By Amy Gajda, a former journalist and the Jeffrey D. Forchelli Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School. Among other publications, she is the author of Seek and Hide: The Tangled History of the Right to Privacy (Viking 2022), a book named by The New York Times as one of the year’s 100 Most Notable. She came to Brooklyn after teaching for more than a decade at Tulane University Law School in New Orleans, and, before that, she held a joint appointment on the journalism and law faculties at the University of Illinois. While there, she won seven Associated Press awards for her legal commentary.
Perhaps the most strikingly normal thing about Ruth Snyder’s last moment on earth in 1928 is that she was wearing a perfectly fashionable dress. Only the helmet, the mask, and the leather straps around her arms and legs indicate that she sits lifeless in New York’s electric chair.
We know what Ruth Snyder wore to her execution and how her body appeared nearly a century ago because a reporter snuck a camera into Sing Sing’s death chamber and took a photograph. New York’s Daily News published the image on its front page, saying that it showed “the actual scene in the Sing Sing death house as the lethal current surged through Ruth Snyder’s body.”
One hundred years later, the image of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair remains jarring. One hundred years later, reporters would still need to sneak a camera into an execution like hers, if they were allowed in at all.
Such limitations on reporting mixed with the importance of telling a death penalty story like Ruth Snyder’s are why news organizations are sparring with prison officials right now, in summer 2025, for access to executions. In most death penalty venues — 27 states and the federal penal system — journalists can attend executions, but they can’t bring recording devices in with them. Louisiana’s execution rules, for example, state that “three witnesses will be members of the news media,” to include an Associated Press journalist, a journalist from the area where the underlying crime occurred, and one more, chosen from those journalists who’d like to be present. “No photographic or other visual or audio recording of the execution shall be permitted,” the rule adds.
In other places, journalists aren’t allowed into the death chamber at all. In Indiana, the law provides that “only” the warden, those employees “necessary to assist in the execution,” two physicians, two spiritual advisors, and five friends or relatives of the condemned can attend. No reporters, no recording.
Those states weren’t chosen at random. In March 2025, Louisiana carried out its first execution in 15 years. In December 2024, Indiana did the same thing, and then executed another man this May.
Access to such events isn’t about sensationalism. As a failed access request filed by reporters before the second Indiana execution argued, it’s about “trustworthy first-hand accounts” that help readers better understand what happens during executions that are part of their state’s law of criminal punishment. In 2024, that filing explained, an Associated Press reporter who attended an execution in Idaho reported that it took several minutes for the team to find a vein in the condemned man’s hands, feet, and legs in which to administer the lethal drugs. That same year, another AP reporter in Alabama told readers that the condemned man had “writhe[d] violently in thrashing spasms and seizure-like movements” before dying.
That sort of detail might inspire some to oppose the death penalty. The filing argued as much, quoting a prior court: “informed public debate is critical in determining whether execution by lethal injection comports with the evolving standards of decency which mark the progress of a maturing society.”
But such detail might also satisfy other members of the public who want to know that the condemned got what they deserved. “[P]ublic observation of executions fosters the same sense of catharsis that public observation of criminal trials fosters,” the reporters’ failed request for access pointed out, quoting that earlier court. It’s about “the dark side of human nature” that wants “to see justice done, lest it vent its frustration in extralegal ways.” That’s an idea taken from the United States Supreme Court’s decision in Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia, a 1980 case that gave journalists access to criminal trials. Justices wrote there about “the fundamental, natural yearning to see justice done,” “the urge for retribution,” and they suggested that “no community catharsis can occur” if it all happens in secret.
Journalism’s fight for access has ramped up because, as the Louisiana and Indiana executions show, the death penalty itself could be ramping up. The escalation is happening on the federal level too. President Trump praised and promoted capital punishment in a January 2025 Inauguration Day Executive Order that mandated that “the laws that authorize capital punishment [be] respected and faithfully implemented.” He called the death penalty an “essential tool” and ordered the Attorney General to advise states to use their own death penalties, paying “special attention” to crimes “committed by an alien illegally in this country” and police killings.
Just like in Louisiana and Indiana, the media’s access (or not) to those executions stems from enacted law. The United States Code of Federal Regulations specifies that, in the federal system, “a sentence of death shall be executed . . . by intravenous injection of a lethal substance or substances in a quantity sufficient to cause death” with certain persons present for the event, including “necessary personnel,” various attorneys, “one spiritual advisor,” “three adult friends or relatives,” “eight citizens” chosen by the government, and “ten representatives of the press.”
There’s a similar level of detail regarding the process in the states too. In Louisiana, statutes not only limit who can witness the event, they describe the means of death: “(1) Intravenous injection of a substance or substances in a lethal quantity into the body; (2) Nitrogen hypoxia; (3) Electrocution, causing to pass through the body of the person convicted a current of electricity of sufficient intensity to cause death, and the application and continuance of such current through the body of the person convicted until such person is dead.”But the media’s access to that procedure stems not only from statutes like those, it stems from the Constitution: Courts routinely use the First Amendment’s promise of press freedom when interpreting enacted law. As that group of journalists wanting access to the May execution in Indiana argued, the First Amendment has traditionally given the public “a qualified right of access” to a traditionally open government proceeding like an execution.
There’s a tension there, of course, because a qualified right of access is not full access. Key jurisprudence that helps draw the line between what journalists can see and what’s forbidden comes from federal courts in California, a state where the death penalty remains on the books, and that body of law is what media often points to in its access arguments, even in other places. In 2002, the Ninth Circuit federal appeals court in San Francisco ruled that witnesses including the media had the First Amendment right to watch as a condemned man died. In 2019, the Ninth Circuit similarly decided that death chamber witnesses had the First Amendment right to hear “the sounds of executions in their entirety.”
Just this spring, a federal judge in Idaho used that reasoning to allow media access both to Idaho’s execution chamber and to the nearby “Medical Team Room,” a place where government workers assigned to the execution monitor the condemned through closed-circuit audio and video.
But, as statutes show, access often stops at things like recording, at the precise label details about lethal injection drugs, and at the identities of the people involved in an execution. A ban on recording preserves “the order, privacy and solemnity of the proceeding,” the Trump Justice Department explained in 2020 when it refused to change the Code of Federal Regulations to allow greater access to executions. Trump Justice Department lawyers also refused to add the specifics of lethal injection to the regulations or to change the language in a way that would release the identities of those with execution roles, lest those people become targets for “harassment and threats.”
Those Trump Justice Department lawyers found and continue to find support for such line-drawing interpretation of the law from courts throughout the United States. Even that federal appeals court in California opposed access to such information in its 2019 decision. “We did not hold that there is a First Amendment right to examine executions in minute detail,” the court wrote in describing its earlier decisions, “such that witnesses could see the drug labels and the nametags of execution team members.”
All that is why journalism’s requests for access to many things surrounding an execution continue in the 28 jurisdictions that have the death penalty.
New York State, where Ruth Snyder died in the electric chair in 1928, is not one of those places. New York does not have the death penalty. Here, the perfect right-of-access story would be that the jarring image of Ruth Snyder put a halt to New York’s use of the electric chair. Instead, it took the state until 1963 to stop its executions and until 2004 to officially abolish the death penalty.
Still, even today, there’s a power to that photograph and that coverage of Ruth Snyder’s execution, and it’s hard to believe that what the Daily News called its “vividness of reporting” didn’t help sway public opinion. Put another way, a journalist’s perspective offers a glimpse at what an execution really means in a way that 18 United States Code Section 3596—“Implementation of a sentence of death”—simply can’t. “Her helmeted head is stiffened in death,” the Daily News wrote about Ruth Snyder’s execution, “an electrode strapped to her bare right leg.”
And there it is, just below the hem of her fashionable dress.
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