As Andrew Grant DeYoung died by lethal injection in a prison in Jackson, Ga., on Thursday night, a video camera watched silently.
For decades in the United States, what goes on inside the execution chamber has been largely shrouded from public view, glimpsed only through the accounts of journalists and other witnesses.
But the video recording of Mr. DeYoung’s death, the first since 1992, has once again raised the possibility that executions might be made available for all to see. In the process, it has reignited a widespread debate about how bright a light to shine on one of the most secretive corners of the criminal justice system.
Legal experts say the decision by Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane of Fulton County Superior Court to allow the taping in Mr. DeYoung’s case opens the way for defense lawyers across the country to push for the video documentation of other executions. And it is inevitable, many experts believe, that some of those recordings will make their way onto television or even YouTube, with or without the blessings of a court.
Brian Kammer, a defense lawyer who argued for allowing Mr. DeYoung’s execution to be recorded, said that documenting the death was essential because of the controversy over the drugs used in lethal injections.
“We’ve had three botched lethal injections in Georgia prior to Mr. DeYoung, and we thought it was time to get some hard evidence,” Mr. Kammer said.
After Mr. DeYoung’s execution, the video was sealed and sent to a judge’s chambers for safekeeping, and Mr. Kammer, for one, said he hoped it stayed hidden. “It’s a horrible thing that Andrew DeYoung had to go through, and it’s not for the public to see that,” he said.
But Douglas Berman, a professor of law at Ohio State University who commented on the issue on his blog, Sentencing and Law Policy, said, “I think it would be foolish for anybody who is authorizing or supervising the videotaping of executions to assume that it will always remain sealed and unseen.” Mr. Berman added, “Somewhere, somehow, at some point, this will become publicly accessible.”
Source: The New York Times, July 23, 2011
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