What's Going on in Indiana's Death Chamber?

Last year, Indiana ended a 15-year execution moratorium with the killing of Joseph Corcoran. This in itself is not unusual: the past two years have seen a nearly record-breaking execution spree across the United States. Nor is the reason for that long moratorium particularly notable: after pharmaceutical companies and foreign governments blocked sales of any drugs involved in capital punishment, states began scrambling for alternatives; like Indiana, around half of them (and the federal government) settled on pentobarbital.

Where Indiana differs is in who gets to see the machinery of death in action. While killing states take extraordinary measures to keep the death penalty out of the sunlight, the vast majority put on a patina of transparency at the execution itself by allowing journalists to document the proceedings. (I don’t want to go overboard here: Alabama, for instance, has been known to strike critical journalists for shockingly petty reasons.) Indiana, however, allows only a small number of friends and family from the executed person and their victim (a few intrepid journalists have been able to gain access via the latter’s friends-and-family list).

As local journalists Seth Stern and George Hale point out, this lack of transparency has important consequences for public understanding of what the state is doing in their name:

Now, as The Intercept’s Liliana Segura revealed last week, the loved ones of men executed by Indiana have questions no one can answer.

Conflicting Accounts of Indiana Executions

Not allowing media witnesses is only the beginning of Indiana’s abandonment of transparency. Witnesses weren’t allowed to view the proceedings until a full half hour after the state claims the “process of execution“ began. Indiana Capital Chronicle reporter Casey Smith reported that when the curtain to the witness stand opened, an IV was already placed (traditionally a major source of botched executions) and attached to tubing that led behind a wall. Smith couldn’t even be sure when the pentobarbital was administered.

Ultimately, this led to conflicting views of the execution. Corcoran’s spiritual advisor stated that, “from my perspective, it was very, very peaceful.” Corcoran’s wife Tahina, on the other hand, told The Intercept “you could see his hand twitching“ as he “tried to raise his head up.“ According to defense attorney and witness Steve Schutte, Indiana’s next execution (of Benjamin Ritchie was even more disturbing: Ritchie “violently sat up — raised his shoulders — and twitched violently for about three seconds…he didn’t collapse back down. It looked like, from my perspective, that he just kind of relaxed back down and had no movement for another couple of minutes, and then they closed the curtains.”

The time until sedation made them unable to move, and therefore to signal any possible problem, shouldn’t be read as a sign that problems with the executions only lasted a few minutes. Levels of sedation are measured in legitimate medicine according to the Richmond Agitation-Sedation Scale (RASS), a nine-point metric ranging from +4 to -5. A patient at the first two levels of sedation might find it difficult or impossible to move while remaining mostly conscious, during which time a pentobarbital dose as heavy as the one used in most lethal injection protocols (as much as ten times the recommended maximum) can cause torturous pain:

According to The Intercept, Corcoran’s lungs noted signs of congestion, but their weights were not consistent with the worst cases of lethal injection.

Indiana’s Court Filings Suggest Deceptive Drug Sourcing

With reputable manufacturers unwilling to sell to states for use in the death chamber, states have turned to some dark corners. After international pressure led to a crackdown in overseas secondary markets, most states—including Indiana—turned to compounding pharmacies, which normally deal in custom-made drugs for special populations. In addition to the diminished quality states seem willing to accept, compounded drugs pose logistical problems like severely foreshortened shelf lives, as Indiana found out for itself in July; the state was forced to delay executions when its drug supply expired. When executions resumed, however, the Department of Corrections told a federal court it had obtained manufactured pentobarbital.

While conventional pentobarbital is more reliable than the compounded version, it raises questions of its own, most prominently: how did they get it? Like most barbiturates, pentobarbital is a controlled substance (specifically, it’s Schedule II, the DEA’s second-strictest classification); it’s not something you can pick up off the street. While pentobarbital has domestic manufacturers and can thus avoid the international scrutiny that led to thiopental’s end, many of them have policies of their own against capital punishment, with strict controls to be sure none of their products end up in death chambers. States have resorted to some questionable-at-best methods for obtaining manufactured drugs, including lying to hospitals and posing as mental health services. These underhanded methods, in turn, spur pharmaceutical companies to impose even tighter controls, with the costs passed on to legitimate consumers. (To say nothing of the irony: committing drug diversion to enforce the law.)

Indiana has, thus far, declined to answer this question, or say much of substance in detail about any of its executions.