Recording the Pain of Others: Lethal Injection’s Visibility Problem

In July 2011, Georgia executed Andrew DeYoung for murdering his parents and sister. Pursuant to a motion to preserve evidence brought by counsel for Gregory Walker, another man on Georgia’s death row, DeYoung’s execution produced the only existing video of a lethal injection in the United States, which remains under seal in a Georgia courthouse.¹ This effort to record an execution runs against the historical trend of making executions less visible by bringing them inside prison walls and limiting eyewitnesses.² Unlike similar cases, the successful motion to preserve DeYoung’s execution and autopsy on video did not litigate the public’s right to see executions; it instead argued that visual evidence of a botched execution was necessary to support another condemned man’s Eighth Amendment claim.

J.D. Candidate, 2020, Columbia Law School.

1 Motion to Compel Response to Allow Preservation of Critical Evidence of the Execution of Andrew DeYoung, Walker v. Humphrey, No. 08-V-1088 (Ga. Super. Ct. July 19, 2011) (on file with author). Only one other execution has been recorded (Robert Alton Harris in California), pursuant to a class action challenging lethal gas; ultimately, the judge in the class action did not view the video, which was destroyed in 1994. Associated Press, Videotape of a California Execution is Destroyed, N.Y. TIMES, Feb. 13, 1994, at 35; Email from Brian Kammer, Exec. Dir., Ga. Research Ctr., to Author (Sept. 24, 2018).

2 See generally, e.g., JOHN BESSLER, DEATH IN THE DARK: MIDNIGHT EXECUTIONS IN AMERICA (1997) (tracing the history of executions, from public hangings in colonial times to modern-day private executions); WENDY LESSER, PICTURES AT AN EXECUTION (1993) (exploring a federal court’s decision not to televise Robert Alton’s execution).

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Recording the Pain of Others: Lethal Injection’s Visibility Problem