WASHINGTON (AP) – While the Trump administration was nearing the end of an unprecedented series of executions, 70% of those sentenced to death were ill with COVID-19. The guards were sick. Executives’ traveling prison staff were infected with the virus. The same was true of media witnesses, who may have infected other people without knowing when they returned home because they were never informed about the spreading cases.
Records obtained by the Associated Press show that officials at the Indiana prison complex, where the 13 executions were carried out over six months, had contact with inmates and other people infected with the coronavirus, but were able to refuse the test and refused to participate. efforts to find contacts and were still allowed to return to their work assignments.
Other team members, including those brought in to assist in the executions, also spread tips to their colleagues on how they could avoid quarantines and bypass public health guidelines from the federal government and Indiana health officials.
The executions at the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, which ended in a short window over the course of a few weeks, probably acted as an over-spread event, according to records analyzed by the AP. It was something that health experts warned could happen when the Justice Department insisted on resuming executions during a pandemic.
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It is impossible to know exactly who introduced the infections and how they started to spread, in part because prison officials did not track contacts consistently and were not fully transparent about the number of cases. But medical experts say the executioners and support staff, many of whom traveled from prisons in other states with their own virus outbreaks, are likely to have triggered or contributed both to the Terre Haute penitentiary and beyond the prison walls.
Of the 47 people on death row, 33 tested positive between December 16 and 20, becoming infected shortly after the executions of Alfred Bourgeois on December 11 and Brandon Bernard on December 10, according to Colorado’s attorney Madeline Cohen, who compiled the names of people who tested positive by contacting other federal lawyers on death row. Other lawyers, as well as activists in contact with those sentenced to death, also told the AP that they were informed that a large number of those sentenced to death tested positive in mid-December.
In addition, at least a dozen other people, including members of the enforcement team, media witnesses and a spiritual advisor, tested positive within the virus incubation period, meeting the criteria of a super propagating event, in which one or more individuals trigger an outbreak that spreads to many others outside their circle of acquaintances. The count can be much higher, but without contact tracking it is impossible to be sure.
Cases of active inmates at the Indiana penitentiary also increased from just three on November 19 – the day Orlando Cordia Hall was sentenced to death – to 406 on December 29, 18 days after Bourgeois’ execution, according to data Bureau of Prisons. The data includes prisoners from the high security penitentiary, although the Bureau of Prisons never said whether it included death row inmates in that count.
In all, 726 of the approximately 1,200 US prison inmates in Terre Haute have tested positive for COVID-19 since the start of the pandemic, according to data from the Bureau of Prisons. Of these, 692 recovered.
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Lawyers and lawyers for prisoners, a Zen Buddhist priest who was a prisoner’s spiritual advisor, and even the families of some of the victims struggled to delay executions until after the pandemic. His requests were repeatedly rejected and his dispute failed. And some got sick.
Witnesses, who were forced to wear masks, watched from behind glass in small rooms where it was often not possible to stand a meter apart. They were taken to and from the death chamber building in vans, where adequate social detachment was often not possible. Passengers often had to wait in vans for an hour or more, with windows closed and poor ventilation, before being allowed to enter the execution chamber building. And in at least one case, witnesses were locked inside the execution chamber for more than four hours with little ventilation and no social distance.
Prison officials told colleagues that they should first board planes, return to their homes and then take a test, according to two people familiar with the matter. If they were positive, they said, they could just quarantine and not be stuck in Terre Haute for two weeks, said the people, who could not publicly discuss private conversations and spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity.
After Hall’s execution in November, only six members of the enforcement team opted to have coronavirus tests before leaving Terre Haute, the Justice Department said in a lawsuit. The agency said all tests were negative. But days later, eight team members tested positive for the virus. Five of the positive test team members were taken back to Terre Haute for further executions a few weeks later.
Yusuf Ahmed Nur, Hall’s spiritual advisor, was just a few feet away inside the execution chamber when Hall was executed on 19 November. He tested positive for the virus days later.
Writing about the experience, Nur said he knew he would put himself at risk, but that Hall had asked him to stay by his side when he was sentenced to death. He and Hall’s family felt compelled to be there.
“I couldn’t say no to a man who would soon be killed,” wrote Nur. “The fact that I contracted COVID-19 in the process was collateral damage” from executions during a pandemic.
Two journalists later tested positive for the virus after witnessing other executions in January, then had contact with activists and their own loved ones, who later tested positive as well. Despite being informed of the diagnoses, the Bureau of Prisons deliberately concealed the information other media witnesses and decided not to initiate any contact tracking efforts.
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In mid-December, prison officials said Corey Johnson and Dustin Higgs were ill. They were the last two prisoners to be executed, just days before President Joe Biden took office.
Death row was blocked after the results, prisoners told Ashley Kincaid Eve, a lawyer and death penalty activist. But even though they also tested positive, she said that Higgs and Johnson were still moved by the prison – potentially infecting the guards who accompanied them – so they could use phones and e-mail to speak to their lawyers and family members as per the date of execution approached. Eve said prison officials may be concerned that a court would postpone executions on constitutional grounds if access is denied.
In response to questions from the AP, the Bureau of Prisons said employees who have no symptoms “are ready to work” and have their temperatures measured and are asked about the symptoms before they report to the service. (AP previously reported that staff in other prisons were released at normal temperatures even when thermometers showed hypothermic readings.)
The agency said it also conducts contact training in accordance with federal guidance and that “if the team is circumventing that guidance, we are not aware”.
The authorities said that employees were required to participate in contact tracking “if they met the criteria for doing so” and agency employees could not force employees to take the test.
“We cannot force team members to do the tests, nor does the CDC recommend testing for asymptomatic individuals,” said an agency spokesman, referring to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Terre Haute employees’ union declined to comment, saying it did not want to “get into the public fray over the whole issue.”
Elsewhere, union leaders have long complained about the spread of the coronavirus in the federal prison system, as well as the lack of personal protective equipment and space to isolate infected prisoners. Some of these problems have been mitigated, but containing the virus remains a concern in many facilities.
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No further execution was scheduled for Biden. The Bureau of Prisons has repeatedly refused to say how many others have tested positive for coronavirus after the latest executions. And the agency would not answer questions about the specific reason for withholding public information, instead directing the PA to file a public record request.
The Bureau of Prisons said it also “made great efforts to mitigate the transmission” of the virus, including limiting the number of media witnesses and adding an extra van for witnesses to space them.
He argued that witnesses were informed that social detachment may not be possible in the execution chamber and that witnesses and others were forced to wear masks and were given additional protective equipment, such as gowns and face shields. The agency also declined to answer questions about whether director Michael Carvajal or any other senior leader raised concerns about the execution of 13 people during a worldwide pandemic that killed more than 450,000 in the United States.
Still, it appears that their own protocols have not been followed. After a federal judge ordered the Bureau of Prisons to ensure that masks were worn during executions in January, the US executioner and marshal in the death chamber removed their masks during one of the executions, appearing to violate the judge’s order. The agency argued that they needed to do this in order to communicate clearly and that they only removed their masks for a short period of time and disputes that it violated the order.
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In a November 24 lawsuit over the spread of COVID in Terre Haute, Joe Goldenson, a public health expert in spreading diseases behind bars, said hundreds of employees participated in one way or another in each execution, including about 40 people on execution teams and specialized security teams of 50 people who have traveled from other prisons across the country. He said he had warned earlier that executions were likely to become over-sized.
Medical and public health experts have repeatedly appealed to the Department of Justice to delay executions, arguing that the configuration of prisons made them especially vulnerable to outbreaks, not least because social detachment was impossible and substandard health care.
“This is the type of high-risk overspread event that the (American Medical Association) and (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) have been warning about during the pandemic,” James L. Madara, executive vice president of AMA, wrote to the Department of Justice on January 11, just before the last three federal executions were carried out.
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Tarm reported from Chicago and Sisak reported from New York.
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On Twitter, follow Michael Tarm at twitter.com/mtarm, Michael Balsamo at www.twitter.com/MikeBalsamo1 and Michael Sisak at twitter.com/mikesisak.