provide. 

I am not encouraging American execution videos be readily available on the web as is the uncut Saddam execution video (though I do think it strange that I can visually assess an Iraqi execution protocol but not any American execution protocols).  Rather my point is simply that, now that so many state-citizen encounters are preserved on video to provide evidence of what transpired, shouldn’t a video recording be a standard part of any modern execution protocol?