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While Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) maintains a firm stance on the effectiveness of the death penalty in managing drug trafficking in Singapore, the article presents evidence suggesting that the methodologies and interpretations of these studies might not be as substantial as portrayed.

Arizona challenged to abandon secrecy on death penalty drugs

The secrecy imposed by Arizona on the source and quality of the lethal injection drugs it uses to kill death row inmates has been challenged in a new lawsuit brought by the Guardian and other media organizations.

In the lawsuit, filed with a federal court in Phoenix, the Guardian together with the Associated Press and four of Arizona's largest news outlets argue that the state's refusal to disclose any information about its lethal injection drugs is a breach of the public's 1st amendment right to know about how the death penalty is being carried out in its name. It follows a groundbreaking first amendment case brought by the Guardian and others in Missouri in May.

In tune with many other death penalty states, Arizona has gone to great lengths to hide the provenance and nature of the medical drugs it uses to execute prisoners. Supplies of the medicines have run low in the wake of a worldwide boycott of US executions, and as a result the department of corrections has had to resort to increasingly imaginative sources which it has shrouded in secrecy in an effort to keep supply lines open.

But recent botched executions have highlighted the problematic nature of such creative sourcing and secrecy, and the heat has been turned up on death penalty states to subject themselves to more accountability. In Arizona, it took Joseph Wood almost took hours to die from an experimental concoction of midazolam and hydromorphone.

Eyewitnesses reported the prisoner gulping more than 600 times. It was later revealed that Wood had been injected with 15 doses of the 2-drug cocktail out of the view of public witnesses to the execution.

Use of midazolam in executions in recent months has proved particularly problematic and contentious. It has been associated with gruesome and prolonged deaths in Florida, Ohio and Oklahoma.

The Arizona complaint has been joined, in addition to the Guardian and the Associated Press, by 2 of the state's most important newspapers, the Arizona Republic and the Arizona Daily Star. 2 major television channels, KPNX-TV Channel 12 and KPHO Broadcasting Corporation, are also party to the suit.

The action is lodged in the US district court in Arizona and is directed against Charles Ryan, director of the department of corrections, and the state's attorney general, Thomas Horne, both in their official roles. The Guardian and fellow plaintiffs are represented by the Media Freedom and Information Access Clinic at Yale law school, with the assistance of Ballard Spahr LLP in Phoenix.

Unlike most other lawsuits that have been brought relating to the creeping secrecy that surrounds lethal injection drugs - which have argued the prisoners' constitutional rights have been violated - the Arizona lawsuit starts with the principle that the public has a right to know how capital punishment is being carried out.

The complaint argues that "the public cannot meaningfully debate the propriety of lethal injection executions if it is denied access to this essential information about how individuals are being put to death by the state." It says that the established constitutional right of public access to aspects of government procedures means that the state should be obliged to reveal "the source, composition, and quality of drugs, as well as the protocols, that have been or will be used in lethal injection executions and to view the entirety of anexecution".

This is the 4th lawsuit that the Guardian has launched against various manifestations of secrecy in the US death penalty. As well as the actions in Arizona and Missouri, there are ongoing legal complaints currently before the courts in Pennsylvania and in Oklahoma, where the state is being challenged for having drawn the curtain halfway through the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in April.

Source: The Guardian, October 24, 2014

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