[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----MO., OKLA., ARIZ., S.DAK., WYO., USA

[Rick Halperin]

Sept. 5



MISSOURI:

Attorneys: Race played role in death row case


Attorneys for Missouri death row inmate Earl Ringo Jr. are asking Gov. Jay 
Nixon to halt the execution scheduled for next week over concerns that race was 
a factor in Ringo's conviction and death sentence.

Ringo, who is black, was convicted of killing 2 people in a Columbia restaurant 
robbery in 1998. Attorney Kay Parish says Ringo was tried by a white judge and 
sentenced to death by an all-white jury. Her request to Nixon on Thursday also 
asks that the governor appoint an independent board of inquiry to examine the 
role race played in the case.

Messages seeking comment from Nixon's office were not immediately returned.

Ringo is scheduled to die by injection at 12:01 a.m. Wednesday. He would be the 
9th Missouri inmate executed since November.

(source: Associated Press)

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

Missouri May Have Lied Under Oath About What Drugs It Used To Kill People And 
When


In three recent lethal injections gone awry, inmates struggled for as much as 2 
hours before they died. These executions occurred in different states, under 
different circumstances, but they all used the same drug, the short-acting 
sedative Midazolam. Doctors don't know how Midazolam works for executions, 
since it is typically only used to sedate patients during surgery; the drug is 
not even considered a "true general anesthesia" because it the patient retains 
some awareness.

So when lawyers asked Missouri officials under oath whether they were or might 
ever use Midazolam in the state's lethal injections, it was significant that 
they said they would not. "We will not use those drugs," Department of 
Corrections director George Lombardi said during a deposition in January. But 
St. Louis Public Radio reported this week that records show they did use those 
drugs, in every single execution since November of last year. In fact, the 2 
men who swore under oath that the state would not use the drug signed off on 
documents authorizing the use of the drug. Not only that; documents suggest 
that officials administered the Midazolam before the execution warrant was even 
valid, and before witnesses were taken into the execution viewing room.

These officials would not respond to requests for comment from St. Louis Public 
Radio. And the revelation raises particular alarm bells. For 1 thing, Midazolam 
is among the more controversial lethal injection drugs and could have 
unpredictable consequences. Anesthesiologist David Waisel called Midazolam 
"uncharted territory," saying, "States literally have no idea what they???re 
doing to these people." States haven???t agreed on a standard dosage. And they 
don't know how much awareness death row inmates retain while they???re being 
killed.

For another thing, Missouri was among the first states to insist that it could 
execute people without disclosing the source or any other information about the 
drug. Lawyers for the death row inmates have argued that this secrecy means 
they can't verify whether the state is imposing cruel and unusual punishment in 
violation of the Eighth Amendment. And Missouri???s seeming misrepresentations 
amplify that concern.

"There's a complete lack of transparency here. So I mean the issue we've had 
all along, which is secrecy. continues," Missouri criminal defense lawyer 
Cheryl Pilate told ThinkProgress. "And this adds further weight to the notion 
that what we're seeing is really a very sanitized stage managed procedure and 
we don't know what the prisoner is experiencing."

As St. Louis Public Radio laments in its report, "We weren't aware of how far 
the state's secrecy extended in Missouri. We knew the state hid the names of 
those carrying out executions. We knew the state attempted to hide the supplier 
of its drugs. But we didn't know the state had tried to hide what drugs it's 
using, and how long executions really take."

"[W]e just don't know anything," added Pilate. "We don't know how this drug is 
being administered. By whom. Under whose authority. Is it given all at once? Is 
it oral? Is it IV? What time is it given?"

Lying under oath is one of a number of questionable tactics states are pursuing 
so they can keep putting people to death, even as international opposition to 
the death penalty has created shortages of some lethal injection drugs. In 
Louisiana, state officials reportedly tricked a hospital into providing a 
painkiller for executions by misleading administrators about what it was for. 
And some lawmakers have called for bringing back firing squads, gas chambers, 
and the electric chair.

(source: thinkprogress.org)






OKLAHOMA:

How to Avoid Botched Executions, According to Oklahoma----For one, don't 
schedule multiple executions on the same day.


Oklahoma state officials have completed a review of April's botched execution 
of Clayton Lockett and determined that oversights in monitoring the IV line 
likely contributed to problems witnessed during his prolonged death.

The investigation, conducted by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety and 
made public Thursday, concluded that "the viability of the IV access point was 
the single greatest factor that contributed to the difficulty in administering 
the execution drugs."

The report largely absolves government officials of direct blame in Lockett's 
failed execution, which was described as a grisly affair by witnesses and 
prompted a national conversation about the efficacy of lethal injections as the 
preferred method of capital punishment in the United States.

"Regarding whether [the Department of Corrections] correctly followed their 
current execution protocols, it was determined there were minor deviations from 
specific requirements outlined in the protocol in effect on April 29," the 
report states. "Despite those deviations, it was determined the protocol was 
substantially and correctly complied with throughout the entire process."

The report also lists a series of largely bureaucratic recommendations, 
including general suggestions such as improving interagency communication, 
better training of officials, and adoption of consistent "execution 
terminology." It makes no determination as to the effectiveness of the drugs 
used in Lockett's execution, including midazolam, a sedative that has been used 
in three botched executions this year.

Among the more tangible conclusions in the investigation is that Oklahoma 
should refrain from scheduling two executions on the same day. The state had 
planned to execute Lockett and fellow death-row inmate Charles Warner 
back-to-back, an unusual "double execution" that would have been the 1st in 
Oklahoma since 1937 and the 1st nationwide in 14 years. The state halted 
Warner's execution after Lockett's went awry.

"It was apparent the stress level at [Oklahoma State Penitentiary] was raised 
because two executions had been scheduled on the same day," the report noted. 
"Due to manpower and facility concerns, executions should not be scheduled 
within seven calendar days of each other."

The review of Lockett's execution lands amid a spate of legal challenges to 
secretive lethal-injection protocols in a handful of active death-penalty 
states around the country. The execution also sparked international outcry and 
a wave of intense media attention, eliciting a response from the White House.

"We have a fundamental standard in this country that even when the death 
penalty is justified, it must be carried out humanely," press secretary Jay 
Carney said a day after the execution. "And I think everyone would recognize 
that this case fell short of that standard."

The investigation was ordered by Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, as an 
independent review of the state's execution protocols. But several 
death-penalty opponents were skeptical that a review by another state agency 
amounted to truly independent oversight.

Lockett was executed on April 29. He was declared unconscious 10 minutes after 
being injected with the 1st dose of a then-untested 3-drug lethal cocktail. 
Minutes later, however, Lockett awoke and began breathing heavily. Still 
strapped to his gurney, he began writhing and muttering, which prompted 
officials with the Oklahoma Department of Corrections to lower the death 
chamber's blinds.

Lockett eventually died 43 minutes after his execution began. Officials 
originally determined the cause of death to be a heart attack, but an 
independent autopsy released last week concluded the lethal drugs were directly 
responsible for ending his life.

(source: nationaljournal.com)

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

IV Misplaced in Oklahoma Execution, Report Says


An official report released Thursday about a bungled execution in Oklahoma in 
April says that an improperly placed intravenous line in the prisoner's groin 
allowed the drugs to perfuse surrounding tissue rather than to flow directly 
into his bloodstream.

The report was ordered by Gov. Mary Fallin after the prolonged writhing and 
gasping of the prisoner, Clayton D. Lockett, during an execution that drew 
global attention to death penalty procedures and problems associated with 
lethal injections.

Because the groin area was covered with a sheet as the injections began - first 
a sedative intended to render Mr. Lockett unconscious, and then paralyzing and 
heart-stopping agents - the doctor and paramedic on the scene did not see the 
bulge, larger than a golf ball, indicating a procedure gone awry, said the 
report by Michael C. Thompson, the commissioner of public safety.

The report, which described prison officials as ill-prepared for unexpected 
events during an execution, recommended keeping injection sites visible at all 
times, improving the training of prison officials who inject the lethal drugs 
and developing procedures for emergency situations. "I expect the Department of 
Corrections to implement the proposed improvements in protocols to ensure that 
future executions are performed effectively," said Ms. Fallin in a statement on 
Thursday.

Mr. Lockett's execution on April 29 led Oklahoma to suspend executions and 
intensified the national debate about whether lethal injection can meet the 
constitutional standard barring cruel and unusual punishment.

To critics of the death penalty, the chaotic execution of Mr. Lockett, who was 
convicted of shooting a 19-year-old woman and burying her alive, epitomized the 
growing concerns about lethal injections at a time when states are 
experimenting with new drugs and combinations, often purchased from secret 
sources, because the traditionally used barbiturates are so scarce.

Brushing aside calls to appoint an independent investigator, Ms. Fallin 
selected Mr. Thompson, who oversees the prisons, to review what went wrong and 
to recommend changes.

Defense lawyers condemned Mr. Thompson's report as inadequate. "The state's 
internal investigation raises more questions than it answers," said Dale Baich, 
a federal public defender based in Phoenix who is helping to represent other 
prisoners on death row in Oklahoma. "The report does not address 
accountability."

Mr. Thompson said at a news conference that he was not assigning blame to any 
officials and that he believed the state's Department of Corrections would act 
to make the recommended changes before resuming executions. He insisted that, 
despite the training lapses noted in the report, Oklahoma's execution system 
was fundamentally sound.

"Are there things that need to be improved?" he said. "Absolutely." But he went 
on to say that Oklahoma had conducted about 110 consecutive executions over 25 
years without major problems, and he called on the public to remember the 
suffering of the condemned prisoners' victims and their families.

The report confirms for the 1st time that a doctor, whose assigned task was to 
declare the prisoner unconscious and later dead, joined in the frantic effort 
to insert a line into Mr. Lockett's veins once the paramedic ran into problems. 
The report said the doctor, who was not named, worked in emergency medicine and 
had participated in one other execution several years earlier.

The paramedic who initially tried, without success, to insert lines into Mr. 
Lockett's arms, legs and feet has been licensed in emergency medical services 
for 40 years and was "involved in every lethal injection execution in Oklahoma, 
except for 2," the report said.

Once an IV line was placed into Mr. Lockett's right groin - a more complex 
procedure than using an extremity - the officials??? failure to visually 
monitor the site appears to have been a lapse in standard medical practice.

Warden Anita Trammell, who was supervising the execution but has no medical 
training, told the investigators that it was common to cover a prisoner???s 
body with a sheet and that she had also done so in this case "to maintain 
Lockett's dignity." But she also said that "if the IV insertion point had been 
viewed, the issue would have been detected earlier."

The failure was not discovered for many minutes - only after Mr. Lockett, 
incompletely sedated, it appears, began writhing in response to the painful 
second 2 drugs.

Executions in the state were suspended, including that of Charles F. Warner, 
who was convicted in the rape and murder of an infant and was originally 
scheduled to die after Mr. Lockett on April 29. His execution is now set for 
Nov. 13, but Mr. Thompson said it was not clear if the recommended retraining 
and changes could be completed by then.

The sedative used in Mr. Lockett's execution, midazolam, was also used in 
problematic executions in Ohio in January, when the prisoner appeared to gasp 
for 26 minutes before dying, and in Arizona in July, when an execution expected 
to take 15 minutes dragged on for nearly 2 hours, with officials injecting 
additional doses as the prisoner was said to gasp repeatedly.

The inquiry did not explore some questions raised by defense lawyers, like how 
the state chooses drugs for lethal injection and where it gets them. Nor did 
the report try to explain why it was so hard for the paramedic to place an IV 
line. While Mr. Lockett had been combative earlier in the day and refused to 
eat, an official autopsy said that he was not dehydrated when he died.

When Mr. Lockett's execution commenced on the evening of April 29, witnesses 
said, it took longer than expected for an attending doctor to declare Mr. 
Lockett unconscious. Then, as the injections of the other 2 drugs began, he 
seemed to revive, bucking against his constraints. After several minutes, 
officials closed the blinds.

More than a half-hour into what should have been a 10-minute procedure, after 
discovering that the drugs were not being properly delivered, the corrections 
director, Robert Patton, officially called off the execution, but no steps were 
taken to provide emergency resuscitation as Mr. Lockett's heart began to fail. 
10 minutes later, the attending doctor declared Mr. Lockett dead.

Mr. Patton then told reporters that Mr. Lockett's vein had "blown," that he had 
halted the execution but that Mr. Lockett still had died of a heart attack.

The official autopsy concluded that Mr. Lockett had died, in the end, because 
of the effects of the drugs, but did not describe the mechanism of his death.

(source: New York Times)

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

Oklahoma report blames intravenous-line woes for problematic execution


It took 43 minutes for Clayton Lockett to die in April in Oklahoma's death 
chamber, raising questions about whether the botched execution was caused by a 
failed drug protocol. On Thursday, a state investigation blamed the problems in 
carrying out the sentence on the use and monitoring of an intravenous line.

The report, prepared by the Oklahoma Department of Public Safety, calls for 
some changes, including making the IV site visible to officials throughout an 
execution, better training to cope with contingencies and having additional 
supplies on hand. Overall, however, the report says officials acted properly 
during the April 29 execution of Lockett despite the length of time and 
witnesses' accounts that he was writhing in pain.

In recent years, states have had difficulties finding new sources of drugs to 
be used in executions. Opponents have also questioned the types and dosages of 
the drugs used.

Oklahoma used the sedative midazolam for the 1st time in Lockett's execution, 
and Public Safety Commissioner Michael Thompson said at a televised news 
conference Thursday that the deadly cocktail of midazolam, vecuronium bromide 
and potassium chloride were successful.

"The drugs worked," he said. "At the end of the day ... the drugs did what they 
were designed to do.

"Are there some things that need to be improved? Absolutely."

The report says medical workers resorted to inserting the IV line carrying the 
execution drugs into a vein in Lockett's groin after failing to find a viable 
vein in his legs and arms. The IV site was covered with a sheet and not 
monitored until the physician saw swelling larger than a golf ball, according 
to the report.

"The physician and paramedic made several attempts to start a viable IV access 
point. They both believed the IV access was the major issue with this 
execution. This investigation concluded the viability of the IV access point 
was the single greatest factor that contributed to the difficulty in 
administering the execution drugs," the report says.

But despite those difficulties, the report says, Department of Corrections 
officials followed the rules.

"Regarding whether DOC correctly followed their current execution protocols, it 
was determined there were minor deviations from specific requirements outlined 
in the protocol," the report says. "Despite those deviations, it was determined 
the protocol was substantially and correctly complied with throughout the 
entire process. None of the identified deviations contributed to the 
complications encountered during this execution."

An attorney representing a group of prisoners on Oklahoma's death row 
criticized the report, saying it "raises more questions than it answers" and 
protects the chain of command.

"Once the execution was clearly going wrong, it should have been stopped, but 
it wasn't. Whoever allowed the execution to continue needs to be held 
accountable," attorney Dale Baich said in a statement.

He said a pending federal lawsuit against the state would question witnesses 
under oath and attempt to "seek complete information about the manner of 
Clayton Lockett's death."

Oklahoma Gov. Mary Fallin said she expected corrections officials to implement 
the recommended protocols.

"I continue to believe the death penalty is an appropriate and just punishment 
for those guilty of the most heinous crimes, as Mr. Lockett certainly was," 
Fallin said in a statement. "The state's responsibility is to ensure a sentence 
of death is carried out in an effective manner. Commissioner Thompson's report 
and his recommendations for improved DOC protocols will help ensure this high 
standard is met."

The report was the result of an investigation ordered by Fallin into Lockett's 
death, one of several executions that ignited debate over how states administer 
the death penalty and whether they violate the constitutional ban on cruel and 
unusual punishment. Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton originally 
said the cause of death was a heart attack, but autopsy results released last 
week said Lockett, 38, died from the execution drugs.

Lockett was convicted of shooting Stephanie Neiman, 19, with a sawed-off 
shotgun and watching as 2 accomplices buried her alive in 1999.

(source: Los Angeles Times)

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

Oklahoma governor: No executions without new rules


New procedures to improve Oklahoma's execution process must be implemented 
before the state resumes putting prisoners to death by lethal injection, Gov. 
Mary Fallin said after investigators presented their findings about an April 
case in which the inmate writhed and moaned on the gurney.

In its report released Thursday about the troubled April 29 execution of 
Clayton Lockett - who was declared dead 43 minutes after his execution began - 
the state Department of Public Safety made 11 recommendations include more 
training for medical personnel and having additional supplies of lethal drugs 
and equipment on hand.

Corrections Director Robert Patton is reviewing the guidelines, Fallin said, 
adding that she expects the department to implement them before executions 
resume. 3 executions have been set for November and December, the 1st on Nov. 
13.

The governor said she still believes the death penalty is a just punishment for 
those guilty of the most heinous crimes, but that the state must make sure it's 
carried out effectively.

"If I am assured as governor that those protocols are in place ... then we can 
look forward to returning to executions. But until all of those protocols have 
been put in place, we won't be having executions," Fallin said.

Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said Patton had no immediate comment. But 
Michael Thompson, commissioner of the Department of Public Safety, echoed 
Fallin.

"The last thing we want to do is rush this and have an issue come up where 
we're not prepared for an execution," Thompson said.

Fallin said the report verified what authorities had believed: "There were 
significant complications establishing an IV line in Clayton Lockett."

The report blamed Lockett's flawed lethal injection on poor placement of 
intravenous lines. The medical team could not find suitable veins in Lockett's 
arms, legs, neck and feet, leading them to insert it in his groin, the report 
said.

Out of modesty, no one monitored the intravenous line, a job that is the normal 
duty of Oklahoma State Penitentiary Warden Anita Trammel, who decided to cover 
Lockett's body - and the IV - with a sheet. When it became apparent the 
execution wasn't progressing normally, the execution team pulled back the sheet 
and noticed a swelling larger than a golf ball near the injection site.

"Those involved with the execution stated that they could have noticed the 
problem earlier if they had been monitoring the insertion site during that 
time," lead investigator Capt. Jason Holt said.

Oklahoma also used the sedative midazolam for the 1st time in Lockett's 
execution, but Thompson said all 3 drugs - midazolam, vercuronium bromide and 
potassium chloride - worked as planned.

Midazolam was also used in lengthy attempts to execute an Ohio inmate in 
January and an Arizona prisoner last month. Each time, witnesses said the 
inmates appeared to gasp after their executions began and labored for air 
before being pronounced dead.

Thompson said no single person was to blame for the problems in the execution 
and no charges are being considered, leading critics to charge that the report 
does not address accountability.

"It protects the chain of command," said Assistant Federal Public Defender Dale 
Baich, an attorney who represents 21 death row inmates who have sued the state 
Department of Corrections to block their executions.

"Once the execution was clearly going wrong, it should have been stopped, but 
it wasn't," Baich said in a statement. "Whoever allowed the execution to 
continue needs to be held accountable."

Patton, who had halted the execution, had said Lockett died of a heart attack, 
but autopsy results released last week said he died from the drugs.

Lockett had been convicted of shooting Stephanie Nieman, 19, with a sawed-off 
shotgun and watching as 2 accomplices buried her alive in 1999.

(source: Associated Press)






ARIZONA:

Lawyers Say Arias Desparate to Avoid Death Penalty in Sentencing Phase


An investigator for Jodi Arias will visit the home in Mesa, Arizona where Arias 
killed Travis Alexander in June 2008 ahead of the restart of the sentencing 
phase, part of a plan that Arias has to try to avoid the death penalty, 
according to experts.

Arias was convicted of murdering former boyfriend Alexander but the jury 
couldn't decide on a verdict, so the sentencing phase will restart with a new 
jury that will begin to be picked on September 29.

Arias petitioned to have an investigator return to the home to gather info 
sometime this week, and was successful, bring into question what info she wants 
to gather.

"This is a death penalty case, and Jodi Arias is going to do anything possible 
to save her life," Bryan Claypool, a criminal defense attorney, told HLN-TV.

"I don't think this is manipulation. I think this is a desperate woman trying 
to come up with a plan???and here's her plan: She's going to hire an 
investigator to go over there, and he's going to take some kind of 
measurements, maybe in the bathroom???who knows where???but he's going to come 
up and concoct some theory that maybe she was responding to a traumatic event, 
that he attacked her first.

He said that if he was representing Arias, he too would try to come up with 
some way of in essence having the new sentencing phase be a type of retrial. In 
other words, if jury members are sympathizing with Arias, they won???t give her 
the death penalty.

"How can you separate in a death penalty case what led up to the murder to 
determine whether she should die? You can't separate the 2 in this case because 
you have a brand new jury, so she's gotta retry the facts that led up to the 
murder, to put her mental health and her diminished capacity at issue."

Reeva Martin, another attorney, added:

"I think is total manipulation on the part of Jodi Arias. Everything we've seen 
from this woman is part of her manipulative scheme, and in this instance, she 
wants to gain some kind of unfair advantage, she wants to go back and retry the 
facts of this case, but this judge is smarter than that???this jury is going to 
be confined to looking at whether she should get the death penalty or not, 
they're not going to decide whether this was self-defense, that's already been 
decided."

"She wants to curry some kind of favor, get the jurors to get sympathetic for 
her," Martin said.

Arias has also successfully petitioned to represent herself in the trial, 
though she will have legal counsel.

(source: The Epoch Times)






SOUTH DAKOTA:

'Suicide' common on South Dakota's death row


This morning, we learned that death row inmate James McVay was found dead in 
his cell.

All signs point to suicide, as Mr. McVay was hanging from a bed sheet.

That makes him the second death row inmate to commit suicide in his cell ??? 
the 1st was Robert Leroy Anderson in 2003 - but the reality is that every death 
row inmate in South Dakota's modern era has essentially committed suicide by 
giving up their appeals.

About 10 % of executed inmates in the U.S. fall into the category of a 
"volunteer."

In South Dakota, the figure is 100 %.

"It's not exactly the same as suicide, but it is similar," said Richard Dieter 
of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The 1st South Dakota inmate executed since the U.S. Supreme Court re-instituted 
the death penalty in 1976 was Elijah Page. Page was sentenced to death in 2001 
and gave up his appeals in 2006.

Page was executed on July 11, 2007.

Eric Robert was the next to die by lethal injection. He pleaded guilty and 
asked for the death penalty explicitly. He went so far as to file a brief with 
the South Dakota Supreme Court arguing that it didn't have the authority to 
stay his execution and complete a mandatory sentence review.

Robert was executed on Oct. 15, 2012

Donald Moeller spent 20 years filing appeals through his court-appointed 
lawyers before coming forward through a separate lawyer to end the process. His 
federal public defenders tried to stop him from giving up, but he was 
steadfast. Judge Lawrence Piersol quizzed him for 20 minutes in September of 
2012 before deciding he was competent to choose death.

Moeller was executed on Oct. 30, 2012.

McVay's death leaves 3 men on death row: Page's co-defendant Briley Piper, 
Robert's co-defendant Rodney Berget and Charles Rhines, now the longest-serving 
death row inmate.

Rhines decried the conditions on South Dakota's death row ??? which isn't a 
wing of the penitentiary, but simply a designation for some of the men in 
administrative segregation - in a series of letters to the Argus Leader in 
2013.

"It is said that Page basically committed suicide and of course Anderson 
actually did," he wrote.

The number of actual death row suicides nationwide is unknown, said Richard 
Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, but a study released in May 
from the Bureau of Justice Statistics might give us some indication.

In 2012, there were 8,374 people had been sentenced to death in the U.S. since 
1973. Of those, 478 had died by means other than execution. A share of them 
died of natural causes, but some clearly committed suicide.

In more populous states, we see inmates fighting down to the wire, with defense 
lawyers and family members of the condemned begging for mercy from the U.S. 
Supreme Court, state and federal appeals courts and governor's offices until 
hours before the execution takes place.

If he continues on his current path, Rhines might be the 1st person to do that 
in South Dakota.

The last filing in Rhines' federal appeal came one week ago.

(source: Argus Leader)






WYOMING:

Wyoming lawmakers to debate ending death penalty----Firing squad bill also 
considered at meeting


A state legislative committee will discuss next week whether to sponsor a bill 
in the 2015 session that would abolish the death penalty.

The draft bill may not win approval of the Joint Judiciary Interim Committee on 
Sept. 11, but the discussion may inspire lawmakers to individually sponsor it 
next year, legislators said.

Lawmakers have been debating alternatives to lethal injection since many 
pharmaceutical companies have restricted selling the drugs to prisons 
throughout the United States.

Next week's meeting is at the University of Wyoming. The committee will 
consider draft bills to end the death penalty and to make a firing squad the 
alternative method to executions when lethal injection is not possible, Gingery 
said.

Gingery expects discussion over repealing capital punishment in Wyoming to be 
lively.

"People are interested in that particular bill,??? he said.

Chesie Lee, executive director of the Wyoming Association of Churches, will 
speak in favor of repealing the death penalty.

"Revenge is not what we're called to do," she said. "It's not that we oppose 
punishment all together, but revenge is not the answer." The current law allows 
the death penalty as the sentence for 1st-degree murders.

Gingery ordered the committee's nonpartisan staff to draft a bill at a July 
meeting in Newcastle. Reps. Stephen Watt, R-Rock Springs, and Marti Halverson, 
R- Etna, supported the effort the most among the committee members, Gingery 
said. In May, the committee ordered staff members to draft the firing squad 
bill.

The meeting will be the last time the Judiciary Committee will discuss it 
before next year's session, which convenes Jan. 13, Gingery said.

"My guess is we will vote out the firing squad one, that will move on," he 
said. "I don't think we'll get enough votes for getting rid of the death 
penalty. That's our last meeting of the year, so it either happens or it 
doesn't happen. By the Judiciary committee having this discussion, as a 
committee, it might encourage Steve Watt and Marti Halverson in bringing this 
bill forward."

Halverson didn't return a message from the Star-Tribune. Watt is up for 
re-election Nov. 4. If he wins and the committee rejects sponsoring the bill, 
he said he would sponsor it.

Watt opposes the death penalty for religious reasons and out of concern that 
the wrong people could be executed.

Death by firing squad shouldn???t be an alternative execution method, said 
Watt, who was shot five times as a trooper with the Wyoming Highway Patrol in 
1982.

"It hurts," he said about being shot. "I don't care that it's a fraction of a 
second. It hurts tremendously. It's cruel and unusual to subject another person 
to that."

(source: Casper Star-Tribune)






USA:

Justice Scalia Says Executing The Innocent Doesn't Violate The Constitution


2 North Carolina men were exonerated earlier this week due to new DNA evidence 
after spending 30 years in prison, where one was awaiting the death penalty, 
highlighting the reality that innocent men can end up on death row.

Back in 1994 conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia voted against a 
petition asking the Supreme Court to review the case of one of those men, Henry 
McCollum. That man became North Carolina's longest-serving death row inmate 
after he and his half-brother Leon Brown were convicted of raping and killing 
an 11-year-old girl.

This news brings to mind Scalia's insistence that the Supreme Court has never 
ruled the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who later 
convinces a court of his innocence, as Slate points out.

"This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a 
convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to 
convince a habeas court that he is 'actually' innocent," Scalia wrote in a 2009 
dissent of the Court's order for a federal trial court in Georgia to consider 
the case of death row inmate Troy Davis. "Quite to the contrary, we have 
repeatedly left that question unresolved, while expressing considerable doubt 
that any claim based on alleged 'actual innocence' is constitutionally 
cognizable."

The legal definition of "actual innocence" is the absence of facts required to 
convict someone based on a criminal statute, according to the Legal Information 
Institute. Defendants appealing convictions seek to prove actual innocence by 
submitting new evidence that reverses the court's confidence in a past verdict.

The opinion is technically right, Dahlia Lithwick points out in Newsweek. "As a 
constitutional matter, Scalia's assertion is not wrong," she wrote. "The court 
has never found a constitutional right for the actually innocent to be free 
from execution."

However, Vincent Rossmeier noted in Salon,"His opinion suggested a certain 
callousness on the question of whether the courts should care if the state puts 
an innocent man to death, but he was right when he said the Supreme Court has 
never ruled whether an individual???s 'actual innocence' necessitates the 
involvement of a federal court in a state conviction."

Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist wrote a 1993 decision that was in line with 
Scalia's comment that the Supreme Court has never made such a ruling.

But Rehnquist added that the execution of a defendant who has made a 
particularly strong demonstration of innocence could conceivably be considered 
unconstitutional. "We may assume ... that in a capital case a truly persuasive 
demonstration of 'actual innocence' made after trial would render the execution 
of a defendant unconstitutional and warrant federal habeas relief if there were 
no state avenue open to process such a claim," Rehnquist wrote in that 
decision.

Scalia has accepted the fact that the justice system is not perfect, and 
innocent people will be convicted. ???Like other human institutions, courts and 
juries are not perfect," he wrote in a 2006 opinion. "One cannot have a system 
of criminal punishment without accepting the possibility that someone will be 
punished mistakenly."

(source: Business Insider)