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The problem of secrecy now surrounding the execution process in the United States is well documented. Over the past decade, as the Death Penalty Information Center reports, death penalty states across the country “have enacted new secrecy statutes that conceal vital information about the execution process.”

Some prevent witnesses “from seeing at least some part of the execution … (or) from hearing what’s happening inside the execution chamber,” the center notes. “No state … has allowed any witness … to know when each drug is being administered.”

Abolitionists have long contended that the news media should be able to witness every stage of the execution process in order to provide the public a clear view of what it is the population is supporting when it allows the state to put people to death. Courts have generally rebuffed these requests for unimpeded access.

But late last month, Debora Grasham, a U.S. magistrate judge for the District of Idaho, issued an unprecedented ruling enjoining the state from carrying out any executions until it can allow media witnesses to see and hear them from beginning to end. She was explicit that this must include the “preparation and administration of the lethal injection drugs.”

In that order, she pulled back the curtain on a critical stage in the lethal injection process, when the lethal drugs are handled and given to condemned inmates. In her opinion, Grasham recognized that transparency in that moment is especially important at a time when, as the DPIC argues, states “have........

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