[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----OKLA., NEV., USA

[Rick Halperin]

September 28



OKLAHOMA:

Oklahoma prepares to become 1st state to execute inmates using gas



Oklahoma is preparing to be the 1st state in the nation to execute inmates 
using gas.

After all the mistakes and missteps in administering the death penalty, what 
state are leaders looking at in their effort to prepare for this new generation 
of capital punishment?

The last time members of Gov.Mary Fallin's office wanted to rush through 
executions using the wrong drug, her general counsel now so famously told the 
attorney general to "Google it" when he was pushing to allow for the use an 
unauthorized drug to kill Richard Glossip.

It was more than just Google that got Oklahoma to the point of making history 
as the 1st state to transform it's death chamber from lethal injection to gas.

Lead researcher Michael Copeland teaches criminal justice at East Central 
University in Ada. His past research for the state has helped on everything 
from uninsured motorists to how law enforcement handles the mentally ill; this 
request was different.

"I knew it was a controversial subject and that's not normally the type of help 
I give so that part did make me a little apprehensive," Copeland told FOX 25.

There were 3 researchers who contributed to the initial report the legislature 
relied on to adopt nitrogen gas as the primary execution method. One was 
opposed to the death penalty, one in favor of it, and then there was Copeland.

"I'm sort of caught in between," Copeland told FOX 25. "I do feel some 
concerns, but our question wasn't to solve whether or not Oklahoma should have 
the death penalty. The question was do we have anything better than the 
electric chair which would have been the alternative had we not come up with 
this."

The attorney general expanded on that to include other inter gases, like 
helium, which according to the research the state relied on promise a quick and 
painless death.

"Typically within about 18-20 seconds they'll pass out," Copeland said. "Most 
of the time they won't notice it at all; some of the time they'll feel a slight 
bit of inebriation as if they had been drinking alcohol before they pass out 
and a very small percent of the time they'll feel a little bit of nausea."

"My book has no connection with judicial execution. It is purely for the 
terminally ill and those degeneratively ill to end their lives if their 
suffering is so great," said author Derek Humphry from his Oregon home. "I'm 
sorry it is used, however indirectly, with capital punishment."

Derek Humphry began campaigning for the right-to-die, the assisted suicide 
movement, 40 years ago. He is opposed to the death penalty and says his work is 
about preserving humanity and dignity in death, not forcing it upon others.

Humphry did not know his research and experiences were being used to justify 
gas executions until FOX 25 contacted him after finding his work referenced in 
the state's research on nitrogen. He said it might not be as easy for prisons 
to use gas because it is unlikely inmates will be willing participants.

"We have found that the only secure way of ending life via nitrogen or helium 
is by putting it into a plastic bag which is over the person's head and secured 
at the neck," Humphry said, "But how the penal authorities plan to do it I do 
not know."

The state is not commenting on how it will carry out inert gas executions.

In response to a request for letters or emails about the planning of gas 
executions by Oklahoma Watch and also provided to FOX 25, the only document the 
Department of Corrections provided was a hand written letter faxed in from a 
man in Pennsylvania detailing how the state could build a room. The letter 
contains a sketch of the room in which the man says nitrogen could be pumped in 
while the condemned prisoner sits in a chair perhaps sipping on the supplied 
pitcher of cold beer.

Copeland, who hasn't been asked for input on implementation, says the procedure 
should be designed to withstand legal challenges.

"If it were me," Copeland said, "I would probably buy a high altitude training 
chamber that is used for pilots so that we know exactly what that experience is 
like, buy a used one so you could have people that sat in that very chamber 
come and testify what it is like to pass out breathing nitrogen."

Oklahoma hasn't executed anyone since January of 2015 and even if new protocols 
were approved today, it would be well into 2019 at the earliest before 
executions could resume due to the state's promise to the courts it would allow 
5 months between adoption and implementation of new execution procedures.

(source: okcfox.com)








NEVADA:

I'm on Death Row for Punching a Man----"After 3 decades, I now feel like I'm 
dying a slow death."



It's 1988. Me and my homeboy - Schoolboy we called him - are sitting in a car 
in Las Vegas, drinking. A woman we know comes up to us. She has a black eye, 
and we ask her what happened. She says her pimp had beat her up and she wants 
him out of her room. She wants us to help her.

So we go over to the hotel room and open the door. The guy jumps off the bed 
and throws his hands up. In my neighborhood, that means you want to fight, and 
so we start going at it. I landed some hard punches, but when I left he seemed 
fine, just bleeding a little bit. The woman goes off to do her thing and we 
fall asleep in the car.

The next day the police surround us, saying we killed somebody. I didn't know 
the guy had died. It turned out he had a brain aneurysm.

I eventually confessed and pleaded guilty. Schoolboy was charged with 
involuntary manslaughter, but I was charged with murder. The prosecutors told a 
different story of the fight, one that capitalized on things I said while high 
and suicidal. They said I walked in planning to kill him and did just that.

I'd been incarcerated before and it was horrible. I was 19 and heard about 
people getting raped and killed. When I left, I thought, I'll never go back to 
that place. I was not in my right mind. So when I was arrested this time, I 
thought, I would rather die than go back to prison. I was on a suicide mission. 
You want to kill me? I thought. Come on with it!

I started admitting to other murders, murders that it became clear had never 
taken place, all to guarantee I'd get a death sentence. I wrote the judge a 
letter and challenged him to kill me.

A doctor who interviewed me in jail found I was not competent to help my 
defense lawyer, but then the judge wrote a report saying I was competent and 
pretended it had come from the doctor. We later proved in court that the report 
was typed up on the judge's typewriter. (I know this all sounds wild - just go 
read the court papers if you don't believe me.)

Once I got to death row, I thought I'd get executed right away, or at least 
within months. But then the years started passing. My mind cleared. People 
said, "You shouldn't be here forever for a fist fight." I started reading. I 
read that the law requires you get an "impartial tribunal" that "preserves both 
the appearance and reality of fairness." I read that some courts have ruled 
that 2 guys who start a deadly fight are equally guilty, so then why did 
Schoolboy get manslaughter? I was meeting guys on death row with 2 or 3 bodies 
in their past.

My family prevailed on me to start fighting. My brother was in prison at the 
time, and he said, "I don't want to get out and visit you as a plaque on the 
ground." My mom said, "You're going to beat this."

Earlier this year, I heard that Kim Kardashian got the president to commute a 
woman's sentence for drugs and money laundering, and I wondered: What do I have 
to do to get this sort of help? After 3 decades, I now feel like I'm dying a 
slow death. My mom and brother have both died, along with many aunts and 
uncles.

I'd always been kind of slow. I never learned to read or write, even in high 
school - because I was black they just kept passing me on. I didn't learn to 
read until I got to prison. My public defender said they could fight my death 
sentence by having me classified as intellectually disabled. This worked. I 
have a new sentencing coming up next year, and recently my judge tried to find 
any other murder cases with my name on them - the ones I made up - and none 
came up.

But nobody has fought my underlying murder conviction. To defense lawyers, if 
you don't get executed, it's a win for them. But I'm facing life in prison for 
a fist fight, and some crazy things I said 30 years ago.

(source: J.T. Kirksey is currently incarcerated at High Desert State Prison in 
Indian Springs, Nevada, pending a medical procedure. He can be reached by mail 
via death row, at the state's Ely State Prison, with the ID number 30379----The 
Marshall Project)








USA:

The Innocence of Abu Zubaydah



I have defended men and women on death row for nearly all of my thirty years as 
a lawyer, and have represented people caught up in the excesses of the “war on 
terror” since very shortly after that war was launched. For more than a decade, 
I have been counsel for Zayn al-Abedin Muhammad Hussein, known more widely as 
Abu Zubaydah. Abu Zubaydah was the 1st person immured in a "black site," the 
clandestine prisons operated around the globe by the CIA from early 2002 to 
late 2006. He was the 1st prisoner to have his interrogation "enhanced," and 
the only person subjected to all the DOJ-approved interrogation techniques, as 
well as a number that were never approved (including, for example, rectal 
rehydration). The infamous torture memo was, in fact, written specifically to 
legitimize Abu Zubaydah's torture.

At the time of his capture and for years afterward, government officials took 
great pains to demonize Abu Zubaydah in order to justify his abuse. "The other 
day," President George W. Bush announced at a Republican fundraiser in April 
2002, "we hauled in a guy named Abu Zubaydah. He's one of the top operatives 
plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States. He's not 
plotting and planning anymore. He’s where he belongs." Various senior 
administration officials described Abu Zubaydah in comparably colorful terms.

These pronouncements, however, are not what set the torture scandal into 
motion. For that, we can thank a "psychological assessment" written by unnamed 
CIA officers and faxed to John Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer who was the 
lead author of the torture memo. This document described Abu Zubaydah as "the 
3rd or fourth man in al-Qaida" and "a senior Usama Bin Laden lieutenant" who 
had been "involved in every major al-Qaida terrorist operation" and was "a 
planner of the 11 September hijackings." He "managed a network of [al-Qaeda] 
training camps," "directed the start-up of a Bin Laden cell in Jordan," and 
"served as al-Qaeda's coordinator of external contacts, or foreign 
communications." He was also alleged to be "engaged in ongoing terrorism 
planning against US interests." For good measure, he had supposedly written the 
organization's "manual on resistance techniques" and had a particular expertise 
in thwarting conventional interrogations. It was this assessment that provided 
Yoo with the "facts" needed to legalize the unlawful and rationalize the 
unthinkable.

And so Abu Zubaydah was tortured. As often as it has been repeated, the litany 
of this torture is still shocking. His captors hurled him into walls and 
crammed him into boxes and suspended him from hooks and twisted him into shapes 
that no human body can occupy. They kept him awake for seven consecutive days 
and nights. They locked him for hours in a freezing room. They left him in a 
pool of his own urine. They strapped his hands, feet, arms, legs, torso, and 
head tightly to an inclined board, with his head lower than his feet. They 
covered his face and poured water up his nose and down his throat until he 
began to breathe the water, so that he choked and gagged as it filled his 
lungs. His torturers then left him to strain against the straps as he began to 
drown. Repeatedly. Until, just when he believed he was about to die, they 
raised the board long enough for him to vomit the water and retch. Then they 
lowered the board and did it again. The torturers subjected him to this 
treatment at least eighty-three times in August 2002 alone. On at least 1 such 
occasion, they waited too long and Abu Zubaydah nearly died on the board.

*

The "facts" recounted above to justify this torture were all false. Abu 
Zubaydah was no lieutenant to Osama bin Laden. He held no position in al-Qaeda, 
senior or otherwise. He had no part in September 11 or any other al-Qaeda 
operations. He did not operate a network of al-Qaeda camps, open an al-Qaeda 
cell in Jordan, or manage al-Qaeda's external communications. He did not draft 
any resistance manual, for al-Qaeda or anyone else, and had no special 
expertise in resisting interrogations.

The government no longer maintains that these assertions are true, and now 
concedes that Abu Zubaydah was never a member of al-Qaeda.

This was the conclusion of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which 
undertook the most meticulous study of the torture scandal to date, eventually 
publishing a 500-page summary of its findings. The drafters reviewed more than 
6 million pages of contemporaneous records, from the CIA and other sources, and 
concluded there was no support for any of these assertions. The CIA has 
likewise admitted error, and now affirms that Abu Zubaydah was not part of 
al-Qaeda. This is also the conclusion of the United Nations Security Council, 
which has removed Abu Zubaydah from its Islamic State and al-Qaeda sanctions 
list, based on the earlier recommendation of the UN ombudsman, who similarly 
concluded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of al-Qaeda. And years ago, the 
Department of Justice withdrew all allegations that Abu Zubaydah had a 
connection to the September 11 attacks or played any part in al-Qaeda's 
terrorism.

When I point this out, many people ask whether I am claiming that Abu Zubaydah 
is "innocent." Here, they mean innocence in the Hollywood sense - the 
wrong-place-wrong-time sort of innocence that has acquired such purchase in 
American life. Do I maintain that Abu Zubaydah is innocent?

This preoccupation with my client's innocence reminds me of conversations I 
have often had about capital punishment. The question that occurs to many 
people when they reflect on the death penalty is whether he (it is almost 
always a he) "did it." Other questions - about the limits of state power, the 
fairness of the penalty, and the legality of the proceeding - simply do not 
arise. They do not matter so long as the accused committed the offense. The 
plain fact of guilt supersedes any constitutional qualms.

We have now brought this orientation to the new world we once designated 
"post-9/11," but now simply accept as normal. Because the demonization of 
radical Islam has been uncritically embraced by a significant portion of the 
population and a great many of our elected officials, there is widespread 
(though not universal) agreement that the federal government may do things to 
followers of radical Islam that it would never do to a conventional offender - 
even one the government would seek to execute, like a domestic terrorist who 
blows up a federal building in Oklahoma City.

Thus, many people have come to accept that the government may "enhance" such a 
person's interrogation in a way that their former selves would have called 
torture, and that it may hold him on a remote island without trial or 
meaningful legal process for the rest of his days. The only question that 
matters is whether the person falls within the forbidden category. If he does, 
then he is not "innocent" and his special fate is not only justified, it is 
salutary, regardless of the constitutional consequences. But if he does not 
belong to the category of radical Islamist, then he can be considered 
"innocent" and may be spared.

The tragedy of innocence-speak, whether in capital punishment or the post-9/11 
world, is that it encourages a childlike fantasy that we live among saints and 
demons. And it compounds this folly by supposing that the challenge of our time 
is merely to separate the 2 as accurately as possible. Having satisfied 
ourselves that we have done so, we then grant the state the authority to impose 
nearly any penalty on those who fall on the wrong side of an imaginary line. 
The obsession with innocence encourages the transmogrification of a human being 
into a character in a Marvel Comics movie.

*

The short answer to the question "Is Abu Zubaydah Hollywood-innocent?" is that 
it doesn't matter. At least, it shouldn’t. It shouldn't matter in the legal 
sense, because if the law were humane, it would not authorize the government to 
imprison someone for the rest of his days unless he had some specific 
responsibility for the event that triggered our entry into this endless war. 
And it shouldn't matter in the moral sense, because regardless of what he may 
have done, regardless of whether he is "innocent," we should not authorize the 
government to treat him in a way that we would never tolerate if it were done 
to a dog, or to imprison him incommunicado, in a small, windowless cell, 
without charges or meaningful process, until he dies, forgotten by a world that 
has long since moved on.

But we do not live in the world that ought to be. We live in the world that is, 
and most people who ask whether Abu Zubaydah is innocent are not satisfied with 
what they regard as a non-answer. So for them, the answer is no.

Abu Zubaydah would describe himself as a mujahid, which means simply that he is 
engaged in jihad (literally, "struggle"). Like many others, he has long 
believed he has a religious obligation to come to the defense of other Muslims 
who have been attacked, even if the attack comes from an entity as powerful as 
a government. He has believed this for years, which is why he dedicated himself 
to the defense of Muslims in Afghanistan during its war against the Communists. 
And it was a piece of Soviet shrapnel that lodged in Abu Zubaydah’s brain in 
1992 as he fought alongside his fellow Muslims against the Soviet-installed 
puppet government.

Back then, Ronald Reagan called the mujahideen "valiant freedom fighters." He 
said we supported the mujahideen, and would continue to support them as long as 
it was needed, because "their cause is our cause: freedom." Reagan made sure 
the mujahideen received funding from the CIA, and American leaders thought men 
like Abu Zubaydah were heroes of the anti-Soviet resistance.

After the Communist government in Afghanistan collapsed, bickering factions 
dragged the country into civil war. Like most mujahideen, Abu Zubaydah had no 
interest in a conflict that pitted Muslim against Muslim. But there were other 
places around the world where Muslims were under organized attack. Places like 
Bosnia. Because of his injury, Abu Zubaydah could no longer serve as a soldier; 
he simply lacked the physical and mental capacity. So he became a kind of 
mujahid travel agent. He coordinated the travel of other Muslims into Pakistan, 
and from Pakistan to a training camp on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, known 
to the West as Khalden.

Contrary to what the United States believed when its agents tortured Abu 
Zubaydah, the government now agrees that Khalden was not an al-Qaeda camp. 
Under bin Laden’s influence, al-Qaeda considered any American a legitimate 
target, including innocent civilians. Abu Zubaydah, however, like the vast 
majority of mujahideen, rejected this extremist view; he believed then, and 
believes now, that attacks on non-combatants, whether American or otherwise, 
were and are explicitly forbidden by the Koran. (This is also why he believes, 
like most mujahideen of his era, that the actions of ISIS are an egregious 
violation of Islamic law.) Although Abu Zubaydah knew bin Laden, the 2 held 
irreconcilably opposing views of Islam. The ideological antipathy between bin 
Laden and the leadership at Khalden was widely known among the mujahideen in 
Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was precisely because of this antipathy that bin 
Laden forced the Taliban to close Khalden in 2000.

Khalden trained Muslim men to fight in the defense of other Muslims. The men 
who passed through the camp, however, like people everywhere, were free agents 
who could use their training as they deemed appropriate. Like most mujahideen, 
the majority of Khalden trainees went to places like Bosnia to defend Muslims 
under attack. Some, however, came under the sway of bin Laden and moved to 
camps run by al-Qaeda. And some of these men would later be recruited by 
al-Qaeda to take action against the United States. But the leaders of Khalden 
opposed al-Qaeda's campaign. In fact, the man described by the United States as 
a former commander of Khalden, Noor Uthman Muhammed, who was arrested at the 
same time as Abu Zubaydah and who trained hundreds of men at the camp, was 
released from Guantánamo nearly 5 years ago.

Abu Zubaydah is thus not Hollywood-innocent. He helped facilitate the movement 
of scores of Muslim men to a camp that trained them in armed combat. Some of 
these men were later recruited by al-Qaeda. If the government believes this 
adds up to a legal indictment, my co-counsel and I will see them in court. We 
have demanded that he should be either charged or released. The government has 
never brought any charge against Abu Zubaydah, in either civilian or military 
court, presumably because it understands that he has committed no crime.

Instead, the United States is content that he should be forgotten, out of sight 
and out of mind. And for this, the government relies on people continuing to 
imagine him a monster. Because if he is a monster, the government was right to 
torture him. If he is a monster, it is not just lawful but good that he remains 
imprisoned indefinitely. If he is a monster, we may do with him what we will.

But there are no monsters. There is only us.

(source: Joseph Margulies, New York Review of Books)



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

America should do away with the death penalty



Without being aware of it, Vernon Madison might become a footnote in 
constitutional law because he is barely aware of anything. For more than 30 
years, Alabama, with a tenacity that deserves a better cause, has been trying 
to execute him for the crime he certainly committed, the 1985 murder of a 
police officer. Twice the state convicted him unconstitutionally (first 
excluding African-Americans from the jury, then insinuating inadmissible 
evidence into the record). In a third trial the judge, who during his time on 
the bench overrode more life sentences (6) than any other Alabama judge, 
disregarded the jury's recommended sentence of life imprisonment and imposed 
the death penalty.

The mills of justice grind especially slowly regarding capital punishment, 
which courts have enveloped in labyrinthine legal protocols. As the mills have 
ground on, life has ground Madison, 68, down to wreckage. After multiple 
serious strokes, he has vascular dementia, an irreversible and progressive 
degenerative disease. He also is legally blind, his speech is slurred, he has 
Type 2 diabetes and chronic hypertension, he cannot walk unassisted, he has 
dead brain tissue and urinary incontinence.

And he no longer remembers the crime that put him on death row for most of his 
adult life. This is why on Tuesday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments 
about the constitutionality of executing him.

His counsel of record, Bryan A. Stevenson, head of the Equal Justice Initiative 
in Montgomery, Alabama, says that it was undisputed in the penalty phase of 
Madison's 3rd trial that he already "suffered from a mental illness marked by 
paranoid delusions." Stevenson says that Madison, who has been mentally ill 
since adolescence and who over the years had been prescribed "numerous 
psychotropic medications," cannot remember "numerous events" of the past 30 
years, including "events from the offense to his arrest or to his trial," and 
cannot remember the name of the police officer he shot.

The mere phrasing of the matter at issue - whether Madison is "competent to be 
executed" - induces moral vertigo. A unanimous 3-judge panel of the 11th U.S. 
Circuit Court of Appeals held that Madison lacks the requisite competence 
because he lacks understanding of the connection between his crime and his 
execution. The question before the Supreme Court is whether executing Madison 
would violate the Eighth Amendment's proscription of "cruel and unusual 
punishments."

The court has said that "we may seriously question the retributive value of 
executing a person who has no comprehension of why he has been singled out and 
stripped of his fundamental right to life." For many people, the death penalty 
for especially heinous crimes satisfies a sense of moral symmetry. Retribution 
- society's cathartic expression of a proportional response to attacks on its 
norms - is not, however, the only justification offered for capital punishment. 
Deterrence is another. But by now this power is vanishingly small because 
imposition of the death penalty is so sporadic and glacial.

Madison’s case compels us to focus on the death penalty in its granular 
reality: Assisting someone who is non-ambulatory, and bewildered because he is 
(in Stevenson's phrase) "memory-disordered," to be strapped down so an 
executioner can try to find a vein - often a problem with the elderly - to 
receive a lethal injection. Capital punishment is withering away because the 
process of litigating the administration of it is so expensive, and hence 
disproportionate to any demonstrable enhancement of public safety, but also 
because of a healthy squeamishness that speaks well of us.

Sixty years ago, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote that the Eighth Amendment - 
particularly the idea of what counts as "cruel" punishments - "must draw its 
meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a 
maturing society." Concerning which, two caveats are apposite: "evolving" is 
not a synonym for "improving," and a society can become, as America arguably is 
becoming, infantilized as it "matures." That said, it certainly is true that 
standards of decency do evolve, and that America's have improved astonishingly 
since 1958: Think about segregated lunch counters, and much else.

Conservatives have their own standards, including this one: The state - 
government - already is altogether too full of itself, and investing it with 
the power to inflict death on anyone exacerbates its sense of majesty and 
delusions of adequacy.

(source: Opinion; George F. Will writes a twice-weekly column on politics and 
domestic and foreign affairs. He began his column with The Washington Post in 
1974, and he received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1977----The Times)