[Deathpenalty] death penalty news-----USA

[Rick Halperin]

Nov. 1



USA:

Death row reprieve has national backlash


Earl Berry had eaten his final meal and was just 19 minutes away from his
appointment with the executioner on Mississippi's death row when the news
arrived that the Supreme Court in Washington had granted him a stay of
execution.

His lawyers had made a last-ditch appeal arguing death by lethal injection
the method of choice in almost every US state that upholds capital
punishment  constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and was thus barred
by the constitution.

Berry, a murderer who confessed to the 1987 kidnap and killing of a
56-year-old woman, is far from the only prisoner to make the case. The
argument has become widespread ever since a judge imposed a de facto
moratorium on executions in California 20 months ago for precisely that
reason.

But he appears to be the one who has brought the entire machinery of
state-administered executions to a halt across the US for the next several
months.

The Supreme Court, which has leaned ever more conservatively in recent
years and doesn't seem a likely source of ardent death penalty opposition,
agreed last month to take up the lethal injection question based on a case
coming out of Kentucky. Since then it has stayed three executions,
including Berry's.

Legal scholars now agree that no execution is likely to take place
anywhere in the US until the Kentucky case is settled. The Supreme Court
will hear arguments in that case in January and is expected to rule in the
spring. If the justices decide death by lethal injection needs any
modification, however minor, it could be more months still before another
execution takes place.

Lethal injection was introduced in the late 1970s, because it was supposed
to be more humane than the electric chair. But the cocktail of drugs was
not concocted by a doctor or chemical expert but rather by a prison board
in Oklahoma. Recent medical evidence has suggested that the second drug, a
paralysing agent called pancuronium bromide, may only mask the pain of
execution. If the sodium pentothal administered first as a painkiller is
not effective, then the prisoner can die in horrible agony without any
witnesses being aware of it.

That argument first won over the courts in California, which has since
ordered its prison service to redesign its lethal injection regime. That
redesign hit a setback this week when a judge near San Francisco said in a
tentative ruling that it needed to be subjected to public review and
comment  a process that would put off the prospect of another execution in
California for months.

2 of the Supreme Court's most conservative members, Antonin Scalia and
Samuel Alito, dissented in Tuesday night's ruling staying Berry's
execution.

The stay infuriated the relatives of the murdered woman, Mary Bounds. "Now
you want to tell me that we got a fair shake today?" her husband, Charles
Bounds, said. "Please don't ever let that man out of prison, 'cause you'll
have me, then. [...] I'll kill him."

(source: The Independent)