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

[Rick Halperin]

Feb. 22



UTAH:

Flagged Bill - SB 189 - Death Penalty Amendments - Sen. Steve Urquhart


In a day and age where a number of states are moving away from capital 
punishment, Utah seems to be embracing it. In 2015, the Legislature passed HB 
11 - Death Penalty Procedure Amendments. Sponsored by Representative Paul Ray 
(Republican - Clearfield), the measure allows for the firing squad to be used 
if the substances necessary for lethal injection cannot be obtained in time. 
During the present legislative session, another pro-death penalty bill is being 
considered: HB 136 - Human Trafficking Amendments. Also sponsored by Ray, the 
bill allows for the death penalty to be an option in the event that a homicide 
that occurs while an individual is engaged in human trafficking.

While the majority of the legislature seems all too eager to expand the death 
penalty, 1 lawmaker wants the state to abolish the practice going forward - but 
is the bill dead on arrival?

1 lawmaker is taking a different approach. Senator Steve Urquhart (Republican - 
St. George) wants to repeal capital punishment in Utah altogether.

Introduced in the Senate on Thursday, SB 189 - Death Penalty Amendments 
eliminates the death penalty as a form of punishment in future cases. If the 
bill passes, beginning May 10, 2016, an offense of aggravated murder committed 
before May 10, 2016, and for which the death penalty has not been sought, may 
not be charged as a capital offense. Offenses committed on or after May 10, 
2016 may also not be brought forth as a capital felony. Those currently on 
death row, however, would still have the punishment carried out.

One of the main incentives to Urquhart has pointed to is the financial benefit 
of doing away with the death penalty. A study completed in 2012 by the 
Legislative Fiscal Analyst's Office found that it costs approximately $1.7 
million more for a capital murder case, as opposed to a sentence of life in 
prison.

SB 189 is attempting to do something that should have happened long ago. As 
society continues to move forward, we should leave capital punishment in the 
past where it belongs. The fact that this archaic and highly immoral practice 
continues should be a grand embarrassment to all. There is no evidence to 
suggest it acts as a deterrent to would-be killers and the number of innocent 
people wrongly executed is reason enough for a moratorium.

That being said, SB 189 likely won't succeed. With the recent votes in favor of 
expanding the death penalty, it appears that the will of the body is simply not 
there yet.

(source: utahpoliticalcapitol.com)






USA:

'Dead Man Walking' nun: My argument with Scalia----Sister Helen Prejean, a 
Sister of St. Joseph, ministers to prisoners on death row. She is the author of 
"Dead Man Walking." The views expressed are her own.


I'm praying for Justice Antonin Scalia, that his passage into eternity was 
peaceful. I respect his sincerity, even though on the subject of the death 
penalty, he was my nemesis.

As I was writing "The Death of Innocents," I happened to run into him in an 
airport, and I said teasingly that I was "taking him on" in my book. And he, 
personable as he was, jabbed his finger in the air and said, "And I'll be right 
back at ya!"

In "Innocents," I wrote about 2 men I believe were innocent: Joseph O'Dell and 
Dobie Gillis Williams, whose executions Scalia summarily authorized without an 
apparent qualm, acknowledging that his role on the Supreme Court made him part 
of the "machinery of death."

Scalia's experience of the "meaning" of capital punishment, as he described it 
in one of his dissenting opinions, couldn't have been more different from my 
own. In the marble confines of the court, he argued interpretation of 
Constitutional texts, while I, in state killing chambers, accompanied real 
human beings -- 6 of them -- to their deaths as a direct result of Scalia's 
interpretations.

In grasping the "meaning" of state killings, I had one advantage over Scalia. I 
was there, close up to the anguish and terror of the condemned and their 
grieving mothers. Scalia, in the cerebral confines of the Court, never touched 
a tear-stained cheek, never stood present at the grave as families buried their 
loved ones killed by the state.

One thing the justice and I did have in common, however, was this: he stumped 
around the country to persuade citizens of the rightness of his "originalist" 
approach to the Constitution; I stumped around the country (still do) to 
persuade citizens to abolish the death penalty, laying out my arguments through 
stories of personal experience, beliefs of my Catholic faith and logical, 
fact-infused arguments, including Constitutional analysis.

After all, as citizens, are we not the ultimate proprietors of the Constitution 
and its meaning for our lives? Are not its protections of life and liberty far 
too precious to blindly be turned over to legal "experts," every bit as prone 
to prejudice and blind spots as the rest of us?

I have profoundly disagreed with Scalia on two fronts: jurisprudence and 
religious faith.

As for his jurisprudence, I do not think that the only correct way to interpret 
the Constitution is to interpret its words (text) as, supposedly, our 18th 
century framers understood them.

Given what we now know about the fluid nature of text and context in 
linguistics, that's an impossible task. Even more impossible is to confine 
ourselves to the practice of punishment as they practiced it, which, to most 
modern eyes, was harsh in the extreme.

In 1999, I accompanied Dobie Gillis Williams into the killing chamber of 
Louisiana three times before my native state finally killed him. An African 
American with a very low IQ, Dobie was sentenced by an all-white jury to die 
for supposedly killing a white woman.

I say supposedly because even though the appeals courts upheld Dobie's guilt, I 
am convinced of his innocence. I tell Dobie's story in"The Death of Innocents," 
taking readers through our broken system of justice that masks truth and gets 
poor men like Dobie executed.

3 years after Dobie's death came a Supreme Court decision that, had it come 
earlier, might well have saved his life, a decision in which Scalia fiercely 
dissented. In Atkins v Virginia (2002), the court ruled 6-3 that executing 
people with mental disabilities -- that is with an IQ of 70 and below -- 
violates the Eighth Amendment's ban on "cruel and unusual punishments."

In his dissent, Scalia used as his moral criterion an 18th century dictionary's 
definition of "idiot" as "such a person who cannot account or number twenty 
pence, nor can tell who was his father or mother, nor how old he is." According 
to Scalia's perception of the Constitution as not living but dead, that archaic 
definition should have guided the court's decision and not any modern 
understanding of diminished mental capacity. Dobie, who had an IQ of 65 but 
knew exactly who his mama was, would have failed Scalia's "idiot" test.

My 2nd argument with Scalia was the way he interpreted Catholic teaching about 
the death penalty. Church opposition to government executions has developed 
considerably in recent years, which to Scalia was anathema. He interpreted his 
Catholic faith as he interpreted the Constitution, staking his position in 
unchangeable tradition, upheld by Saints Augustine in the 5th century and 
Thomas Aquinas in the 12th.

These stalwart teachers, he maintained -- unlike Catholic American bishops so 
easily swayed by "modern trends," as he saw it -- upheld the righteousness of 
government-imposed executions as God's will, justified in the same way as the 
killing of a rabid dog or the amputation of a gangrenous limb.

Thus, Scalia could not brook American bishops' increasing opposition to the 
death penalty, nor the opposition of Popes John Paul II and Francis -- 
especially Pope Francis, who must have disturbed the justice considerably in 
his bold appeal before Congress for global abolition of the death penalty.

At a conference in Chicago in 2002, Scalia's statements about Christian faith 
vis a vis the death penalty stunned me. Statements such as these:

-- "It seems to me that the more Christian a country is, the less likely it is 
to regard the death penalty as immoral. Abolition has taken its firmest hold in 
post-Christian Europe and has least support in the church-going United States."

-- He interpreted St. Paul's words, "The powers that be are ordained of God," 
to mean: "Government derives its moral authority from God. It is the minister 
of God with powers to revenge, to execute wrath, including wrath by the sword, 
which is unmistakably a reference to the death penalty. ...These passages from 
Romans represent the consensus of Western thought until quite recent times ... 
regarding the powers of the state. That consensus has been upset by the 
emergence of democracy."

Democracy, indeed. Do our elected leaders derive the authority to govern from 
the people or by direct divine infusion? That's theocracy, not democracy.

Where was Jesus in the Justice's stance of faith? Where is his moral challenge 
to rise above seeking "an eye for an eye," to pray for and forgive our enemies?

In Chicago, Scalia justified his interpretation of scripture by making a 
distinction: individual Christians must follow Jesus' call to forgive, but not 
the state.

In this distorted reading, state governments as God's ministers have God's 
blessing to inflict wrath on evildoers and those they deem "enemy."

It seems Scalia was as adept at drawing bright lines in the practice of his 
faith as he was in his jurisprudence. Now the bright line of death has been 
drawn across his life. I pray that he finds eternal rest.

I also hope and pray that the 9th new justice will be a person, who not only 
has an excellent legal mind, but also a compassionate and fair-minded spirit, 
in close touch with the struggles and aspirations of ordinary people -- 
especially the most vulnerable among us for whom "equal justice under law" is a 
cruel chimera if not an outright lie.

(source: Helen Prejean, CNN)

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

Return of the gas chamber----A shortage of lethal injection drugs drives some 
states to think the unthinkable


As Arizona death row inmate Joseph Wood gasped and gulped for air, prison 
officials kept pumping more drugs into his system. It took 15 injections and 
almost 2 hours for him to die. The botched execution followed other 
court-ordered deaths in Ohio and Oklahoma in 2014 that were supposed to be 
pain-free and humane but ended up horribly bungled.

States are having problems because it's increasingly difficult to get 
effective, reliable, government-approved drugs for executions. As a result, 
lethal injections have become messy testing grounds for experimental drug 
cocktails. And now states are scrambling to find other options - including gas 
chambers and even firing squads, recently reinstated (though not yet utilized) 
in Utah.

Ohio's recent decision to postpone executions until at least 2017 highlights 
the dilemma that states face. "There are basically 4 choices states can make at 
this point," said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty 
Information Center, a non-profit clearinghouse on death penalty issues. "One is 
stop and figure it out. 2 is look for other drugs. 3 is to change the method of 
execution. 4 is to get rid of the death penalty. And there have been proposals 
in virtually all of the states to do one or more of those."

The pressure on the 31 death-penalty states is growing because drug suppliers 
are increasingly pulling out of the death business, making it more difficult to 
find alternatives to the primary drug used for lethal injections: sodium 
thiopental, a barbiturate no longer manufactured in the United States.

In the absence of locally sold barbiturates, some states have looked overseas 
to purchase the drug. But in 2011, the European Union imposed a ban on the use 
of European-manufactured drugs in American executions. This forced some state 
governments to turn to local compounding pharmacies - which create drugs from 
basic ingredients - and untested barbiturates for executions. But even though 
several state governments promised compounders their identities would stay 
secret, few of the pharmacies were willing to risk being identified and 
stigmatized.

The supply problem highlights a long-standing issue with the medicalization of 
lethal injection drugs: the lack of scientific evidence of their effectiveness. 
While sodium thiopental is an effective anesthetic, it is often used in 
combination with 2 other drugs - 1 that speeds up the heart until it stops and 
another that paralyzes the rest of the body's muscles. Yet how the combination 
of drugs work together has never been tested or sanctioned by the U.S. Food and 
Drug Administration.

The dosage of drugs used for the death penalty is also arbitrary, according to 
Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University in New York City. And 
since medical professionals and pharmaceutical companies refuse to be 
associated with the process, there are no controlled trials, analysis or 
peer-reviewed literature to guide how much of a drug prison officials need to 
administer to death row inmates. And if the drugs are contaminated by tiny 
particles - as drugs manufactured by compounding pharmacies often are - they 
can burn and scrape the insides of veins like sandpaper, instead of having an 
anesthetic effect.

Some states like Maryland, Illinois and Connecticut have responded to the 
growing controversy by abandoning capital punishment, but most death-penalty 
states are sticking with it, perhaps because polls show that public support for 
the death penalty hasn't wavered much in recent years: 6 in 10 Americans still 
favor it.

"The death penalty is something of an American institution," said Michael 
Benza, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "It's 
hard for politicians to ignore when a large part of the population supports 
it."

To some capital punishment supporters, older methods such as hanging, 
electrocution and the firing squad are still viable options - even though those 
methods had been dropped because they were less humane than injection. But 
hanging is still a legal method of execution in Delaware, New Hampshire and 
Washington, and could potentially be used as a backup if those states give up 
on lethal injections.

Utah's reinstatement of the firing squad last March, 11 years after abandoning 
it, means that the Beehive State has its backup method back in place. And the 
electric chair remains an alternative option to lethal injections in Alabama, 
Tennessee and 6 other states.

Even as states lay the groundwork for alternatives though, lethal injection 
remains the preferred choice in all 31 death penalty states. To switch to a 
different method, state governments would need to certify that reliable 
injection drugs were not available before using their backup method, according 
to Benza.

"The real problem with the other methods is the way they look. They are not as 
aesthetically nice as lethal injections," Benza said.

But states are free to choose any alternative execution method as long as it 
complies with the Eighth Amendment's prohibition against "cruel and unusual 
punishment," according to Denno, of Fordham University in New York.

In Oklahoma, a suggestion from an old friend of a state legislator led to a new 
law designating nitrogen gas as a viable method of execution, set to take 
effect this month. Oklahoma hasn't yet established a protocol to use the gas in 
executions, and it's possible that the state would utilize a gas mask or a 
small tent instead of a room-sized chamber, but its similarity to methods the 
Nazis used in the mass extermination of Jews and other minorities is already 
stirring passionate opposition and likely legal challenges. Some have likened 
it to the use of cyanide gas in California's San Quentin state prison, where 
nearly 200 prisoners were executed before the method was abandoned in 1994 due 
to similar parallels being drawn to Nazi gas chambers used during the 
Holocaust.

Some lawmakers in death penalty states have become so fed up with all the legal 
and ethical challenges that in 14 states they've introduced bills to abolish 
capital punishment entirely. But these repeal efforts have a history of falling 
short. In May, the Nebraska legislature voted to abolish the state's death 
penalty, but Governor Pete Ricketts later vetoed it and the proposed ban is now 
scheduled for a statewide referendum in November 2016.

Opponents of the death penalty are planning to keep pushing, and say the 
problems with execution drugs are only strengthening their case. The botched 
executions and lawsuits that follow are increasing public awareness of the 
issue. And the scrutiny will only keep increasing as people realize the 
uncertainty that surrounds use of lethal injection drugs, according to Ray 
Krone, a director at Witness to Innocence, which is an organization that 
provides a support network to and empowers exonerated death row survivors. 
Krone has personally lived through the experience of being wrongfully accused 
for murder and waited on death row for 3 years. "It's a failed policy," he 
said.

The fight is likely to drag on for years, because most states are not in any 
hurry to resume executions. In fact, most of the 31 states that have capital 
punishment have not executed any criminals for at least 8 years.

"There is no rush amongst most states to do anything because the death penalty 
is not being actively pursued by most states in the country," said Dunham of 
the Death Penalty Information Center.

A few death penalty states, though, are pushing hard. Texas, Missouri and 
Florida are responsible for 80 % of executions over the last 2 years, and plan 
to keep going. Other states that have been searching intensely for drugs that 
can be used in lethal injections include Arkansas, Arizona, Georgia and Ohio.

Arizona has already gotten into trouble with the federal government in its 
search for execution drugs. 2 of the state's 3 proposed cocktails require 
sodium thiopental. Since it's no longer available in the U.S. or through 
Europe, Arizona tried to illegally import some from India, but the drug was 
seized by the Food and Drug Administration at the Phoenix airport.

The 3rd proposed drug cocktail relies on midazolam, the controversial sedative 
used in Joseph Wood's botched execution. That is the drug that inspired U.S. 
District Court Judge Neil Wake to put a hold on lethal injections. It has also 
led to a lawsuit against the state in the wake of Wood's execution. Worried 
that Arizona might use midazolam for other death row inmates without disclosing 
the information, attorneys are fighting for a more transparent procedure.

No more executions can be scheduled in Arizona until the litigation is 
resolved. But after that? "Nobody knows the solution," Benza said. "And that is 
the problem."

(source: scienceline.org)

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

We never really learnt the lesson of To Kill a Mockingbird----After more than 
50 years and millions of classroom lessons, some of the book's central lessons 
about racism still go unheard.


"A court is only as sound as its jury, and a jury is only as sound as the men 
who make it up," Atticus Finch, the lawyer in To Kill a Mockingbird, tells the 
jury in his closing arguments. Finch has just convincingly argued to acquit a 
black man, Tom Robinson, who was falsely accused of raping a white woman in a 
small Alabama town. Finch demonstrates for the jury that Robinson could not 
have committed the crime. But the jury of 12 white men vote to convict him, 
anyway.

The book's author, Harper Lee, died on February 19, aged 89, leaving behind a 
massive legacy. To Kill a Mockingbird has sold more than 40 million copies 
since it was published in 1960. But after more than 50 years and millions of 
classroom lessons, some of its central lessons still, at least at times, go 
unheard.

Research suggests the same racial prejudices that led to Robinson's conviction 
are thriving, if in more subtle ways, in courtrooms today. Numerous studies 
show that black defendants are more likely to be convicted of crimes than white 
defendants, and that people found guilty of murdering white victims are 
significantly more likely to be sentenced to death than those who murder 
blacks. In one study at Cornell, researchers found that defendants with more 
stereotypically black features - a broad nose, thick lips and darker skin - 
were more likely to receive a death sentence in crimes against a white victim.

These differential results have a lot to do with a lack of diversity on 
judicial benches and juries, which tend to be disproportionately white, male 
and older, as the jury in To Kill a Mockingbird was. Although racial 
discrimination in jury selection is illegal, it has a long history in the US. 
Research has long suggested the selection process is biased against minorities, 
women, the young, the poor, and those with particularly high or low education 
levels.

An 1880 decision by the US Supreme Court prohibited judges and lawyers from 
striking or selecting jurors solely because of their race - although it allowed 
exclusions for other factors, such as age or education. However, the decision 
also decreed that juries did not have to be racially diverse or representative 
of the broader population. It rung in a long tradition in which attorneys 
excluded minorities from juries, but came up with other reasons for doing so 
beyond race.

When a jury is selected today, the judge will first strike jurors he or she 
deems incapable of being partial. Then lawyers for both the prosecution and 
defence can ask that a certain number of jurors be removed, a practice called 
peremptory challenges.

As Adam Benforado describes in his book, Unfair: The New Science of Criminal 
Injustice, peremptory challenges were meant to give lawyers the freedom to 
detect and eliminate subtle, pre-existing biases against their clients that 
might influence the outcome of the case. Instead, the practice is often used to 
introduce more bias into the system.

A 2011 study that looked at 173 death penalty cases in North Carolina found 
that peremptory challenges were used to remove blacks from juries at twice the 
rate of whites. In Houston County, Alabama, 80 % of the African Americans 
qualified for jury service were removed from juries between 2005 and 2009 using 
peremptory strikes.

Although the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that attorneys need to be able to 
offer a race-neutral reason for barring a juror, in practice, it's been easy 
for attorneys to come up with a laundry list of reasons to exclude people, like 
not making sufficient eye contact, working in the same kind of industry as the 
defendant, or having a family member who has been accused of a similar crime, 
according to Benforado. Judges are not well-equipped to decide which of these 
reasons might actually be based on race, and which are not. As Benforado points 
out, people often use race-neutral terms to justify racist actions or beliefs 
outside of the courtroom, as well.

The result, Benforado argues, is that the justice system has yet to deal with 
the core problem of discrimination in the courtroom.

This same practice might have been at work in To Kill a Mockingbird. As Scout, 
the little girl who is the book's main character, sits in the courtroom, 
watching her father argue in favour of Robinson, she describes the all-white 
jury. The 12 jurors were from out of town, "sunburned" and "lanky". They all 
seemed to be farmers, Scout says in the book, "but this was natural: townsfolk 
rarely sat on juries, they were either struck or excused".

(source: Commentary, Ana Swanson; Sydney Morning Herald)

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

Bryan Stevenson urges America to heal racial tension by facing its mistakes


Bryan Stevenson remembers a German telling him that his country is no longer 
comfortable with executions, with imposing the death penalty as punishment for 
crime.

"It would be unconscionable for us," he remembers the scholar saying. And 
certainly not imaginable today that a disproportionate number of Jews would 
ever be executed there again, the man told Stevenson.

When he returned to Alabama, Stevenson thought of the thousands of 
African-Americans who died before and after slavery and as victims of homegrown 
racial terrorism. But America still had made no meaningful commitment to seeing 
that its mistakes were not repeated, Stevenson thought.

"You can't go anywhere in Germany without seeing reminders of the people's 
commitment not to repeat the Holocaust," Stevenson told an audience Sunday 
morning at Christ Episcopal Church in Charlotte. "We don't do that here. We do 
the opposite."

Stevenson, 56, is founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit in 
Montgomery, Ala., that provides legal services to the indigent and prisoners 
who may have been wrongly convicted of crimes, as well as others who may have 
been denied a fair trial.

As of February 2015, Stevenson and his colleagues had saved 115 men from the 
death penalty. His work on behalf of 2 convicted 14-year-olds led to a landmark 
U.S. Supreme Court decision in 2012 barring life-without-parole sentences for 
killers under 18 - a ruling that changed the law in North Carolina and other 
states.

Fighting against excessive and unfair sentencing has been a major focus for the 
New York University School of Law professor. In 2014, Stevenson published some 
of his experiences in the best-seller "Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and 
Redemption."

He was in Charlotte as a speaker for Christ Episcopal's long-running Faith 
Forum to talk about healing a broken world.

Stevenson urged the audience of several hundred people to "find the courage to 
get past the discomfort" of facing past mistakes and those that linger.

Bigotry, hate and social injustice are difficult topics, but confronting those 
evils is necessary for healing and reconciliation, he told the group.

"There is something better than what we have experienced," he said. "We have to 
get to a space where we are not bound by this history. That means we have to 
talk about it."

Stevenson shared personal stories of men and women whose lives have been 
ravaged by racial bias in the criminal justice system and in other parts of 
society.

"It breaks your heart to have to deal with this, but it will break your heart 
even more when your children and your grandchildren and their 
great-grandchildren are as separated and burdened by this legacy as we are," 
Stevenson said.

(source: charlotteobserver.com)