In Thursday's motion, the ACLU, the Guardian, and three local newspapers—the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and the Philadelphia City Paper—take a different tack, demanding that court documents from an unrelated class-action lawsuit, which name the compounding pharmacy preparing the drug, be unsealed on First Amendment grounds. The public and the press, they argue, "have a presumptive right of access to documents filed with the court...These documents are of acute interest to the public and the media in the light of intense public scrutiny that has developed in the last year around the source of drugs used for lethal injection executions."

Below is a snippet from the Guardian's story on the case:

A recent string of botched executions in Ohio, Oklahoma and Arizona has brought a spotlight bearing down on death penalty states and raised questions about the effectiveness of the lethal injection protocols they are following. Among the concerns are whether compounding pharmacies can be relied upon as sources of the lethal injection drugs. The pharmacies make up medicines to order, and are not subject to the same stringent standards as drugs manufactured under supervision of the federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA)...

Despite Pennsylvania’s refusal to disclose the identity of the compounding pharmacy that supplies it, sufficient information can be gleaned from court documents to know that there are grounds for concern over the lethal medicines it has acquired. Expert testimony in the case of Hubert Michael noted that the concentration of the pentobarbital in the state's possession was different from that called for by Pennsylvania’s own execution protocol.

This is not the first time news organizations and state governments have sparred over lethal injection drugs. In May, the Guardian, AP, and three local newspapers filed a lawsuit challenging the secrecy surrounding lethal injections in Missouri, which was preparing to put convicted murderer and rapist Russell Bucklew to death. Hours before he was to be strapped to the gurney, the Supreme Court stayed Bucklew's execution, citing a rare medical condition that could make death by lethal injection excruciating.