Deborah Denno quoted in a Kansas City Star story about convicted Missouri killer Michael Worthington, who was to become the country’s first person executed since the prolonged and problematic lethal injection of Arizona inmate Joseph Wood III.
Fordham University Law School Professor Deborah Denno, who has written extensively about capital punishment issues, called that trend to more secrecy “troubling.”
Denno said that she didn’t know what kind of impact the Arizona execution would have on the national death penalty debate. But with each botched execution, pressure builds on the states and corrections departments and adds more ammunition for defense attorneys to argue in the courts, she said.
“It’s a slow, glacial process, but every time something like this happens it has a snowball effect,” Denno said.
Read the entire Kansas City Star article.