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

[Rick Halperin]

November 7





TEXAS:

Death sentence for sex offender who killed prison officer


A convicted sex offender found guilty of killing a female corrections officer 
in Texas has been sentenced to death.

A Jones County jury on Tuesday ordered the death penalty for 24-year-old 
Dillion Compton.

Compton was convicted of capital murder Oct. 15 in the July 2016 slaying of 
guard Mari Johnson, whose beaten body was found in a storage unit at the 
Robertson prison in Abilene.

The killing occurred while Compton was incarcerated for aggravated sexual 
assault of a child in a 2010 attack on a Dallas County girl.

Prosecutors say Johnson suffered blunt force trauma and a crushed throat. 
Compton was found with scratches on his face and his skin underneath Johnson's 
fingernails.

Compton's defense attorney said Compton and Johnson had a sexual relationship.

(source: Associated Press)





USA:

The Kafkaesque Machinery of the Death Penalty in America
Capital punishment is losing support in the United States, but what about on 
the Supreme Court?


The Supreme Court, its conservative majority in place for years, no longer 
debates whether state-imposed death is morally right or constitutionally valid. 
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation last month all but guarantees this will 
remain true for another generation, despite Justice Stephen Breyer’s best 
efforts. Since the court doesn’t weigh the substance of the death penalty, it 
instead focuses on the aesthetics of the system it oversees.

These aesthetics are vital to maintaining public support for the system. 
American capital punishment is ritualized, with a carefully orchestrated set of 
appeals that often culminates in a last-minute denial from the Supreme Court. 
It’s also theatrical: Executions are choreographed to produce a quiet spectacle 
for an audience of witnesses, who then convey what they see to the wider world. 
Justice Harry Blackmun, concluding in 1994 that the system no longer met 
constitutional standards, described it as “the machinery of death.”

The court’s docket this term shows how much that machinery has deteriorated 
since then, and raises questions about how long the justices can uphold capital 
punishment while Americans increasingly lose faith in it.

The court first heard oral arguments on Tuesday in Bucklew v. Precythe, an 
unusual lethal-injection case. A Missouri jury sentenced Russell Bucklew to 
death in 1998 for murdering a man he found with his ex-girlfriend, whom Bucklew 
then kidnapped and raped. Bucklew does not challenge the validity of his 
sentence or any of the procedural aspects surrounding it. Instead, he’s 
challenging the manner in which Missouri seeks to end his life.

Bucklew suffers from a gruesome condition known as cavernous hemangioma, which 
creates malformations in some of the body’s blood vessels. Over time, those 
malformations swell and fill with blood until they form benign tumors. The rare 
condition can manifest anywhere on the body. Bucklew’s case is even more 
unusual because it primarily affects his mouth and throat. His uvula is covered 
in blood-filled tumors that make it harder to eat, breathe, and sleep. There is 
no cure for the condition, and it will progressively worsen for as long as he 
lives.

Missouri plans to execute him using the sedative pentobarbital. Bucklew 
contends that his medical condition raises the likelihood that the lethal 
injection will go awry. In his brief for the court, his lawyers warned that 
“the violence of his choking as he slips into unconsciousness will likely cause 
his tumors to rupture and lead him to aspirate his own blood.” To prevent this, 
Bucklew asks to be put to death by lethal gas, specifically by asphyxiating him 
with nitrogen.

State officials oppose Bucklew’s request on both substantive and procedural 
grounds. Neither Missouri nor any other state has performed a nitrogen 
asphyxiation, the state argues, so it does not count as a “known and available” 
procedure under the Supreme Court’s precedents. Bucklew argues that all he has 
to do under those precedents is demonstrate that alternative methods exist. 
“How a state implements those other options ... are ultimately up to the 
state,” he told the court. “An inmate need not specify every last step the 
state should take along the path to killing him.”

Since the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, the court has favored a state’s desire to 
perform executions over concerns that its methods may be cruel and unusual. “We 
begin with the principle ... that capital punishment is constitutional,” Chief 
Justice John Roberts wrote for the plurality. “It necessarily follows that 
there must be a means of carrying it out.” That logic isn’t airtight, to say 
the least. But it’s the law of the land. The court’s conservative justices took 
it even further in Glossip v. Gross in 2015. In a 5-4 decision, they gave 
Oklahoma the green light after the state botched 2 executions, and set a high 
legal threshold for future challenges to execution methods.

On Tuesday, court-watchers noted a potential change in tone from Roberts, and 
tough questioning of Missouri’s lawyer by Kavanaugh. “Chief Justice John 
Roberts asked serious, carefully considered questions about particular 
execution procedures, the court’s precedents, and the ramifications of those 
precedents,” Chris Geidner, BuzzFeed News’ legal editor, reported on Twitter.

While Bucklew is challenging how he will leave death row, Curtis Flowers is 
challenging how he arrived there. His case, Flowers v. Mississippi, has a 
gobsmacking procedural history even by the standards of death penalty 
prosecutions. Local prosecutors have put him on trial six times to convict him 
for the murders of 4 people at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, in 
1996. The first 3 trials led to convictions but were overturned on appeal 
because local district attorney Doug Evans had gone to extraordinary lengths to 
keep black Mississippians off the jury. Jurors failed to reach a unanimous 
verdict during his 4th and 5th trials. The 6th trial saw Flowers, who is black, 
convicted of all 4 murders.

Flowers argues that prosecutors also relied on racially discriminatory 
practices during his sixth trial. Evans allowed a single black juror and a 
single black alternate juror during the jury selection process, and struck the 
rest. This tactic mirrored Evans’s past efforts to craft disproportionately 
white juries; the Mississippi Supreme Court even admonished him after Flowers’s 
3rd trial for demonstrating “as strong a prima facie case of racial 
discrimination as [it had] ever seen.” This time, however, the court upheld 
Flowers’s death sentence in a sharply divided decision.

Four justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court dissented from the court’s 
ruling, including Justice Leslie King. Although 42 % of the panel of 
prospective jurors were African Americans, he noted, “the jury that convicted 
and sentenced Flowers consisted of 8 % African Americans.” King also pointed 
out that Evans asked black prospective jurors 3 times as many questions as 
their white counterparts, and that his questions for white jurors were 
perfunctory re-phrasings of those already asked by the trial judge. “Because of 
that failure, I cannot conclude that Flowers received a fair trial, nor can I 
conclude that prospective jurors were not subjected to impermissible 
discrimination,” King wrote.

When it took Flowers’s case last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to 
consider whether the Mississippi Supreme Court properly applied precedents that 
forbid racial discrimination in jury selection. But there are also serious 
doubts that Flowers is guilty of the crime for which he has been repeatedly 
prosecuted. Local civil-rights groups, including the Magnolia Bar Association 
and the Innocence Project New Orleans, told the Supreme Court that Flowers’s 
case was “built on faulty eyewitnesses, improper forensics, and false 
confessions from untruthful informants.” They noted that Evans, the prosecutor 
who sought to craft all-white juries to convict Flowers, had attended meetings 
organized by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group 
that opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind.” Though the justices 
will not be technically considering whether Flowers is innocent or guilty, this 
background may make them more receptive to his case’s procedural flaws.

Bucklew and Flowers’s cases ultimately are about whether, and how, their lives 
will be ended by the government. But they also raise deeper issues with the 
death penalty. Is it administered in a needlessly cruel way when it risks 
forcing a man to drown in his own blood? Is it handed out by a local criminal 
justice system that appears inextricably driven by racism? The justices will 
have to wrestle with the age-old challenge of maintaining public confidence in 
American capital punishment. What they may ultimately find is that the system 
does not deserve it.

(source: Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic----newrepublic.com)


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


Supreme Court troubled by planned use of lethal injection to execute prisoner 
with rare condition


3 years after narrowly upholding lethal injection in executions, the Supreme 
Court appeared troubled Tuesday that it could cause "gruesome and brutal pain" 
for a Missouri prisoner with a rare medical condition.

Despite two lower court rulings upholding the state's plan to execute convicted 
murderer Russell Bucklew by lethal injection, a slim majority of justices 
seemed likely to send the case back for further review, including consideration 
of alternate methods.

Such a decision would expose a potential problem with the high court's 2008 and 
2015 decisions upholding lethal injection. In the latter case from Oklahoma, 
the court's conservative justices ruled that the method must be shown to be 
riskier than a known alternative.

Bucklew, 50, has proposed the use of nitrogen gas, a method that has not been 
tested in any state, rather than those used in recent years: electrocution in 
Tennessee and firing squad in Utah. The state argues its 1-drug lethal 
injection is safer.

"Are you saying even if the method creates gruesome and brutal pain, you can 
still do it because there's no alternative?" new Associate Justice Brett 
Kavanaugh, who may hold the deciding vote, asked State Solicitor D. John Sauer. 
"Is there any limit on that?"

Bucklew was convicted of murder, rape and kidnapping in 1996 and has not 
challenged his conviction or death sentence. Instead, he claims that a rare and 
incurable condition that causes blood-filled tumors in his throat, neck and 
face creates the risk of extreme pain and suffocation.
Missouri convicted murderer Russell Bucklew is fighting for the right to be 
executed by lethal gas, rather than lethal injection.

The high court blocked his execution twice before, first in 2014 following a 
series of botched lethal injections in other states, and again last March. The 
most recent action was by a 5-4 vote, with Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy 
siding with the court's four liberals.

Kavanaugh succeeded Kennedy last month following a contentious confirmation 
battle that he won 50-48. It was not a surprise that on Tuesday, both lawyers 
continuously pitched their arguments in his direction.

The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2015 that Oklahoma could use a more 
controversial, three-drug lethal injection protocol because challengers had not 
proven it would not mask excessive pain and had not identified a better 
alternative. That decision, written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, prompted 
Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to suggest that 
capital punishment itself might be unconstitutional.
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"While most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good 
fortune," Alito wrote in 2015. "Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the 
elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death 
penalty altogether."

During Tuesday's oral argument, Alito appeared most dissatisfied with Bucklew's 
challenge. Told by his attorney, Robert Hochman, that nitrogen gas would be a 
quicker death than lethal injection, Alito said, "What are the numbers? And 
where does that come from?"

Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern that Bucklew's chosen alternative 
has never been used, even though several states authorize it.

"Things can go wrong regardless of the method of execution," he said. "And it 
seems to me that if you have a method that no state has ever used, that that 
danger is magnified."

In the 2015 case, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the principal dissent 
for the four more liberal justices, charging that the ruling "leaves 
petitioners exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned 
at the stake."

On Tuesday, Breyer raised both that specter and the feeling of being "drowned 
to death slowly over a period of time." He asked whether Missouri was arguing 
such pain and suffering should be allowed.

"The Constitution would rule out burning at the stake, absolutely," Sauer said.

(source: USA Today)