NEW: Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Georgia has made payments of more than $1.1 million for at least one contractor to work with the Corrections Department on its lethal injection process. The state performed just one execution in that period.

If you’d like to speak with me about Georgia’s lethal injection process, please reach out at [email protected].

The state’s Corrections Department and attorney general’s office declined to comment on this story. Here’s what they had to say in the past.

The records show that Georgia is paying far more for lethal injection-related costs than it did in the past. The state 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.

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.

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

So I filed requests for records that would shed light on that. But the Corrections Department 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.

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.

Fruits and vegetables from those farms are labeled with a green sticker of a woman holding a basket of tomatoes. When I’ve found produce with these stickers in my grocery stores, they don’t cost measurably more than others without the label.

Supermarkets commit to paying a little more for produce — a cost so negligible, only a few pennies per pound, that one expert said it shouldn’t drive up prices. For those few pennies, grocers get crops from farms that offer their workers stronger protections.

I’ve reported at length about abuses of foreign farmworkers who come to the U.S. on H-2A visas: stolen wages, guns pointed in their faces. One woman I met was kidnapped, raped and nearly killed. I wanted to know: How do I tell if the produce I buy is part of the problem? 👇