Niki Kelly wanted to know how much money Indiana spends to buy the drugs they use to execute prisoners. She and her reporters at the Indiana Capital Chronicle had to sue the state to get the records. The court battle lasted an entire year.
In a 2025 column, the editor-in-chief of the nonprofit newsroom explained why she sued the Indiana Department of Correction, arguing that the basic cost of executions is no different from public records on the salary of a judge, the cost of a construction project, or how much state officials spend on travel. Public records allow citizens and journalists to hold those in power accountable to us, the people of Indiana. We can see how our government is spending money, who benefits and who is adversely impacted. Kelly pursued the records on executions so her readership could more clearly see what executions were costing the state.
She and her staff usually get that kind of information by making phone calls to the relevant state agencies’ public information officers. When public records requests are severely delayed or denied, it morphs into a fight for access. “Lately, the Braun administration is requiring formal Access to Public Records Act requests for even simple items,” Kelly said, referring to Gov. Mike Braun.
“I also think that what a lot of people don’t realize is, they think we have an agenda when we ask for a record, and we don’t,” she said. “Sometimes we just want to see what it says. It doesn’t necessarily mean we’re doing a story. But then when you hide it from us, you start to think, ‘oh well, what are they hiding,’ right?”
On Feb. 27, the Capital Chronicle won its legal challenge when a Marion County Superior Court judge resolved the public records lawsuit in their favor. The court ruled that the IDOC had failed to respond to the news outlet’s 2024 public records request within a reasonable time and wrongly denied access to records showing how much public money Indiana spent to obtain pentobarbital for executions.
With all their questions on the cost of buying drugs for executions answered by their previous reporting and the resolution of the lawsuit, the Capital Chronicle reporters documented that the state spent a minimum of $1.275 million on pentobarbital over the past two years to carry out the state’s three executions.
Scrutiny over Indiana’s lethal injection drugs has continued to grow. Lawmakers, attorneys and medical professionals all raised questions after the May 2025 execution of Benjamin Ritchie, who was convicted of the 2000 shooting death of Beech Grove Police Officer William Toney. Witnesses to the execution reported that Ritchie had a violent physical response to the drugs.
Indiana journalists have pro bono legal support
Kris Cundiff is the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press (RCFP) attorney in Indiana, who represented the Capital Chronicle in its lawsuit against IDOC. He used to work for Indiana’s Public Access Counselor’s office, helping people inside and outside of government understand how government agencies handle records requests, or the state’s Access to Public Records Act laws.
“Transparency is essential to accountability, and the court’s ruling affirms that the people of Indiana have a right to know how the state spends taxpayer money to carry out the death penalty,” Cundiff told Capital Chronicle reporter Casey Smith in a recent story about the Capital Chronicle’s win. “We hope this decision sends a clear message that government agencies cannot withhold public records to avoid scrutiny of their most consequential decisions.”
RCFP is a national nonprofit that provides pro bono legal services to reporters across the country. The organization reports a steady increase in calls to their hotline in recent years. Overwhelmingly, journalists are seeking guidance on how to obtain public records at the federal and state levels, said Gunita Singh, RCFP staff attorney, based in Washington, D.C. In 2025, the nonprofit set a record for hotline calls, she added.
Sometimes government officials don’t flat out deny public records requests, they just don’t reply, leaving reporters (and, by extension, the public) in limbo for months, not knowing if their request will be granted. Delays aren’t new in fulfilling records requests, says Singh, but the reason for the delays, she said, have become more novel.
Last spring, Singh noted a federal judge ruled that government agencies can no longer cite staff shortages as a reason they are unable to respond to requests for public information.
I asked Indy reporters about their experiences getting records from various governments.
Mirror Indy reporters Emily Hopkins and Peter Blanchard said that there are very few agencies at the local, state, and federal level that respond to reporters in the timeframe that accommodates the daily deadlines of journalism. However, in reporting on their “Mr. Clean” series, investigating Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett, they found the city was initially responsive to all of their requests for Part One of the series. However, the city has yet to fulfill a records request for a study Blanchard cited in Part Two of the series that would shed light on the value of downtown real estate, information that is crucial to the investigation.
Hopkins, a data reporter, and Blanchard, a government reporter, teamed up with IndyStar’s Tony Cook, an investigative reporter, to write the series, which details how the mayor ignored conflicts of interest involving millions of dollars in public contracts and incentives. They submitted more than a dozen public records requests for email correspondence, contracts, and ethics findings that were not previously available online. Some of their requests are still outstanding even though it’s been months since they filed them.
The team of reporters also relied on really good sourcing from both government officials and private individuals, as well as anonymous sources to uncover whether the mayor has lived up to his campaign promise to make government more transparent, 10 years into his administration. In Part One of “Mr. Clean,” the reporters were able to show readers a money trail of projects under Hogsett’s administration that might not have been in the public’s best interest. Their series detailed how more than $80 million in incentives for projects were either recommended or awarded to clients of the mayor’s former chief of staff Thomas Cook, who worked for a law firm at the time.
Mirror Indy and the IndyStar worked together on the series. By combining resources they were better able to sift through many records and track down those that were previously unavailable. The nonprofit newsroom was able to leverage the resources of the IndyStar’s archives and manpower to produce the series.
Sorting through public records requires a high tolerance for tedium. To successfully complete this investigation, reporters read hundreds of pages of contracts and campaign finance records, filed dozens of records requests and then prepared their arguments when records requests were denied, said Hopkins.
“You really have to be persistent, and you have to be willing to do that sort of drudgery to get the stuff that you want, and that’s not always easy,” they said.
Documenters stand in as witness for the public
Insisting that public meetings remain open and transparent is another critical form of government access. If it takes a high tolerance for monotony to sort through public records, it takes courage and curiosity to show up at government meetings and be the public witness to proceedings. Mirror Indy’s Documenters provide that service to the community.
The Documenters program is part of a national effort to strengthen communities by training and paying residents to document local government meetings. Launched in September 2023, Mirror Indy’s Documenters program has trained more than 400 residents to take notes at city government meetings in Marion County. The notes are edited, fact-checked and published on the Documenters website, and the Documenter is paid.
The meeting notes are then shared with Mirror Indy reporters and linked in relevant stories. Sometimes they even spark additional reporting, like in this story, which detailed allegations of student harassment on a school trip by a chaperone who was also an IMPD officer.
“The program has been successful because we continue to train excited, curious neighbors, who want to help hold city government officials accountable,” said Ariana Beedie, Mirror Indy Community Journalism director, in an email.
Without all these people—journalists, lawyers and citizens—fighting for government access, we wouldn’t know that Indiana spends more than $1 million on lethal injection drugs. We wouldn’t know that Mayor Hogsett’s administration isn’t completely transparent about conflicts of interest. Keeping the work of our local and state governments in the open, so that the public can scrutinize it, requires constant vigilance. We use our access, or we lose it. The newsrooms that are fighting these battles create a net benefit for all of us.
Tracey Compton is Poynter’s Indianapolis Public Editor. You can send your questions about local media to her at indypubliceditor@poynter.org.
Mirror Indy publishes the Indianapolis public editor columns as part of a partnership with Poynter Institute to increase media literacy and trust in local journalism.