Televised Executions

Media Access and First Amendment Issues

Executions in the United States and Europe were historically conducted in public, often with pageantry and spectacle. In the 1800s in the United States, governments started restricting access to executions. Currently, while some important government activities are available through media to the public, real images of police and courts are more available than real images of punishment, especially capital punishment. Media are allowed entrance to executions as official witnesses, but can only provide written and verbal descriptions; sketch artists are allowed entrance, but photographers and television and video cameras are not. Legal challenges to this system started after the U.S. Supreme Court reauthorized executions in 1976, although none has been successful.

In a 1977 case, for example, a television station charged that prison policies discriminated against visual media: if news writers with pens are allowed, then television or photojournalists should have equal access with their respective reporting tools. A lower court sided with the media, maintaining the government should not decide what is fit for the public to view. But an appeals court overturned the decision, arguing the First Amendment applies to publication and does not confer additional rights to gather information. The court also concluded that public information was not limited by the unavailability of actual footage, which did not have qualities that distinguished it from a simulation. In a California case, an execution was videotaped for use in a case about the constitutionality of the gas chamber, but a local station was denied the ability to televise it. The tape was destroyed when the gas chamber case was resolved. An inmate who wanted to record his execution as part of a documentary about the pitfalls of a life of crime was denied his request because of a mix of concerns about security and limits on the First Amendment right to gather information.

Timothy McVeigh's execution for the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City was a partial exception because it was shown in a theater to a group of survivors who could not all be accommodated in the small execution witness room in the federal prison in Indiana. But the live closed-circuit broadcast did not violate the federal law that prohibits recording an execution because it was not captured and preserved. A lawsuit to take the same video feed going to Oklahoma City and disseminate it on the Internet was supported by McVeigh because he said he favored scrutiny of government actions. However, this suit was rejected by a court, which deferred to the prison warden's claims that not televising executions upheld the solemnity of executions and would prevent riots because a televised execution would make inmates see executions as “sport” and feel dehumanized.

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