Florida Senate Votes for More Secrecy Around Executions

Storm clouds pass over the Booking and Release Center at the Orange County Jail in Orlando, Florida, on July 16, 2011. Mark Wilson/Getty Images

PUNTA GORDA, Florida–The state Senate on March 7 approved a bill that would add to the existing secrecy around state executions,  sending the measure to the desk of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.

Florida’s current law is a public-records exemption that shields information about people such as executioners and prescribers of the drugs used for lethal injections.

The bill (HB 873), if signed into law, would expand the protections to include people and entities or drugs involved in any step of the process needed to carry out an execution.

The Republican Senate and the bill’s sponsor Doug Broxson told committee members that additional protections are needed because drug manufacturers and distributors refuse to allow their pharmaceuticals to be used to “put people to death.”

The bill was designed to ensure that the corrections department “will be able to obtain the drugs necessary to carry out executions in the future,” Broxson, said before the Senate passed the measure in a 28-10 vote on Feb. 28.

Because the bill includes a public records exemption, a super-majority is required for passage. Six Democrats joined 22 Republicans to move the legislation forward.  Sen. Jeff Brandes, was the only Republican to oppose the bill.

The gurney in the execution chamber at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary in McAlester, Okla., on Oct. 9, 2014. Sue Ogrocki/AP Photo

Brandes, in his final year in the Senate, has promoted criminal justice reforms and argued that information about the death penalty should be open to the public.

“If there’s one place, one place where the state should be transparent in everything that it does, it’s the process of putting somebody to death,” Brandes argued before the Feb. 28 vote. “We should provide transparency in the drugs that we use, the cocktail that we use, how we purchased those drugs, the distributor that we got them from, so that everybody understands everything that we can about the process by which Florida uses to exercise the highest penalty that we have. This bill puts that in the shadows.”

Brandes continued: “If the state has a difficult time purchasing the drugs used for executions, that’s part of the process.”

“We should not have to lie to the manufacturers. We should not have to hide from the distributors. We should not have to do some backroom drug deal in order to get the drugs necessary to execute somebody in Florida,” he added.

Florida is one of 27 states that allow the death penalty. The state added lethal injection as a form of execution after the botched electrocution of a Death Row inmate in 1999.