Before I joined ProPublica in 2021, I had spent a year writing about a Georgia prison physician named Carlo Musso, one of the rare doctors who’d openly talked about his role in lethal injections. After he stepped away from that work, I wanted to know who replaced him, so I filed open records requests for documents that would shed light on that.

The role Musso held is so controversial that more than a dozen states have made it illegal to disclose the names of those involved with lethal injections. Georgia is among them. The state has gone to great lengths to hide the details around how it carries out lethal injections.

Georgia wouldn’t release records I had requested, claiming that its secrecy law is needed to prevent those helping with its executions from getting harassed by opponents of the death penalty.

I ended up suing the state. A few years later, a panel of three judges sided with me, and the state released some of the documents.

What I received reveals new details — and revives old questions — about Georgia’s lethal injection process. Among the discoveries: Georgia has made payments of more than $1.1 million since the COVID-19 pandemic for at least one contractor to work with the Corrections Department on its lethal injection process. During that period, the state carried out just a single execution.

The records also show that Georgia is paying far more for lethal injection-related costs than it did in the past. The state’s Corrections Department has spent an average of over $150,000 a year on those costs over the past decade. That’s substantially more than what it agreed to pay in the years before 2017, the records show.

Secrecy laws like Georgia’s shield the public from awareness of the growing costs of pharmacists concocting drugs and the doctors administering the injections. Legal experts say those costs reflect the challenges that corrections officials face in finding help with carrying out lethal injections, which can subject prisoners to torturous levels of pain.

“You wouldn’t have to pay this much money if the lethal injection process was an acceptable one,” said Deborah Denno, a Fordham University law professor who is an expert on the death penalty. “The process itself is so problematic that a lot of money has to be paid.”

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