[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----NEB., NEV., WASH., USA

[Rick Halperin]

June 16



NEBRASKA:

Counties show their frustration with death penalty repeal



At least 3 county boards in the state have passed "no confidence" votes in 
response to the Nebraska Legislature's recent repeal of the death penalty, and 
a capital punishment proponent thinks there will be more.

"A lot of people are very upset," said Pierce County Sheriff Rick Eberhardt, 
who thinks other counties will follow suit. "I think the senators lost contact 
with who they work for. It's we the people."

The votes of no confidence came from northeast Nebraska and targeted 2 senators 
who voted for the repeal, Sens. Kate Sullivan of Cedar Rapids and Paul 
Schumacher of Columbus.

In at least 2 instances there was a personal connection between the votes and a 
deadly 2002 bank robbery in Norfolk that left five people dead and sent three 
robbers to death row.

In Pierce County, the first to approve a motion, the matter was introduced by 
board member Marvin Elwood Jr. of Plainview, whose nephew's wife, Lola Elwood, 
was among those slain.

Stanton County, where the County Board took action on Monday, was the home of 
another victim, Evonne Tuttle, who worked at the weekly newspaper in Stanton.

"I'm the one who delivered the message to her mother of her death. I knew 
(Evonne) quite well," said Stanton County Sheriff Mike Unger, who urged board 
members to pass the motion.

The Antelope County Board approved its no-confidence motion a week ago.

Madison County, where the killings occurred, is represented by a state senator 
who opposed the repeal.

County board members interviewed said they supported the no-confidence votes 
because the senators were not reflecting the views of people in their counties.

Unger and Eberhardt said the votes were not part of an organized effort by the 
Nebraska County Attorneys Association, which voted last week to endorse a 
petition drive to hold a referendum on the death penalty in 2016. But the issue 
also has been taken up by at least 2 other county boards, in Hall and Platte 
Counties.

Emotions have run high since the Legislature's historic repeal of the death 
penalty last month.

Lawmakers overrode a veto by Gov. Pete Ricketts to make Nebraska the 1st 
conservative state since 1973 to do away with capital punishment.

Within hours, plans were announced for a referendum drive to reinstate the 
death penalty. Nebraskans for the Death Penalty, organized by operatives of the 
governor and the Republican Party, is leading the effort.

Schumacher, a Republican, said Monday he was unaware that the Stanton County 
Board was considering such a motion. He said board members would have agreed 
with the repeal had they been presented the same information given to state 
lawmakers.

"But they're entitled to their opinion," said Schumacher, an attorney whose 
district includes Platte County and parts of Stanton and Colfax Counties.

"We studied the issue. And I think each of the 49 legislators reached an 
educated opinion based on their research," he said.

Schumacher said that when he served as Platte County attorney, County Board 
members there told him they were OK with taking the death penalty off the table 
in murder cases because of the hundreds of thousands of dollars in extra 
expense for county taxpayers.

County board members "are usually pretty practical people," he said.

Sullivan, a Democrat, said she voted for the repeal because Nebraska has not 
carried out an execution in nearly 20 years, and it was "the right thing to 
do."

"Even if we return to the death penalty, it will continue to be impossible or 
difficult to execute anyone," said Sullivan, whose district includes nine rural 
counties, including Pierce and Antelope.

"They sent me down there to think, to listen and to learn and then make a 
decision, which is exactly what I did," she added.

Eberhardt, a lanky former boxer who has been Pierce County???s sheriff for 31 
years, has been one of the leading advocates for overturning the death penalty 
repeal.

He drove to Lincoln to attend the governor's veto-signing ceremony, then stayed 
to personally lobby state senators to uphold the veto.

"The death penalty is very important to me. It's justice," Eberhardt said.

The sheriff said he also drove his car across the northern and western parts of 
Nebraska to warn fellow sheriffs and others that a bill was advancing in the 
Legislature to do away with the death penalty.

Eberhardt was present when the Hall County Board tried to hold an emergency 
meeting last month to urge its state senator, Mike Gloor, to reverse his 
position and uphold the governor's veto. That discussion was called off after 
the ACLU of Nebraska challenged the legality of calling the emergency meeting, 
and after the meeting failed to generate a quorum of board members.

Eberhardt said he was there because he grew up in Grand Island and because a 
high school friend, Gary Quandt, was among those on the County Board calling 
for the special vote.

Quandt said on Monday that he would like to see his County Board pass a 
no-confidence motion, but he hasn't decided yet if he will raise the issue.

Larry Dix, the executive director of the Nebraska Association of County 
Officials (NACO), said he knows of no organized effort to get county boards to 
take no-confidence votes.

He said NACO directors, who include county officials from across the state, had 
earlier discussed taking a position on the death penalty and declined.

"It becomes an emotional and personal issue," Dix said. "We don't deem it a 
county issue. Yes, it can impact us ... but the NACO board said we???re not 
going to weigh in on it."

Eberhardt said he's already begun seeking signatures for the referendum, and 
Unger said he plans to have petitions available for people to sign. Both said 
their activities will be conducted in their free time.

(source: World-Herald)

******************

Death penalty is expensive failure



We are both Nebraskans who teach constitutional law at the University of 
Nebraska College of Law. One of us considers himself a libertarian conservative 
Republican. The other considers himself a moderate Democrat. We disagree 
frequently on important issues of constitutional law and even more frequently 
on issues of public policy.

However, we strongly agree that Nebraska is better off without the death 
penalty.

Though we differ on the proper role of government in society, we both believe 
that governmental programs are a bad idea if their costs outweigh their 
benefits. By this measure, the Nebraska Legislature did the right thing last 
month when it voted to repeal the death penalty.

Simply put, capital punishment's costs are high, and its benefits are 
negligible. The death penalty is the quintessential failed governmental 
program. It is tremendously expensive, far more so than a criminal system with 
a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole.

Studies in other states have shown that death penalty cases cost millions of 
dollars more than otherwise identical non-capital cases, primarily because of 
the extensive legal proceedings required in capital cases. Taxpayers, of 
course, end up footing the bill.

This cost simply isn't worth it. Nebraska hasn't executed anyone since 1997. 
Death-row inmate Michael Ryan, who committed murders in 1985, recently died in 
prison of natural causes.

Even if Nebraska voters brought back capital punishment, the State of Nebraska 
would continue to have problems carrying out executions. For starters, the 
state hasn't been able to get the drugs necessary for its lethal injection 
procedure. It recently paid over $54,000 to buy the drugs from overseas, only 
to learn that federal law prohibits their importation.

Though Gov. Pete Ricketts insists he will be able to iron out these problems, 
drug manufacturers are trying to prevent states from using their products in 
executions. As a result, states will likely find it harder, not easier, to get 
lethal injection drugs over the coming years.

Even assuming that Nebraska could resume executions, there are good reasons to 
abandon the practice altogether. The criminal justice system is fraught with 
error. There have been 329 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United 
States. Innocent people surely remain behind bars, including on death row.

Nebraska is hardly immune to these mistakes, as we learned from the sad case of 
the Beatrice Six. Of course, this risk of error extends beyond capital cases, 
but wrongful conviction is especially intolerable when lives are at stake and 
the penalty is irrevocable.

Supporters of capital punishment sometimes argue that victims' families deserve 
closure. While we concede that families will have different preferences in 
these awful circumstances, death sentences inevitably delay closure.

Without the death penalty, Nebraska???s worst offenders would receive sentences 
of life in prison without parole, and that would be the end of the matter. By 
contrast, in states with capital punishment, victims' families often wait 
decades for a death sentence to be carried out. Oftentimes, it never is.

Finally, research has failed to establish that capital punishment deters 
violent crime. A recent report by the prestigious National Research Council of 
the National Academies, reviewing more than 3 decades of research, identified 
fundamental flaws in earlier studies claiming that the death penalty works as a 
deterrent. Indeed, the murder rate in states with capital punishment is higher 
than in states without it.

Rather than pouring money into a policy with highly questionable deterrent 
effects, we should instead use those resources to help law enforcement 
officials run crime prevention programs proven to work. Our police and our 
citizens deserve effective rather than merely symbolic tools to fight violent 
crime.

We understand that some people feel strongly that some crimes are so abominable 
that they deserve the punishment of death. The decision about whether to retain 
capital punishment, however, should be, first and foremost, a policy question 
about whether capital punishment can justify its exorbitant costs.

The past several decades have made very clear that the death penalty is a 
governmental program that does not work. It would be a terrible mistake for 
Nebraskans to bring it back.

(source: Opinion; Eric Berger and Richard F. Duncan ---- Berger is associate 
professor of law in the University of Nebraska College of Law. Duncan is the 
Sherman S. Welpton Jr. professor of law at the University of Nebraska College 
of Law----omaha.com)








NEVADA:

New trial date for accused rapist, killer to be set June 29



Accused rapist and killer Bryan Clay will return to Eighth District Court in 
two weeks to have a new trail date determined.

Clay appeared before Judge Jessie Walsh Monday morning, a week before his 
death-penalty murder trial was set to begin June 22.

"They decided to meet again in 2 weeks for a status check and to determine a 
new trial date," court information officer Mary Ann Price told News 3.

Clay is accused of bludgeoning to death Yadira Martinez and her 10-year-old 
daughter, Karla, whose bodies were found April 16, 2012, in their Las Vegas 
home. Both mother and daughter had been sexually assaulted during the attacks, 
which also left Arturo Martinez-Sanchez with severe head injuries, according to 
police reports.

Clark County District Attorney Steve Wolfson has said his office will seek the 
death penalty if Clay is convicted.

The killings rocked much of the valley, especially because Arturo and his sons 
survived more than a day in the home before one of his son's told his brother 
to go to school and get help. The killings were not reported until the child 
could get to Hoggard Elementary School to tell staff that his mother and sister 
were dead.

In June 2012, a grand jury indicted Clay on 10 felony charges, including 2 
counts of murder with use of a deadly weapon. Metro Police arrested Clay in 
late April after DNA tied him to the crimes.

Arturo, a religious man, has since remarried. He has said several times that he 
has forgiven Clay for his actions.

(source: NBC news)








WASHINGTON:

Monfort jurors begin penalty phase of trial



5 months into the Christopher Monfort trial in King County, jurors have a new 
job. They've already convicted him of murder. They now must decide if he'll die 
for it.

This week, the Monfort trial enters its penalty phase. As we've learned from 
another high-profile death penalty case, the deliberations can be complicated 
and contentious.

Snohomish County prosecutor Mark Roe says every case is different, but the 
jurors' obligation is the same.

"To follow the instructions of the judge, to listen to the other jurors, to 
look each other in the eye, like I'm doing you right now, and to do actually 
the hard work, to consider your views and whether you should change them," Roe 
said.

"It was brutal; it was a deeply personal decision," said Trent Stewart, a juror 
from the Joseph McEnroe death penalty trial. The jury convicted McEnroe of 
murdering six people in Carnation last month.

"In the last day and half of deliberations, their concrete wall had gotten as 
thick it can get. They weren't willing to talk," Stewart said.

By all accounts, the jury in the McEnroe trial working methodically and 
cooperatively in the guilt phase of the trial. But Stewart says relations fell 
apart in the penalty phase.

"There was a failure with a few of the jurors who were just completely and 
totally unwilling to participate in the process," he said.

After a day or so, Stewart says the holdouts dug their feet in and shut down. 
An 8 to 4 majority voted for death. Since the death penalty requires a 
unanimous vote, McEnroe's life was spared.

"If people just turn their face to the wall and say screw it, I'm not listening 
to what any of your have to say, I've made up my mind and that's it, that's not 
a failure of the system. That's a failure of an individual," said Roe.

Some attorneys argue where deliberations in the guilt phase of a trial is 
rational, the penalty phase is more emotional.

The jury is the conscience of the community. And now that community must decide 
if a convicted cop killer will die.

The penalty phase for the Monfort trial starts Tuesday morning, and could take 
at least a couple of weeks. His attorneys say they have 44 people on their 
witness list.

(source: KING news)








USA:

The death penalty and society's responsibility



The Aurora theater shooting trial has forced all conscientious citizens to 
weigh what is at stake with the death penalty. After a long conversation with a 
friend, I hope that I have gained in understanding when I say that I believe 
what is truly at stake is the Truth with a capital T.

What created the murderer in an otherwise decent sort of individual could not 
just happen in a vacuum. When a person is a murderer, knowing what made that 
person who he or she is would probably reveal problems deep within the fabric 
of our society.

The death penalty is a solution that ignores root causes. We can all continue 
to hide our heads in the sand that way, and pretend that all is well. At some 
point we must take responsibility for the violence in our society, and take a 
serious look at why it appears to be getting worse.

Brenda M. Romero, Westminster

(source: Letter to the Editor, Denver Post)

************************

Theater shooter's university psychiatrist set to testify



A mental health professional who was doing therapy with James Holmes before he 
carried out his deadly attack on a Colorado movie theater is expected to 
testify Tuesday in his death penalty trial.

Dr. Lynne Fenton saw Holmes 5 times in 2012 while he was a neuroscience 
graduate student at the University of Colorado.

She prescribed him medication for depression and anxiety, concerned that he had 
a social phobia after he confessed thoughts of killing people, according to 
testimony from other witnesses.

Prosecutors said Fenton didn't believe Holmes would act.

Her testimony is among the most highly anticipated of the trial, as Fenton has 
never spoken publicly about their sessions. She remains bound by the trial 
judge's gag order, and a civil suit says she should have done more to stop 
Holmes.

Holmes waived his patient-client privilege when he pleaded not guilty by reason 
of insanity, opening the door for her to take the stand.

Defense attorneys, who say Holmes suffers schizophrenia and was in the grips of 
a psychotic episode at the time of the July 20, 2012 attack, are expected to 
cross examine Fenton at length. 2 psychiatrists appointed by the court to 
examine Holmes concluded he was sane at the time.

Holmes is charged with killing 12 people, wounding 58 with gunfire and leaving 
12 others injured. Questions remain about whether anyone could have stopped 
him.

Holmes said he pointedly kept Fenton uninformed as he plotted his attack. He 
never told her about the arsenal of weapons he was assembling. His elaborate 
schemes and to-do lists were kept in a journal that he didn't send to her until 
hours before his assault, and it lingered in a campus mailroom for days 
thereafter.

His list for their sessions included: "Prevent building false sense of rapport 
... deflect incriminating questions ... can't tell the mind rapists plan."

But he did tell her and two other therapists at the university that he was 
having thoughts of killing people.

Fenton did contact a campus-wide threat assessment team in June 2012, more than 
a month before the attack and told a campus police officer about her concerns 
after Holmes sent her a threatening email. Fenton, however, rejected the 
officer's offer to arrest Holmes and place him on a 72-hour psychiatric hold, 
according to the civil suit.

In interviews with one of the two court-appointed doctors 2 years after the 
shooting, Holmes said he kept Fenton at bay. He didn't go out of his way to 
build rapport, seeing their relationship as artificial, he said.

"I kind of regret that she didn't lock me up so that everything could have been 
avoided," Holmes told Dr. William Reid.

(soruce: Associated Press)

*****************


The Death Penalty Is Cruel. But So Is Life Without Parole.



Prison cells don't attract many spectators, but executions have always drawn 
crowds. Paradoxically, the names and identities of death row inmates only come 
to matter when their execution had been scheduled: from impending death we take 
a sudden interest in life.

Despite the incongruity, this isn't all that surprising. 21st century America 
is still susceptible to the time-honored spectacle of state-sanctioned death, 
even if much of the attention now scrutinizes, rather than cheers, the 
practice. Recently, there have been many stories typical of the current 
fascination with American capital punishment, most notably Ben Crair's piece in 
this magazine and Jeffrey Stern's in The Atlantic. Like other recent 
examinations of the death penalty, both accounts focus specifically on the act 
of execution by lethal injection; each covers botched executions and the 
question of cruel and unusual punishment in the death chamber itself. Stern's 
story centers on the act and ramifications of Oklahoma inmate Clayton Lockett's 
execution: A paramedic - and later, a physician - fail to find a vein in a 
dozen stabs into Lockett's flesh so the execution can proceed. (Which it does, 
equally gruesomely.) Crair's investigation deals with the national execution 
drug shortage - including Lockett's experience along with many others - and 
highlights Ohio prisoner Joseph Wood's story; his execution was so mishandled 
that he "gasped and snorted for 1 hour and 57 minutes ... the longest execution 
in modern history."

For Stern and Crair, as well as many human rights-minded activists and 
advocates, the death chamber is a potent and useful example of inhumanity. 
Other, newer abolitionists - like the legislators in Nebraska that voted to 
abolish the death penalty there last month - focus on the act of execution as 
well. While the death chamber is itself horrific, abolitionists would be remiss 
to ignore the more common punishment: the immense cruelty of a prisoner's long 
wait for execution. The "death row phenomenon" and associated prison conditions 
cause significant psychological and physical harm; a so-called "death before 
dying??? is both internationally condemned and domestically pervasive. If the 
end to capital punishment in the U.S. is based on concern for human beings - 
whether in a religious or moral sense - the reform movement must be concerned 
with the prison conditions left when death is not on the table.

Executions of any kind are exceedingly rare, so much so that death row itself 
appears to be the real punishment for the vast majority of inmates. There are 
just over 3,000 people awaiting execution in United States prisons. In 2013, 
the latest year for which the Bureau of Justice Statistics has data, there were 
39 executions. That is just more than the 31 inmates who died before their 
scheduled executions; it is just less than the 44 death row convictions or 
sentences overturned that year.

It is not a short wait on death row, either. Since 1984, the time between an 
individual's sentencing and their execution has almost tripled - from an 
average of 6 years to 15-plus years. In Delaware, the fastest state to execute, 
prisoners spend, on average, just over 7 years on death row. Mark Pettigrew, 
writing in the Journal of Law and Criminal Justice last year, suggests we ought 
to shift our scrutiny accordingly: "Nearly 40 years of experience affirm the 
notion that capital punishment does not always, or even in the majority of 
cases, or the majority of states, produce death (more people are killed each 
year by lightning ...)," he writes. "Increasingly death row is the punishment."

It is not just the time served, though, that makes these delays brutal. The 
specific qualities of a death sentence and its attendant prison conditions 
raise serious concerns.

The sentence itself generally gives rise to what is sometimes referred to as 
the "death row phenomenon" or "death row syndrome," resulting in psychological 
illness and physical deterioration: depression, hallucination, delusion, weight 
loss, and susceptibility to physical illness. Prisoners on death row face 
unique existential stress from "living under an ever present sentence of death, 
with much of this time spent not knowing when the actual execution will take 
place."1

This stress is exacerbated under the present circumstances, where executions 
might not be on schedule, and stays or drug shortages can result in quick 
cancellations (as Stern and Crair demonstrate). Numerous courts, including the 
Supreme Court of California and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, have 
found that the wait for execution "terrorizes" prisoners and thus constitutes 
cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment. Many inmates prefer death and 
volunteer for their own execution. Others don't wait: The suicide rate on death 
row is at least 6 times higher than in the general prison population.

Given that death row is associated with the harshest conditions of confinement, 
this is hardly surprising. Pettigrew's review of confinement for capital 
convicts, conducted over 3 years, found striking similarities across prison 
experiences. "Inmates on death rows across the United States are routinely 
incarcerated for 23 hours a day, or more," he writes. "Shackled whenever they 
leave their cell, arbitrarily denied even the most basic services: showering, 
exercise, unspoiled food, psychological and medical care...access to education, 
self improvement, and work opportunities."

Because solitary confinement is the de facto housing for American death row 
convicts, and because excruciating delays are par for the course, international 
observers have considered U.S. capital punishment inhumane enough to 
delegitimize its practice entirely.2

In his report to the UN General Assembly in 2012, Juan M???ndez (the UN Special 
Rapporteur on Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or 
Punishment) suggested that the realities of imperfect executions and death row 
conditions almost unavoidably run afoul of the international prohibition 
against human mistreatment.3

"Solitary confinement, in combination with the foreknowledge of death and the 
uncertainty of whether or when an execution is to take place, contributes to 
the risk of serious and irreparable mental and physical harm and suffering to 
the inmate," Mendez writes. "Solitary confinement used on death row is by 
definition prolonged and indefinite and thus constitutes cruel, inhuman or 
degrading treatment or punishment or even torture." Though a recent and high 
profile indictment of America's practice of execution, it's not the 1st. In 
Soering v. United Kingdom (1989), the European Court of Human Rights 
unanimously blocked the extradition of Jens Soering to the United States, where 
he would be put on death row: The ruling rested not on capital punishment 
itself, but the likelihood that extradition would condemn Soering to face 
inhuman and degrading treatment awaiting his execution.

Nearly every prisoner faces an abrogation of his or her 8th Amendment 
protections against cruel and unusual punishment; only a small few face the 
added cruelty and indignity of a botched execution. What about the pain of a 
cramped concrete cell, of shackling and restraints, attempts at self-harm, 
inedible food, existential fear, depression, and deprivation of any human 
contact? If there is concern is over fair treatment of human beings sentenced 
to death, it's unwise, from a strategic standpoint, to continue ignoring the 
majority of their lives. Campaigns based on claims of cruel and unusual 
treatment would not rely on staying the execution of a single individual, but 
rest on the indefinite torture of thousands. That would be powerful.

Moreover, the instances of death penalty abolition that do not consider the 
background conditions for capital punishment invariably leave immense cruelty 
in its place. Nebraska's legislation is typical in this regard: All death 
sentences become sentences of life imprisonment without the possibility of 
parole (LWOP). The de facto alternative for states that abolish the death 
penalty, LWOP actually retains many of the worst conditions of confinement 
described above, as well as still effectively sentencing the prisoner to death. 
It is in almost every way a death row, and as such is also an internationally 
condemned practice.

It's for this reason that some, like Andrew Dilts, an assistant professor of 
political theory at Loyola Marymount University, refer to current forms of 
death penalty abolition as "death penalty replacement," the same result but 
with the added effect that prisoners lose even more legal protections. As Dilts 
writes in the new volume Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of 
Mass Incarceration, these alternative sentences appease the "almost fetishistic 
levels" of concern over execution while it "effectively deflects attention away 
from the moment of death, even though death is necessarily a part of the 
sentence." In addition, whereas "the Court requires strict review of offender 
qualifications, strict procedural guidelines, extended appeals processes, and 
additional standards of heightened scrutiny...the same procedural and 
substantive protections are simply not applied" to life sentences. The result, 
ultimately, is simply a "dramatic reduction of appellate rights" for inmates 
that are still condemned to die; it's a slower death with even less of a chance 
for redemption. While the conversion of these sentences might lessen some of 
the specific psychological traumas related to the death row phenomenon, it does 
not address the expected use of solitary confinement or other inhumane 
treatment. There is nothing in an execution-focused narrative that would lead 
to the transformation of these conditions: It might, rather, cement them as 
appropriate penal policy.

Only by focusing on the cruel and unusual conditions of death row right now 
would a movement take hold that addresses the fundamental abuses taking place 
under our system of capital punishment, and our carceral system as a whole. 
This way forward is essential, but it is not easy.

While the Supreme Court has taken up the question of cruel and unusual 
executions on multiple occasions - including the pending pharmacological 
matters in Glossip v. Gross - it has repeatedly declined to hear cases on the 
constitutionality of prolonged delays on death row. In 2011, the court denied 
Manuel Valle's petition for a stay of execution on this basis; after 33 years 
on death row, Valle was executed. In March, it denied a petition by Lester 
Bower Jr.'s on similar grounds; he was executed on June 3rd.

It is possible the court will become receptive to constitutional claims about 
confinement - as it did in Brown v. Plata, finding that California's prison 
overcrowding violated the 8th Amendment - but hopes for reform should not be 
hung on their word. In the state's punitive mind, for now, the labeling of a 
convict as a capital offender symbolically forfeits his right to fair 
treatment. Successful campaigns for abolition tend to do the same, eschewing 
broader indictments of the prison system, and continuing to impose LWOP as a 
supposedly more humane substitute.

But all of these wayward precedents do tend to point toward a weakness: There 
is a general queasiness about the infliction of pain on inmates, regardless of 
their crime. If the American public's comfort with capital punishment ends when 
it is cruel and unusual - when drug cocktails or decades in prison inflict pain 
on an inmate - then death row, not the death chamber, might be the most potent 
motive for popular and legislative abolition campaigns, ones that demand more 
than a slightly lesser evil. We can use death, as we have already, to look at 
life anew; from a familiar obsession with the end can come a chance for a 
radically different beginning.

1 -- As it happens, the same type of threat is condemned by the Senate 
Intelligence Committee's report on CIA torture.

2 -- While both domestic and international law allow for the practice of 
capital punishment in theory, both contain provisions about the cruel and 
unusual treatment of individuals that entertain those moral questions when it 
comes to actual practice.

3 -- I assisted in researching this report.

(source: Stephen Lurie writes about justice, politics, and labor; New Republic)