A bid to shield potential suppliers of execution drugs to Louisiana prisons behind a wall of secrecy easily cleared the Louisiana House despite objections from some death penalty opponents.
Drug manufacturers, pharmacists, suppliers and other involved in providing the state lethal drugs for executions would be granted strict confidentiality under House Bill 258, which would exempt contracts and other documents that might identify those companies or people from public scrutiny or disclosure in court proceedings.
State representatives voted in favor of the measure, 68-31. It now moves to the state Senate.
Backers, including the bill’s author, Hammond Republican Rep. Nicholas Muscarello, framed it as a way to jumpstart Louisiana’s stalled executions and carry out punishments promised to families of victims when juries sentenced convicted murderers to death.
Louisiana has carried just three death sentences over the past two decades, with the last execution coming in 2010. State prison officials said they’ve struggled to obtain the deadly cocktail needed for lethal injections, the only method of execution allowed under Louisiana law.
Records obtained by The Advocate through a public records request show the state’s most recent supply of any of the drugs used in executions had expired by 2016.
Large drugmakers that manufacture the compounds used in lethal injections have refused to sell it to states for executions and taken steps in recent years to block the delivery of their products prison systems for that purpose.
Muscarello said cloaking the source of execution drugs in secrecy might allow prison officials to tap so-called compounding pharmacies — small operations which custom-mix pharmaceuticals — to supply execution drugs.
Those pharmacies, Muscarello said, may be reluctant to sell to Louisiana out of fear of scrutiny and protest if their role in the death penalty were made public.
“I’m trying to bring a solution to a problem that currently exists and I think it’s a valid solution,” Muscarello said, pointing to neighboring Texas, which has similar secrecy laws and has recently carried out executions.
Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards indicated in an April interview with The Times-Picayune that he'd be inclined to sign the bill if passed by both chambers of the Legislature.
"I would suspect that if it comes to my desk I won’t have a problem with it, but I always reserve the right to look at it because (bills) typically get amended, they get changed and that sort of thing," Edwards said.
Critics have argued the bill amounts to an attack on transparency and open government by hiding the details of one of the state’s most controversial acts from public scrutiny.
Death penalty opponents also questioned whether the bill would be effective — and whether easing acquisition of execution drugs amounted to good public policy.
Rep. Terry Landry, a New Iberia Democrat who’s fought to end the death penalty in Louisiana, said Muscarello’s bill would send the state “heading in the wrong direction.”
“I think we ought to be doing everything we can to protect life,” Landry said.
Source: The Advocate, Staff, May 22, 2019
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