[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----N.H., FLA., ALA., OHIO, USA

[Rick Halperin]

May 28



NEW HAMPSHIRE:

Death penalty's meaning: Its end would diminish our state



Doing away with the death penalty in New Hampshire, which now seems likely, is 
a step that is likely never to be reversed. It is unfortunate, because doing 
away with something that has been more about its symbolism than its actual use 
is likely to have unintended and dangerous consequences.

The message it sends to New Hampshire and its law enforcement community is a 
terrible one. The men and women who are our peace officers go to work every day 
or night knowing that this may be their last on this earth.

It is not so much that an individual policeman’s life is worth more than that 
of any other individual. The point of largely restricting and reserving the 
ultimate penalty for those who would kill a police officer is to say that the 
police profession itself is so important to the public’s safety and security 
that we, the people of New Hampshire, endorse this means of punishment.

Even if the “deterrent’’ factor in the death penalty is limited to the 
cop-killer being executed, and we don’t believe it is, it is worth it. But the 
greater point is to tell one and all that, here in New Hampshire, we place a 
special value on those who risk their lives as part of their job for us.

The state Senate will vote soon on whether to do away with the death penalty. 
If you care about those who protected your safety in your state and community, 
please let your state senator know that now.

(source: Editorial, Union Leader)








FLORIDA:

Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala announces she will not seek 
re-election



Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala announced in a video posted to 
Facebook Tuesday that she will not be seeking re-election.

Ayala cited her personal views of Florida’s death penalty law in the 
announcement.

“It became abundantly clear to me that death penalty law in the state of 
Florida is in direct conflict with my view and vision for the administration of 
justice,” Ayala said.

Ayala announced in March 2017 that her office would no longer seek the death 
penalty in any case, a decision that made national headlines.

Gov. Rick Scott reassigned her death penalty-eligible cases to State Attorney 
Brad King. The governor's move was upheld by the state supreme court.

The court said Ayala was wrong to have a blanket policy of not seeking the 
death penalty.

Following the court’s decision Ayala announced that she would begin seeking the 
death penalty in future cases if it was unanimously recommended by a panel of 
her assistant prosecutors.

The most high-profile case transferred to King was the prosecution of Markeith 
Loyd.

Ayala said she's proud to have helped "raise the standard of prosecutorial 
responsibility."

She defeated incumbent state attorney Jeff Ashton in 2016.

(source: WESH news)








ALABAMA----impending execution

Alabama prepares to execute second man in 2 weeks



Alabama on Thursday plans to execute the 2nd man in 2 weeks by lethal 
injection. Nearly two months after his 1st execution attempt was called off at 
the last minute, Christopher Lee Price is scheduled to die on Thursday at 
Holman prison in Atmore. Price was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of 
Fayette County preacher Bill Lynn.

The state originally planned to kill Price on April 11, but he received a 
last-minute stay of execution from federal and appellate courts.

While Alabama appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay, the court 
did not issue an opinion before midnight, when Price's death warrant expired.

Price had argued Alabama's lethal injection protocol has "botched" previous 
executions and could cause unconstitutional pain and suffering. Price instead 
asked to opt for death by nitrogen gas, a method Alabama approved last year but 
has yet to develop protocol for carrying out. The state argued Price failed to 
opt in for the nitrogen method in 2018 in accordance to a state statute, though 
his lawyer alleged he wasn't properly notified about the opt-in period.

Before his planned execution in April, Price requested to be married. He and 
his fiancée were married in the Holman Correctional Facility yard on April 10.

Price was 19 when he and a friend approached Lynn outside of his Bazemore home 
3 days before Christmas. The 2 attacked Lynn while he was checking on the power 
box. Lynn's wife, Bessie, later testified that the 2 assailants then beat her 
before stealing jewelry and money from their home.

Bill Lynn, who prosecutors say was cut or stabbed 38 times with a sword and 
dagger, died at a hospital approximately 45 minutes after the attack.

Prison officials said on April 11 that Bessie Lynn was prepared to witness 
Price's execution, along with Bill Lynn's 2 daughters, 2 grandsons and a 
nephew.

A Fayette County jury in 1993 sentenced Price to death by a vote of 10-2. Price 
later tried to contest his sentence, alleging his original trial attorney was 
unprepared for the penalty phase of his trial. Price argued the lawyer failed 
to offer evidence that the then-teenager was psychologically traumatized 
following years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his mother's 
boyfriends. The Supreme Court declined to review his case in 2013.

Price's scheduled execution is the state's 2nd in May. On May 16, Alabama 
killed Michael Brandon Samra, who was convicted for his role in a quadruple 
homicide.

Alabama in February executed Domineque Ray after an 11th-hour U.S. Supreme 
Court ruling vacated a stay of execution pending a religious rights claim. The 
court ruled by a narrow majority Ray had waited too late to bring the issue to 
light.

Ray, a Muslim, had argued Alabama's practice of including a Christian prison 
chaplain in the execution chamber was in violation of the First Amendment. Ray 
sought to have his imam present in the death chamber at the time of his death, 
but the state said it would allow only trained prison employees in the chamber.

In subsequent court filings, Alabama now says it has altered its execution 
protocol to exclude any religious leader, including the Holman prison chaplain, 
from the death chamber.

Ray's execution and the last-minute delay in Price's scheduled April execution, 
along with a handful of cases in other states, have highlighted tensions on the 
nation's highest court. On May 13, the court issued an unprecedented trove of 
documents, which The Associated Press deemed "internal squabbling" over the 
death penalty.

(sources: Monntgomery Advertiser & Associated Press)

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

Alabama set to execute Price for 1991 death of pastor



Alabama is scheduled to execute Christopher Lee Price this week for his part in 
a 1991 sword-and-dagger slaying of a pastor in Fayette County.

Thursday's execution has been at the center of unusually public squabbling at 
the Supreme Court over capital punishment.

Court has set a new execution date for Price on May 30. Price, 46, was 
convicted in the 1991 robbery and slaying of Fayette County minister Bill Lynn.

Lynn was killed with a sword and knife just days before Christmas in 1991, 
while he was wrapping presents for his grandchildren. He had over 30 
inches-deep stab wounds and one of his arms was nearly severed. His wife, 
Bessie Lynn, was injured in the attack but survived.

A federal judge stayed Price's execution in April after he raised challenges to 
the state's lethal injection procedure. The Supreme Court fractured 5-4 along 
liberal-conservative lines to overrule those orders and allow his execution to 
go forward, but not before the midnight death warrant expired.

Justice Stephen Breyer admonished court conservatives for overruling 2 lower 
court stays "in the middle of the night."

Justice Clarence Thomas later wrote a 14-page response saying there was 
"nothing of substance" to Breyer's claims.

(source: Associated Press)








OHIO:

DeWine, prisons have no documents on Ohio’s new execution protocol



The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has been working for 
months on Gov. Mike DeWine’s order to revamp Ohio’s execution protocol. But the 
department says it hasn’t generated a single email or other written 
communication related to the work.

The governor’s office suggests the lack of such documentation is intentional. 
And that has critics accusing the administration of trying to avoid 
transparency in an endeavor that in the past has been riddled with problems 
carrying out the death penalty and obtaining the drugs to perform executions.

“The execution process across the United States has been plagued by secrecy and 
a lack of transparency,” said Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information 
Center, a national group that gathers information about how capital punishment 
is practiced.

In Ohio, problems go at least as far back as 2014, when Dennis McGuire choked 
and gasped for about 10 minutes before dying after being administered a new, 
two-drug protocol. That prompted a three-year moratorium as prison officials 
came up with a 3-drug protocol that still used midazolam — which has been used 
in botched executions in at least 4 states — as the first in the procedure.

Since 2017, Ohio has conducted four more executions and abandoned a fifth when 
prison workers couldn’t inject drugs into a man’s veins. Then, earlier this 
year, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued a ruling that likened the Ohio 
protocol to “waterboarding” and said it “would feel as though fire was being 
poured” into a prisoner’s veins.

In response, DeWine postponed one execution and then three more as he ordered 
the corrections department to devise a new lethal injection protocol. But as 
corrections officials did, they had to contend with accusations that the state 
was using subterfuge to obtain earlier execution drugs from manufacturers who 
were adamantly opposed to their use in carrying out the death penalty.

Seeking to get an idea of what drugs the state is thinking of using and how it 
plans to get them, The Dispatch filed an open records request in April with the 
corrections department for all of its internal and external communication 
regarding DeWine’s order and the development of the new protocol. Hearing 
nothing, the paper last week asked about the status of the request. It received 
a response the same day.

“After investigation and review of our agency records, we have determined that 
we have no responsive records. Thank you for your patience,” spokeswoman Sara 
French said in an email.

While it might seem implausible that such a weighty matter as devising a new 
death-penalty protocol could be undertaken by a state agency without a single 
email or memo being generated, DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney seemed to say that 
was by design.

“Gov. DeWine agrees that execution protocol is a very sensitive issue, and that 
sensitivity may not be appropriate for general email or common written 
correspondence,” Tierney said in an email. “The governor speaks with Director 
(Annette) Chambers-Smith regularly, and he will be receiving a full briefing on 
this issue soon.

?(The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction) remains focused on 
researching a new protocol using drugs that the state of Ohio can actually 
obtain.”

Dunham, of the Death Penalty Information Center, said it appears that DeWine 
and his administration are trying to keep the public out of the loop.

“What’s clear is that people don’t intentionally structure communications to 
avoid putting things in writing unless there’s important information they don’t 
want people to know,” he said.

Monica Nieporte, president and executive director of the Ohio News Media 
Association, said the state should not try to devise something as important as 
a new lethal injection protocol in secret.

“Since it appears that the work done on this issue has largely been done 
through verbal conversation and, according to DRC, there is no supporting 
documentation that is public record, it makes it very difficult for journalists 
or citizens to determine what progress has been made on this topic,” she said 
in an email. “Hopefully as their research winds down and they are at the point 
of making recommendations, they will be providing some detailed explanations, 
including documentation about how they made their conclusions.”

(source: The Columbus Dispatch)








USA:

Maybe our country can learn something from stoning



It’s not easy to find something positive to say about the method of execution 
known as stoning, but I’m going to try before this column is finished.

Stoning is in the same category with flogging, torture and slavery, which in a 
better world would have been abolished long ago. Alas, these dreadful practices 
die hard; they persist, and in some cultures they are resurgent.

Brunei is a tiny nation on the island of Borneo. It is ruled by Sultan Hassanal 
Bolkiah, who is fabulously wealthy, thanks to Brunei’s plentiful oil resources. 
He lives in a 1,788-room palace and owns a gold-plated Rolls-Royce. Michael 
Jackson performed for his 50th birthday.

The sultan serves as the country’s prime minister, foreign minister, finance 
minister and defense minister. He is also the chief enforcer of religious 
discipline, and he applies a harsh form of conservative Islam on his subjects. 
He made news last month for implementing punishments such as amputation and 
stoning for homosexuality, theft and adultery.

Stoning is probably the original form of capital punishment, the killing of an 
offender by his community with the implements readily at hand. Stoning figures 
prominently in Jewish history, but it survives today only in Islamic countries, 
where it is legal but generally used only sporadically.

Under Iran’s penal code, for example, a man found guilty of adultery “shall be 
buried in a ditch up to near his waist” and a woman “up to near her chest,” and 
then they are “stoned to death.” It’s hard to imagine a death more primitive 
and brutal.

The law’s language is complicated, subjective and often capricious. For 
example, a man who escapes from the ditch goes free if his conviction was based 
on his own confession. But if he was convicted based on the testimony of 
others, he is forced back into the ditch and is stoned.

Further, Iran’s penal code is extremely specific about what constitutes a sex 
act — I’ll spare you the details — but vague about what represents a proper 
stone for use in the execution, which “shall not be too large to kill the 
convict by 1 or 2 throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be 
called a stone.”

Stoning is a savage business that has no place in a civilized culture. But I 
said that I was going to say something positive about it. Here is a quirk of 
stoning that might be instructive for our nation:

If a person is convicted of adultery based on his confession, the judge who has 
applied the law throws the first stone, then others join in. If a person is 
convicted based on the testimony of witnesses, the witnesses throw the first 
stones, then the judge throws one and then the others.

What’s good about this? Stoning exposes the brutality of capital punishment by 
requiring that the death sentence be carried out in a public and participatory 
way. The members of the community closest to the case throw the first stones, 
and every community member has an opportunity to witness and be a part of the 
killing.

In our culture, we’ve gone to great lengths to do just the opposite. The last 
public hanging was in 1936. Since then, executions have been carried out behind 
closed doors, and we’ve found ways to make them considerably less brutal, and 
thus more acceptable, than stoning.

Still, support for capital punishment shows signs of waning in our culture. 
When they have the option, juries show a preference for life without parole 
over death. How would they behave if the law required them to participate in 
the execution? And how would the rest of us react if we were required to watch?

Should we bring back stoning? Of course not. But stoning differs from lethal 
injection only as a matter of degree. As we practice capital punishment, it is 
still brutal, ineffective, capricious and arbitrary. And until we abolish it, 
any criticism of stoning in places such as Brunei and Iran rings hollow.

(source: John Crisp, Tribune News Service)