A call for truly public executions?
This new AP article, headlined “Botched injections inspire fight to ID executioners,” discusses the efforts of the ACLU of Ohio to seek information about the persons involved in Ohio’s execution procedures. The article cover this ground effectively and has a quote from the DPIC’s executive director that almost make a call for truly public executions:
Richard Dieter, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes the death penalty, said the public can’t properly scrutinize the effectiveness of capital punishment without adequate information on those carrying it out. “Public executions should be as public as possible,” he said. “They supposedly have nothing to hide, and as with anything government does, it benefits from more scrutiny. For medical personnel, yes, there may be a cost. But that’s sort of like the cost that the state, or all of us, bear.”
But death penalty advocates such as Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, California, accuse capital punishment opponents of wanting to expose members of execution teams to intimidate them.
As I have suggested in a number of prior posts, I believe we ought to at least be making video recordings of executions. These recordings need not be made available to the public — but perhaps should be subject to public disclosure if there are no objections from the families of the victims and the executed defendant — in order to ensure we have an evidentiary record of executions that goes beyond just eye-witness accounts.
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