[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----ARK., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 8



ARKANSAS:

'In The Executioner's Shadow' Film Screening at 5 p.m. April 10 in Giffels 
Auditorium



A showing of the documentary film, "In The Executioner's Shadow," will be shown 
at 5 p.m. Wednesday, April 10, in Giffels Auditorium in conjunction with the 
CRIM/SOCI 4013: Death Penalty course and supported by the Department of 
Sociology and Criminology.

According to the film's website at intheexecutionersshadow.com/synopsis-

"It is the potential of this documentary to move us toward a more enlightened 
society that excites me about this work." —Benjamin Jealous, former NAACP 
President

In the Executioner's Shadow casts a penetrating look at the consequences of the 
death penalty through three powerful stories - the rare perspective of a former 
state executioner who comes within days of executing an innocent person; a 
Boston Marathon bombing victim who struggles to decide what justice really 
means; and the parents of a murder victim who choose to fight for the life of 
their daughter's killer. As the battle to overturn capital punishment comes to 
a head in the U.S., this provocative film challenges viewers to question their 
deepest beliefs about justice.

As wrongful convictions, botched executions, and a broken justice system inch 
further into the spotlight, we must consider: What is justice? What part should 
the death penalty play?

In the Executioner's Shadow allows a glimpse into Jerry's rarely seen world of 
death row and execution. It explores Karen's moral conflict as she attends the 
accused bomber's trial, a young man the same age as her son. It defies our 
perception of justice as Vicki and Syl fight for the life of their daughter's 
murderer.

In the Executioner's Shadow illuminates the oft hidden realities entangled in 
death row, the death penalty, and the U.S. Justice system at large.

This is a film about justice, injustice and the death penalty. Informational 
boards will be available and refreshments will be served prior the screening. 
All students are welcome!

(source: uark.edu)








USA:

Democrats Rethink the Death Penalty, and Its Politics



Almost immediately, Democratic presidential candidates lined up in support, 
calling capital punishment a moral outrage infected with racial bias. Senator 
Kamala Harris of California, a former prosecutor, called for a federal 
moratorium on executions. Former Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas did the 
same.

The moment marked a generational shift for a party where some candidates long 
supported the death penalty to protect themselves from being portrayed as soft 
on crime.

But Democrats aren’t leading a national debate; they are following a 
decades-long trend that has seen support for the death penalty drop from nearly 
80 % in the 1990s to just over 50 % now.

Still, many feel that Mr. Newsom was doing his party no favors politically by 
forcing Democrats to talk about an issue that can still be fraught in a general 
election. Even in solidly Democratic California, voters in 2016 rejected a 
ballot initiative to end the death penalty and instead approved one to expedite 
executions.

In short, the moment captured what has changed significantly and what has not 
with an issue that is hard-wired into the nation’s psyche. Like the 
proliferation of guns, capital punishment distinguishes the United States from 
other Western democracies, virtually all of which have banned it.

Bill Whalen, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who once advised Pete 
Wilson, a Republican former governor of California, wrote in a column: “Every 
Democrat who wants to unseat President Trump now must figure out where they 
stand on the death penalty.”

He continued: “For some triangulating Democrats, that’s a tricky balancing act 
given that capital punishment is despised by the party’s progressive base but 
is far more popular in the crime-and-order Heartland.”

The new attention notwithstanding, presidents are limited in their power over 
capital punishment, several experts pointed out in interviews. A president 
could clear federal death row, but that includes only 62 people compared to 
more than 2,500 condemned inmates in state prisons.

The federal government has executed only three people since it reinstated 
capital punishment in 1988 — one of them was Timothy McVeigh — and the last one 
was in 2003.

The president has far greater power to determine the future of capital 
punishment in the United States by appointing justices to the Supreme Court. 
Experts expect the court to eventually rule on whether the Constitution allows 
executions at a time of increasing recognition of the enormous financial costs 
of the death penalty, high-profile exonerations and research showing persistent 
racial bias in capital cases.

“The president, and what the president does, will bear very much on the Supreme 
Court’s thinking on this, because the president does reflect the national 
electorate,” said James S. Liebman, a professor at Columbia University who 
specializes in the death penalty.

New positions and different risks

You don’t have to look back very far to see what a shift there has been in the 
positions taken by Democratic candidates.

In 2016, for the 1st time, the Democratic Party platform called for the 
abolition of the death penalty. But Hillary Clinton, the party’s nominee for 
president, supported capital punishment. President Barack Obama never called 
for its end, either. Al Gore was a supporter, and so was Bill Clinton.

Some fear it could still be a losing issue in a general election against 
President Trump, who has talked about expanding those eligible for execution to 
include convicted drug dealers and could use the issue to rally his base and 
portray Democrats as weak on crime.

A spotlight on the people reshaping our politics. A conversation with voters 
across the country. And a guiding hand through the endless news cycle, telling 
you what you really need to know.

In a Twitter post about Mr. Newsom’s moratorium, Mr. Trump wrote, “friends and 
families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!”

The issue illuminates ideological and generational divides among many 
Democratic voters. Many of the presidential candidates are on record opposing 
capital punishment; Joseph R. Biden Jr., the former vice president who is 
expected to enter the race in the coming weeks, has supported it.

As a senator in the 1990s, Mr. Biden supported many get-tough-on-crime policies 
that liberals now disavow, including limits on appeals for death row inmates.

“Biden was one of the major proponents of the 1994 amendments that severely 
limited the ability of death row prisoners to obtain meaningful judicial 
review,” said Robert Dunham, the executive director of the Death Penalty 
Information Center, a nonprofit group that provides analysis and information on 
capital punishment. “Other people who have sponsored that bill have said they 
thought that was a mistake. And I think that voters will have to decide whether 
candidates for office have made mistakes and learned from them, or whether they 
are professing new views because the views of the public have changed.”

While Ms. Harris has long opposed capital punishment, she has a somewhat 
complicated history on the issue. As the district attorney in San Francisco, 
she refused to seek a death sentence for a defendant accused of murdering a 
police officer, provoking outrage from the right. But she defended California’s 
death penalty as the state’s attorney general, and twice, in 2012 and 2016, she 
refused to take a stand on ballot initiatives that proposed to abolish it.

Aside from Mr. Biden, most of the other candidates have opposed the death 
penalty. In addition to Ms. Harris and Mr. O’Rourke, who have said they would 
support a federal moratorium, Senators Bernie Sanders, Cory Booker, Elizabeth 
Warren and Kirsten Gillibrand all said they support Mr. Newsom’s moratorium. 2 
former governors in the race — John Hickenlooper of Colorado and Jay Inslee of 
Washington — imposed moratoriums in their states.

“It’s kind of interesting that they are talking about it because it had pretty 
much dropped off the radar for national campaigns,” said Kent Scheidegger, the 
legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a group based in 
Sacramento that has led campaigns in California and across the country in 
support of the death penalty. “I’d love to see it made an issue.”

He predicted that it may “drop back off the screen in the national campaign. I 
don’t think Democrats want this to be an issue in a general election, because 
it would be a loser for them.”

Limiting executions, but not ending them

For all the shifts on the death penalty, its status now is defined by two 
things. The Supreme Court, which determines its legality, seems firmly in favor 
of it. And at the state level, where prosecutors, jurors and local courts 
administer the justice system, the number of death sentences and executions is 
plummeting.

A very different Supreme Court declared executions unconstitutional in 1972, 
saying the arbitrary use of capital punishment constituted “cruel and unusual 
punishment” under the Eighth Amendment. Four years later, after states began 
remaking their death penalty systems, the court ruled that executions could 
resume. (The first new federal death penalty statutes were approved in 1988.)

Executions soared during a period of high crimes rates in the 1980s and 1990s. 
The high point for death sentences was 1996, when 315 people were condemned to 
die. In 1999, 98 people were executed, the most in any year since 1976.

Since then, as crime has fallen, the number of new death sentences dropped to 
31 in 2016, a modern-era low, and 20 states have ended the practice.

In 3 important cases in recent years — in 2002, 2005 and 2008 — the court has 
narrowed the death penalty’s scope, ruling that juveniles and those with 
intellectual disabilities can’t be executed, and limiting the types of crimes — 
mostly only murder — that are eligible for a capital sentence.

But the court — with 2 new conservative justices appointed by Mr. Trump, Neil 
M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, and a 5-4 conservative majority — is seen as 
solidly behind the death penalty.

That was vividly illustrated by a bitterly divided recent case in which the 
court ruled 5-4 to allow the execution of an inmate in Missouri who said a rare 
medical condition would make him choke on his own blood during his lethal 
injection.

Justice Gorsuch, writing for the majority, said the Eighth Amendment “does not 
guarantee a prisoner a painless death.”

If President Trump is able to nominate additional justices who are confirmed, 
his successor’s influence on the death penalty would be limited to enacting a 
federal moratorium, nominating district court and appeals court judges and 
using the bully pulpit to make a case against capital punishment.

‘The most toxic issue’

The death penalty has long played a powerful role in presidential politics, 
especially in the 1980s and 1990s.

It helped sink the candidacy of Michael S. Dukakis, a Democrat, in 1988 when he 
said in a debate that he would oppose an execution even if his wife, Kitty, 
were raped and murdered.

4 years later, Bill Clinton rushed back to Arkansas from the campaign trail to 
oversee the execution of a mentally disabled man convicted of killing a police 
officer, burnishing an image of being tough on crime.

“It was just the most toxic issue,” said Stephen B. Bright, a professor at Yale 
Law School, who noted that during this time many state judges were removed from 
office for their opposition to the death penalty. Gov. Mario Cuomo of New York 
lost his re-election bid in 1994 partly because he was against capital 
punishment, Mr. Bright said.

Now, the politics have shifted. Not only are Democrats more willing to speak 
out against the death penalty, but many Republicans — though not Mr. Trump — 
are turning against capital punishment on limited-government grounds and, 
especially, because of high costs.

One study has shown that capital punishment has cost California $5 billion 
since the 1970s. Another study, by Ernest Goss, an economics professor at 
Creighton University, found that each death penalty prosecution in Nebraska 
cost $1.5 million more than when prosecutors sought life without parole.

Those more complex realities do not negate the potential for contentious 
politics in 2020.

“I think the Democratic primaries may be the first one in which candidates 
outflank one another on the left on criminal justice issues,” said Carol S. 
Steiker, an expert on the death penalty at Harvard Law School.

But while Democratic candidates would likely appoint judges and officials who 
support criminal justice reform broadly, few expect the death penalty to become 
a litmus test issue like abortion.

And it’s not clear what will carry more weight in 2020 politics — the complex 
realities of the justice system or the history of the death penalty as a potent 
political weapon, particularly in the hands of Mr. Trump.

“You’ve already got socialism and immigration, and you can add this to it,” Mr. 
Bright said. “The question is if it will resonate.”

(source: New York Times)