Inmate challenges death row law

TERRE HAUTE -- An inmate is challenging the procedure for executions at the federal government's death row, including what witnesses are allowed to see.\nDavid Paul Hammer contends in a federal lawsuit that reporters and other witnesses should be allowed to see the inmate enter the death chamber and everything that happens until the prisoner is pronounced dead.\nDuring the two previous executions at the federal prison in 2001 -- of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and Texas drug kingpin Juan Raul Garza -- the curtains to the witness chamber opened just before the lethal injection. The prison is in Terre Haute, about 60 miles west of Indianapolis.\nIn both cases, inmates were lying on a gurney and were covered by a white sheet when the curtains to the viewing rooms were drawn.\n"I believe if they're for having capital punishment and executions, they should show it all," Hammer told the Tribune-Star for a story published Tuesday.\nHammer, 44, faces execution for the 1996 strangulation murder of his cellmate while serving an Oklahoma state sentence for crimes including kidnapping and attempted murder.\nHammer is serving as his own attorney in the lawsuit, which also challenges prison rules that limit an inmate's contact with media, attorneys, friends and spiritual advisers before an execution.\nDan Dunne, a spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons, said the executions were handled appropriately, but he declined to answer other questions because of the pending lawsuit.