The states are resisting, and the resulting debate pits the public's right to know against a prison worker's right to privacy. Death-penalty opponents and a group that monitors executions say the public has a right to know if there are problems with executions. The state really should have an interest in full disclosure of the process of killing a person,'' said Abe Bonowitz of Citizens United for Alternatives to the Death Penalty. We've gone to lethal injection supposedly to clean up the process of killing people.
Execution is so much a judgment, an action by the community.
It's a statement by the community that this is what they want,'' said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, an organization that tracks executions and analyzes capital-punishment issues. It used to be very public, and now it's done behind prison walls. The more people know about the death penalty, the better they're going to be able to judge it. Officials of both states say they want to protect the identities of prison staff members who volunteer to serve on execution teams. It might be hard to get them to volunteer if they had to do it in front of an audience,'' said Joe Andrews, spokesman for Ohio's prison system.