[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ALA., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

May 15



ALABAMA:

Alabama bought lethal injection drugs on black market, feds seized them, report 
says



A year ago, Alabama officials admitted for the 1st time that the state had run 
out of at least 1 of the 3 drugs it uses for lethal injections.

Now we know why.

Alabama, like several other states, had become so desperate for a supplier that 
it turned to the black market, the Atlantic reported in a story this week. The 
federal government did not approve and the Drug Enforcement Administration 
seized the drugs from several states.

Those details are part of an extensive feature story the Atlantic published 
this week about the execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma. More than just a 
recount of that execution, the story explains why so many states have struggled 
to obtain the sedatives needed for the lethal 3-drug cocktail.

The problematic step in the lethal injection process has been the 1st of the 3 
drugs - a sedative capable of putting inmates into a coma-like state of 
unconsciousness.

Until 2010, states bought the sedative sodium thiopental from the U.S.-based 
pharmaceutical manufacturer Hospira. However, Hospira stopped making the drug 
that year after the Food and Drug Administration discovered that its plant in 
North Carolina had been producing contaminated drugs.

Hospira was the only FDA-approved source of sodium thiopental, but several 
states desperate for other sources of the drug soon began to look elsewhere. At 
least 4 states bought the drug from a London-based company called Dream Pharma, 
but anti-death penalty advocates soon revealed that Dream Pharma was little 
more than a front for the black market. Far from being a pharmaceutical 
manufacturer, Dream Pharma had two desks and a cabinet in a small dilapidated 
building that belonged to a driving school, the Atlantic report says.

After Dream Pharma closed, states turned to suppliers in Mumbai and elsewhere 
in India for sodium thiopental, which sold them the drug until they realized 
that it was being used for executions, at which point they stopped.

It's not clear which source Alabama used, but after 2011, it didn't matter.

"Since Hospira had been the only FDA-approved supplier of sodium thiopental, 
states that had imported it had done so illegally," the Atlantic reports. 
"Prisons had become, in effect, drug smugglers, and while the FDA may have been 
willing to look the other way, the DEA was not. In March 2011, agents seized 
Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental. In April, they seized Tennessee's, 
Kentucky's, South Carolina's, and Alabama's."

After having their supplies of black market thiopental seized, some states 
experimented with another barbiturate called pentobarbital, but soon the 
manufacturer of that drug, the Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck, put 
restrictions on its distribution and use that prevented prisons from using it 
in executions.

After Lundbeck put those restrictions in place, states turned to compounding 
pharmacies, which make small quantities of made-to-order drugs, often for 
patients with allergies or other special needs.

Others began experimenting with the sedative midazolam, but in roughly one in 
four of those executions, the drug has failed to fully sedate the prisoners.

In Alabama, the state has refused to disclose both what drugs it uses for 
lethal injections and their sources of supply, citing the potential for 
litigation.

Several states have passed laws to make that information a state secret, even 
keeping from the defendants facing execution.

In the last 2 years, Alabama lawmakers have attempted to pass such a secrecy 
bill. Last year, a bill that would have made the information secret, even out 
of reach of a court order by a judge, died in the Alabama Senate.

This year, the Alabama House has again passed the secrecy bill and it is 
awaiting committee action in the Alabama Senate.

(source: Opinion, Kyle Whitmire, al.com)








NEBRASKA:

'Boys Don't Cry' Mom: Keep Nebraska's Death Penalty



Nebraska moved closer Friday to repealing the death penalty, thanks to 
Republican and conservative lawmakers who argue it's a waste of taxpayer money, 
a failed government program, and cruel to victims' families who wait decades 
for an execution.

The relatives of those killed by the 11 men on death row are divided about 
whether capital punishment should end in the Cornhusker State - the goal of a 
bill that cleared its 2nd hurdle with a 30-16 vote on Friday.

The mother of Brandon Teena, the transgender murder victim whose story was the 
basis of the film "Boys Dont Cry," said life in prison without parole isn't 
enough for the man convicted of killing the 21-year-old and two other people in 
1993.

"I want him to die," Joann Brandon said of death-row inmate John Lotter. "It 
will bring some closure to me. It bothers me every day because I think about my 
daughter constantly and I don't see any justice being done for her.

"He was sentenced to die. He should have died a long time ago."

The cult leader who tortured and killed Miriam Thimm Kelle's brother in 1985 
has been on death row even longer, but Kelle supports repeal.

Her opposition to the death penalty stems in part from her religious beliefs - 
she's Mennonite - but Kelle also says the drawn-out legal process in executions 
in emotionally exhausting.

"I lost another brother to a car accident. It was quick - you bury them and you 
grieve," she said. "With this, you have to re-grieve all the time. It's like 
picking off scabs continually."

Nebraska hasn't executed anyone since 1997. Until this week, it didn't even 
have the drugs necessary for lethal injection.

But on Thursday evening, Gov. Pete Ricketts announced that the state has 
obtained the three drugs - 2 of them from a supplier in India.

Ricketts has vowed to veto any repeal legislation, but it appears the 
abolitionists have the 30 votes needed for an override, and possibly even the 
33 votes to overcome any filibusters. It needs be passed 1 more time to get to 
Ricketts' desk.

The movement is "pushing together an unlikely coalition of political 
allegiances," University of Nebraska law professor Eric Berger said.

The measure was sponsored by Sen. Ernie Chambers, a firebrand Democrat and 
Nebraska's only black state legislator, who recently came under fire for 
comparing police officers to ISIS.

He's made at least 3 dozen other attempts to end capital punishment in the 
state. The reason he may succeed this time is because Republican and 
conservative lawmakers have signed on.

Some of them believe an anti-execution stance is consistent with pro-life 
policies. Another factor driving them is the expense of capital cases, which 
drag on through years of appeals.

"Nebraska tends to be very cost-conscious," Berger said. "And there is growing 
sentiment here that capital punishment is a failed government program...It's 
something the state has proven inept at managing."

Joann Brandon dismisses those complaints.

"I think it's worth the money and time," she said of executions.

She said her life was destroyed by her child's violent end; Teena was raped by 
2 men who discovered he was transgender and then later killed for reporting the 
sexual assault to police.

When Brandon heard about the repeal effort, she was "devastated," she said.

"I'd like to tell them [legislators] what pills I have to take to get through 
the day, what this is doing to me personally, seeing him just sitting on death 
row," she said.

Kelle said she was opposed to the death penalty even before self-proclaimed 
prophet Michael Wayne Ryan gruesomely murdered her brother James Thimm - 
sodomizing him a shovel handle, shooting off his fingers and skinning his leg 
before stomping him to death.

But 30 years after his conviction, she's even more sure that an execution won't 
bring her peace.

"We don't have to kill people," she said.

(source: NBC news)








USA:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Gets Death Penalty in Boston Marathon Bombing



Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sat stone-faced in a federal court here on Friday as a jury 
sentenced him to death for setting off bombs at the 2013 Boston Marathon that 
killed 3 people and injured hundreds more in the worst terrorist attack on 
American soil since Sept. 11, 2001.

The jury of 7 women and 5 men, which last month convicted Mr. Tsarnaev, 21, of 
all 30 charges against him, 17 of which carry the death penalty, took more than 
14 hours to reach its decision.

In reaching its decision, the jury found that Mr. Tsarnaev had shown no remorse 
for actions, and it rejected the defense argument that his older brother, 
Tamerlan, had brainwashed him into joining in the bombings.

It was the 1st time a federal jury had sentenced a terrorist to death in the 
post-Sept. 11 era, according to Kevin McNally, director of the Federal Death 
Penalty Resource Counsel Project, which coordinates the defense in capital 
punishment cases.

Sister Helen Prejean at an anti-death penalty conference in Switzerland in 
2010. On Monday, she testified for the defense in the death penalty case of 
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.

Prosecutors portrayed Mr. Tsarnaev, who immigrated to Cambridge, Mass., from 
the Russian Caucasus with his family in 2002, as a coldblooded, unrepentant 
jihadist who sought to kill innocent Americans in retaliation for the deaths of 
innocent Muslims in American-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The bombings transformed the marathon, a cherished rite of spring, from a sunny 
holiday on Boylston Street to a smoky battlefield scene, with shrapnel flying, 
bodies dismembered and blood saturating the sidewalks; 3 people were killed 
outright, while 17 people lost at least 1 leg. More than 240 others sustained 
serious injuries, some of them life-altering.

"After all of the carnage and fear and terror that he has caused, the right 
decision is clear," a federal prosecutor, Steven Mellin, said in his closing 
argument. "The only sentence that will do justice in this case is a sentence of 
death."

With death sentences, an appeal is all but inevitable, and the process 
generally takes years if not decades to play out. Of the 80 federal defendants 
sentenced to death since 1988, only 3, including Timothy J. McVeigh, the 
Oklahoma City bomber, have been executed. Most cases are still tied up in 
appeal. In the rest, the sentences were vacated or the defendants died or 
committed suicide.

The Tsarnaev verdict goes against the grain in Massachusetts, which has no 
death penalty for state crimes and where polls showed that residents 
overwhelmingly favored life in prison for Mr. Tsarnaev. Many respondents said 
that life in prison for one so young would be a fate worse than death, and some 
worried that execution would make him a martyr.

But the jurors in his case had to be "death qualified" - that is, they all had 
to be willing to impose the death penalty to serve on the jury. So in that 
sense, the jury was not representative of the state.

Before they could decide that Mr. Tsarnaev should receive the death penalty, 
the jurors had to wade through a complicated, 24-page verdict slip. On it, they 
had to weigh the aggravating factors that would justify his death as well as 
the mitigating factors, presented by the defense, that would argue for him to 
live. Despite that complicated process, Judge George A. O'Toole Jr. of Federal 
District Court, who presided in the case, told jurors that their final decision 
should not be based on a numerical comparison of aggravating factors to 
mitigating factors. Rather, he said, they should use their individual judgment 
and internal moral compass.

The final words that jurors heard before beginning deliberations on Wednesday 
were a blistering assessment from William Weinreb, the lead prosecutor, about 
why Mr. Tsarnaev should be executed and not simply locked up.

"The callousness and indifference that allows you to destroy people's lives, to 
ignore their pain, to shrug off their heartbreak - that doesn't go away just 
because you're locked up in a prison cell," Mr. Weinreb told them. "It's what 
enables you to be a terrorist, and it's what insulates you from feelings of 
remorse."

Life imprisonment, he added, is the minimum punishment authorized by law for 
these deaths - the 3 at the marathon and the death a few days later of an 
M.I.T. police officer. It is "a lesser punishment than death," he said, even 
though some argue that a lifetime in prison is worse.

"Does he deserve the minimum punishment, or do these crimes, these 4 deaths, 
demand something more?" Mr. Weinreb asked the jury. "Please ask yourself that 
question when you go back to deliberate."

The verdict is a rare defeat for Judy Clarke, the lead defense lawyer and 
renowned opponent of the death penalty. Ms. Clarke has represented a number of 
notorious defendants, including Theodore J. Kaczynski, the Unabomber; Eric 
Rudolph, the Olympic Park bomber; and Jared L. Loughner, who killed 6 people in 
an assassination attempt on Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

Ms. Clarke's expertise is in negotiating deals in which her clients plead 
guilty in exchange for sentences of life in prison. But in this case, the 
government was determined to get a death sentence and rejected her overtures.

(source: New York Times)