John,

CREW won!

In December 2019, CREW sued the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Prisons for records on the government’s procurement of pentobarbital, a lethal injection drug to be used in federal executions. On January 31, 2023, CREW won the case against the DOJ in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals!

For nearly two decades, the federal government prohibited the use of capital punishment. But in July 2019, when Donald Trump returned to his now-infamous spree of federal executions, Attorney General Bill Barr directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to use a new lethal drug in federal executions.

A closer look at execution procedures showed that the new drug was notoriously difficult to legally obtain, and that states were turning to alternative non-FDA approved drugs whose degredation over time posed risk of painful death, which possibly constituted torture. So we sued the DOJ to reveal the supplier of the drug, and won an unprecedented victory.

The case also set an important standard for oversight of government contracts: potential harm to a contractor’s reputation is not enough of a reason for the federal government to keep their identity secret. This affirms the basic truth that citizens have a right to know how their tax dollars are spent, and could have enormous impacts in future cases.

And in this case, we’ve moved one step closer to identifying the federal government's lethal injection drug supplier and made it much harder for the government to keep details of its controversial contracts secret.

The fight isn’t over yet—there are still procedural steps before we learn the supplier’s identity—but this is a big victory along the way.

Thanks for being in the fight with us, as we fight for a truly transparent government,

Team CREW

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