Arkansas carried out the first double execution in almost 20 years on Monday night, after numerous legal challenges against the process failed. Jack Harold Jones and Marcel Williams were both administered the controversial drug sedative midazolam, which critics argue causes botched executions.

The Guardian reporter Ed Pilkington joined Amy Goodman and Juan González on Democracy Now! to discuss the details of Monday’s double execution, including the disturbing level of secrecy surrounding state executions.

“They went to extraordinary lengths to make our job difficult as reporters,” Pilkington says. “The whole process has like been a battle between the media, which is the eyes and ears of the public, and the prison service, that, after all, is doing the most serious thing that any state can do, and that is to kill one of its own citizens.”

Watch the full interview in the video above.

—Posted by Emma Niles

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