If the condemned man had not added a reporter to his list, there would have been no public witnesses to observe Joseph Corcoran’s early-morning execution on Wednesday. On Thursday, prominent critics of Indiana’s laws shielding information about the death penalty argued to change, saying that media witnesses play a crucial role in executions, the Associated Press reports. The vast majority of the 27 states with capital punishment and the federal government recognize the need for public oversight via media witnesses. Indiana and Wyoming are the only states that prohibit them. Still, public access to U.S. executions is eroding, according to research from the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) -- at least 16 states have passed death penalty secrecy laws since 2010, the group says, many of them focused on keeping details obscured about where lethal injection drugs are obtained.
Reporters provide the public with independent, firsthand and factual accounts, contends Robin Maher, DPIC’s executive director. The Associated Press aims to cover every U.S. execution because the public has a right to know about all stages of the criminal justice process — including when things do not go according to the government’s plans. Reporters have also been able to describe when executions went awry -- including in Idaho, Alabama, Arizona, Oklahoma and Ohio – and to issue less sanitized versions than prison officials. For instance, reports by the AP and other outlets have described how the condemned persons’ stomachs shudder as the pentobarbital took effect, while federal executioners who put 13 inmates to death by lethal injection during the last months of the Trump administration likened the process to falling asleep.