Ohio lawmakers are rushing in lame-duck session to shield the manufacturers of execution drugs from public scrutiny. House Bill 663 is an overreaching, perhaps unconstitutional, plan to solve, through secrecy, the problem of obtaining effective and comparatively humane drugs for executions.
The bill violates the spirit and letter of the state’s open records laws. It would prevent citizens from holding their government accountable as the state seeks to carry out executions in a proper and constitutional manner. In dangerously sweeping language, it excludes from public record — and thus mandatory disclosure under public records law — information and records that relate “in any manner” to the execution of a death sentence.
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Shielding the identity of drug vendors would prevent taxpayers from knowing if products from the same manufacturer caused problems with executions in other states — a key piece of information in assessing how those drugs are likely to perform in Ohio.
Members of the General Assembly should kill the plan. Withholding information is not necessary to protect companies from threats and harassment. The argument is fundamentally undemocratic.
Laws now adequately protect businesses from unreasonable harassment. Moreover, protest, even vigorous protest, is the stuff of democracy. Companies who sell drugs used in executions — and take taxpayer money in doing it — should expect to hear from people who oppose capital punishment.
Given the problems that death-penalty states, including Ohio, have had with executions, the public needs to know what their governments are doing to find suitable drugs and effective protocols.
Ohio can no longer obtain its lethal injection drug of choice, the powerful sedative pentobarbital, because its European manufacturer refuses to make it available for that purpose. The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction tried an alternative that combined midazolam — a barbiturate — and hydromorphone — a potent painkiller. That move resulted in the botched execution in January of Dennis McGuire, who took up to 26 minutes to die, while he convulsed, choked, gasped, and snorted. The same two-drug cocktail caused similar problems in Arizona.
Ohio has been unable to persuade a compounding pharmacy to duplicate pentobarbital from scratch. Lawmakers apparently hope exempting the company’s identity would make it more amenable, but shutting the public out of the process is not the way democracy should work.
“The most fundamental right of all is the right to live,” said Dennis Hetzel, executive director of the Ohio Newspaper Association and president of the Ohio Coalition for Open Government. “There must be reasonable outside scrutiny and accountability when the government itself is putting people to death.”
A federal court moratorium has paused executions in Ohio until February. The debate over this bill is not about capital punishment: It’s about the right of citizens to know what their government is doing on a matter of life and death.
First Published November 20, 2014, 5:00 a.m.
