After flawed executions, states draw hoods tighter:  Adam Liptak has this article in the TimesSelect (i.e., pay to view) portion of New York Times, entitled "After Flawed Executions, States Resort to Secrecy."  (May be viewed for free by signing up for a TimesSelect 14-day free trial trial here.)

Intro:
After several botched executions, you might think that we would want to know more, not less, about the government employees charged with delivering death. ...

Note:  Courtesy of How Appealing, a temporary pass-through link to the full article is available here.

Excerpt:
...In the wake of several botched executions around the nation, often performed by poorly trained workers, you might think that we would want to know more, not less, about the government employees charged with delivering death on behalf of the state.

But corrections officials say that executioners will face harassment or worse if their identities are revealed, and that it is getting hard to attract medically trained people to administer lethal injections, in part because codes of medical ethics prohibit participation in executions.

The Missouri law addresses that point, too. It bars licensing boards from taking disciplinary actions against doctors or nurses who participate in executions.

The job of executioner has never been a high-status profession, of course, which accounts for the hoods that hangmen wore. But in the old days, as John D. Bessler wrote in a history of executions, killing condemned prisoners “called for no expertise apart from the ability to tie a knot.”

Lethal injections are different. They require executioners to insert catheters and to prepare three chemicals and inject them, in the right dosage and sequence, into intravenous lines. If the first chemical is ineffective as a sedative, the other two are torturous. ...