[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, DEL., N.C., ALA., OKLA., CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

April 29



TEXAS----stay of impendng execution

Texas inmate facing execution wins reprieve from state judge



A Texas judge has halted the execution of an inmate convicted of stabbing a 
corrections officer to death more than 15 years ago.

State District Judge Bert Richardson issued the reprieve just hours before 
35-year-old Robert Pruett could have been taken to the Texas death chamber for 
lethal injection Tuesday evening. Richardson is Pruett's trial judge.

The judge blocked the punishment after Pruett's attorneys asked for DNA testing 
on the piece of metal used to kill 37-year-old Daniel Nagle in 1999 at a South 
Texas prison.

Pruett would have become the 7th inmate put to death this year in Texas. His 
lawyers argued that he was innocent Nagle's killing.

Jefferson Clendenin, an assistant Texas attorney general, argued that the 
mitigating evidence was presented at his trial and Pruett had failed to show 
any of the evidence was previously unavailable.

Clendenin also argued that no state law covers the storage of evidence, and 
that the Texas Department of Public Safety guidelines weren't published until 
2012, a decade after Pruett's trial. Halting Pruett's punishment now for a 
potential advancement in DNA technology would allow any death row inmate to 
obtain an indefinite stay of execution by arguing "that science at some unknown 
point in the future might cast doubt on his conviction," Clendenin told the 
Supreme Court in a filing Tuesday.

Pruett, now 35, was imprisoned at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice 
McConnell Unit when he got into a fatal fight with Nagle over a peanut butter 
sandwich.

Evidence showed Pruett wanted to take his bag lunch into a recreation yard, but 
this was against the rules, so Nagle wrote a disciplinary report. Prosecutors 
said this angered Pruett who stabbed Nagle with a 7-inch-long sharpened metal 
rod.

Pruett said Nagle tore up the disciplinary report containing his name and that 
he was in a gym when he found out the officer had been killed.

DNA tests requested by Pruett's lawyers on pieces of the report found scattered 
around Nagle's body were inconclusive.

Pruett insisted Nagle could have been killed by other inmates or prison 
officers.

"I never killed nobody in my life," Pruett told jurors at his 2002 trial in 
Corpus Christi.

Pruett was already serving a 99-year sentence for his part in the 1995 slaying 
of a neighbor in Channelview, east of Houston. His father is serving life in 
prison in the killing and his brother has a 40-year sentence.

Texas carries out capital punishment more than any other state.

(source: MSNBC)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----6

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----524

Abbott#--------scheduled execution date-----name------------Tx. #

7-----------May 12--------------------Derrick Charles------525

8----------June 3--------------------Les Bower------------526

9-----------June 18-------------------Gregory Russeau------527

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)








DELAWARE:

House must vote on death penalty bill



Death certificates for executions in Delaware list the cause of death as 
"homicide." Indeed it is murder done in the name of the State of Delaware.

The State of Delaware is you and me. We are morally culpable.

We can put an end to "homicide by state" by supporting Senate Bill 40, now in 
the House Judiciary Committee. When the death penalty is no longer a judicial 
option we will focus on victims of crime instead of the criminal and crime 
prevention.

Last year, Senate Bill 40 never made it to the floor of the House for a vote by 
all our representatives. We all can let our representatives know that this 
session is the time for a vote. We are not a perfect society. Our criminal 
justice system is flawed, which could lead to the execution of an innocent.

Molly Keogh

vice president

Delaware Citizens Opposed to the Death Penalty

Smyrna

(source: Letter to the Editor, Cape Gazette)








NORTH CAROLINA:

House wants to subtract doctor from execution equation



House lawmakers took a step Tuesday toward ending the de facto moratorium on 
the death penalty in North Carolina.

By law, when someone is executed by lethal injection at Central Prison, a 
physician is supposed to be present to monitor an inmate's vital signs and 
confirm his or her death. But physicians balked at the requirement eight years 
ago, arguing that participating in an execution violates their medical ethics.

Although the state Supreme Court later ruled that the North Carolina Medical 
Board couldn't discipline a doctor for assisting in an execution, the dispute 
is one of several legal issues that has prevented the state from carrying out 
the death penalty since August 2006.

"The fact that doctors are not willing to be there for the execution has caused 
a real stumbling block for us," said Rep. Leo Daughtry, R-Johnston, chairman of 
the House Judiciary I Committee.

House Bill 774, dubbed the Restoring Proper Justice Act, would begin to untie 
the knot over physician participation by allowing any "medical professional" to 
carry it out. The bill includes any licensed physician assistant, advanced 
degree nurse, registered nurse, paramedic and emergency medical technician as 
those qualified to fill in during an execution.

A physician would still have to pronounce the inmate dead.

"As long as we have capital punishment, it's our duty to make sure the law is 
enforced," Daughtry said.

There are 149 people on death row at Central Prison, including 18 who have been 
sentenced to die since the last execution.

"We have to move about in a way that continues to allow the state to use that 
tool that we have to make sure those who commit a heinous crime are punished 
for the crime they commit," said Rep. Justin Burr, R-Stanly.

Some lawmakers said, however, that a physician's presence is critical in case 
of a botched execution, such as those seen in other states in the last year, 
where medical attention is needed immediately to prevent suffering.

"We just saw some horrific scenes where the state was killing someone in an 
inhumane manner," said Rep. Larry Hall, D-Durham.

The Center for Death Penalty Litigation in Durham, which represents death-row 
inmates, said the bill wouldn't by itself restart executions in North Carolina. 
Pending bias claims under the now-repealed Racial Justice Act and 
constitutional questions surrounding state's execution protocol still need to 
be sorted out, officials said.

"We see any attempt to restart executions as unconscionable in light of 
concerns that there are innocent people on death row," center officials said in 
a statement, citing the recent exoneration of a man who spent 30 years on death 
row.

"If N.C. were to resume executions at some point in the future, removing the 
requirement that a doctor be present increases the risk that we will have a 
botched execution," they said.

The bill easily cleared the Judiciary I Committee and next heads to the House 
floor.

(source: wral.com)

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

Proposal Advanced in NC House to Ease Death Penalty Moratorium



A proposal has been advanced in the state House that aims to fix one obstacle 
which has prevented the death penalty from being carried out in North Carolina.

At issue is the American Medical Association's ethics opinion that says a 
doctor cannot participate in a legally authorized execution. Under the bill, it 
says that a medical professional other than a doctor could monitor a lethal 
injection.

The bill sponsor says that would be a similar protocol to a regular visit to a 
doctor's office.

"Have your physical, you find someone taking blood other than a doctor. There 
will be a doctor there to pronounce a person dead after the execution takes 
place. But that is the reason. It is really an administrative fact of inserting 
a needle into a vein," said Rep. Leo Daughtry, a Johnston County Republican.

This bill now heads to the full House for considertion.

(source: Time Warner Cable News)



ALABAMA:

US Supreme Court death penalty case could turn on Auburn professor's 
credibility



When the United States Supreme Court determines whether recent lethal 
injections constitute cruel and unusual punishment, much of that decision could 
turn on the credibility of a key expert witness - the dean of Auburn 
University's pharmacology school.

On Wednesday, the court will hear oral arguments over whether the sedative 
midazolam is sufficient to render death row prisoners unconscious during 
executions. Dr. Roswell Lee Evans, the dean of the Harrison School of Pharmacy 
at Auburn University, has testified that the drug works, even though the drug 
seems to have failed in roughly 1 in 4 executions in which it has been used, 
the investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica reports.

Evans credibility is being questioned by peers, and a 300-page expert witness 
report he wrote is under scrutiny because it contained more than 150 pages of 
printouts from the online consumer site drugs.com. That site has a disclaimer 
that says it is "not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment," and 
a brief filed with the court by 16 professors of pharmacology says that it is 
not a good substitute for primary sources scientists in the field typically 
use.

Evans is one of the few pharmacologists left who are willing to testify as 
expert witnesses on behalf of death penalty advocates, especially for the 
effectiveness of midazolam.

Contrary to Evans' testimony, other pharmacologists have said that the drug has 
a "ceiling," making higher doses no more effective at rendering a patient 
unconscious. 1 of the 16 pharmacologists who signed the brief told ProPublica 
that she was "a little horrified" when she read Evans' testimony.

Until 2013, states used another sedative for executions, but the manufacturer 
of that drug, Hospira, ceased production because of its use in executions.

Despite the criticisms of midazolam, Evans testified that it would render a 
death row patient unconscious during and execution, when the 2nd and 3rd drugs 
respectively paralyze the prisoner and stop the prisoner's heart.

One of those prisoners, executed after the courts relied on Evans' testimony to 
let the execution proceed, awoke during the execution and said "my body is on 
fire."

(source: Al.com)








OKLAHOMA:

Oklahoma attorney general has public on his side in death penalty case----But 
support waning in many other states



Scott Pruitt goes before the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to argue in 
defense of the 1st of 3 drugs administered during executions in Oklahoma. 
Pruitt is defending the state's protocol in his job as attorney general but 
he's also a true believer, not just in the merits of the death penalty but in 
the way Oklahoma carries it out.

In that respect, he is like the majority of Oklahomans who strongly favor the 
death penalty and are in no hurry to do away with it. Indeed the 
Republican-controlled Legislature recently gave easy approval to, and the 
governor signed, a bill creating a new method of execution if drug injection 
eventually is ruled unconstitutional or otherwise becomes unavailable.

Yet the push to move away from the death penalty is strong in many parts of the 
United States, raising the question of whether the ultimate punishment is on 
borrowed time.

6 states have abolished the death penalty since 2007. They are New York, 
Connecticut, Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois and New Mexico. The first 5 are 
liberal states where the death penalty was never highly popular and wasn't 
often employed. New Mexico has a large Roman Catholic population, and the 
Church has been a consistent, vocal opponent of capital punishment.

A recent vote in Nebraska's legislature offers an indication of how the winds 
are changing on the death penalty. In a 30-13 vote to repeal capital 
punishment, 17 Republicans voted in favor. The Wall Street Journal noted that 
some conservatives said the death penalty was unfair to victims' families 
because the process can be so protracted, others cited costs, and others noted 
that the process has bogged down. Nebraska hasn't carried out an execution 
since 1997, and doesn't have the drugs needed to put to death any of the 11 
inmates now on its death row.

The state's Republican governor has vowed to veto the bill. Even so, one 
lawmaker told the Journal that he used to be firmly in favor of the death 
penalty but, "I've come to believe that the death penalty is simply not good 
government."

A majority of Oklahomans don't share that sentiment - the death penalty polls 
well here. That could change if the state carries out any more troublesome 
executions, which is what has Pruitt heading to the Supreme Court.

At issue is use of the drug midazolam, a sedative intended to render the 
subject unconscious. It was used for the 1st time in the April 2014 execution 
of Clayton Lockett. The execution lasted 43 minutes and included Lockett 
writhing on the gurney and speaking after the drug was administered. An 
investigation found that the problems with the execution were largely the 
result of an IV needle being inserted improperly, but attorneys for Oklahoma 
death row inmates argue that midazolam isn't a suitable drug.

The sedative previously used in Oklahoma has become difficult to obtain because 
manufacturers don't want it used in executions. This too is part of the push to 
do away with the death penalty altogether.

Pruitt is right to be irked that Oklahoma has been portrayed in some circles as 
"less than sober and thoughtful" about the execution process. This state 
created lethal injection. The vast majority of executions carried out in 
Oklahoma have been humane and without incident. Pruitt's wish is for that to 
continue.

The Supreme Court's ruling this summer will determine Oklahoma's next course - 
continue using midazolam in executions, or look for a new drug mixture, or turn 
to the state's newly approved method of death by nitrogen gas. One certainty is 
that Oklahoma will continue with the death penalty until the legal challenges 
grow too burdensome or Oklahomans decide they don't want it anymore. Neither 
seems likely any time soon.

(source: Editorial, The Oklahoman)

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

Key expert in Supreme Court death penalty case facing serious questions about 
credibility



There's a widening gap between the somberness, importance, and profound nature 
of the government's power to end the life of one of its citizens, and the 
seriousness with which many death penalty states seems to be treating that 
power. States, for example, are increasingly resorting to secrecy to keep the 
public from knowing how they carry out their executions.

This week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments about the new lethal 
injection protocol in Oklahoma that uses the drug midazolam. (3 other states 
also use the drug.) The Sooner State, as you might remember from Liliana 
Segura's guest post here at The Watch, has been at the forefront of finding new 
ways to kill inmates since the court brought the death penalty back in 1976.

In Oklahoma, two politicians led the push for lethal injection: State Rep. Bill 
Wiseman and state Sen. Bill Dawson. Wiseman was disturbed by the ugliness of 
electrocutions, later telling the Tulsa World they were "kind of a combination 
of Barnum & Bailey and reform." Describing himself as a reluctant supporter of 
executions, he wrote a bill in 1977 to replace the electric chair with lethal 
injection, which he was convinced would be more humane. According to the World, 
he then 'placed on every legislator's desk an envelope containing 2 pictures of 
a man who had been electrocuted. 'It looked like seared meat,' he said. 'Some 
people just didn't like it.'"

As Denno explains, Wiseman was eventually told by his own physician, who was 
also the head of the Oklahoma Medical Association, that the organization wanted 
no involvement in his lethal injection project. Anxious to give the process 
even the thinnest medical veneer, Wiseman and Dawson settled on the help of the 
state's chief medical examiner, Jay Chapman, who candidly admitted that he was 
more of "an expert in dead bodies" than "an expert in getting them that way." 
Still, he was eager to help. When the lawmakers expressed concerns over what it 
could mean for his reputation within the medical community, Chapman was 
cavalier. "To hell with them," he said. "Let's do this."

Despite his lacking credentials, Chapman devised the famed "3-drug cocktail" 
that would become the established protocol for the rest of the country for 
years. The 1st drug (generally sodium thiopental) anesthetized the prisoner. 
The 2nd (pancuronium bromide) caused paralysis, including of the muscles used 
for respiration. And the third (potassium chloride) stopped the heart.

In combination, the drugs created the impression of a peaceful and humane 
process - the pancuronium bromide masked any ugly outward signs of what may 
have been happening in the prisoners' bodies. But the states would later 
discover that if the anesthetic failed to work properly, the inmates would 
suffocate, and fall into cardiac arrest. They would experience an excruciating 
death, but the paralytic would prevent inmates from crying out or exhibiting 
obvious signs of distress. The risk of such suffering was particularly 
senseless given the lack of evidence that the paralyzing drug played anything 
other than a cosmetic role in the process.

Now that the ingredients to that 3-drug cocktail are in short supply, the 
states are looking for alternatives. Oklahoma again is leading the way, coming 
up with an innovative new cocktail that resulted in the gruesomely botched 
execution of Clayton Locket earlier this year. And once again, the state's 
eagerness to kill people is outpacing its efforts to ensure that the means by 
which it does so are humane. From ProPublica:

Tomorrow, when the Supreme Court hears oral arguments in the highest-profile 
death penalty challenge in seven years, the justices will begin ruling on this 
question: Does Oklahoma's use of the common surgical sedative midazolam fail to 
make prisoners unconscious during lethal injections, thus violating the Eighth 
Amendment's protection against "cruel and unusual punishment"? For many court 
watchers, however, a subject of special scrutiny will be the credibility of 
Oklahoma's key expert witness, Dr. Roswell Lee Evans, who has testified that 
inmates "would not sense the pain" of an execution after receiving a high dose 
of midazolam.

A number of legal activists and medical professionals have expressed concern 
that Evans, a board certified psychiatric pharmacist and the dean of the 
Harrison School of Pharmacy at Auburn University in Alabama, has testified that 
he has never used midazolam on a patient and has, in fact, never personally 
induced anesthesia.

According to his curriculum vitae, which he submitted as part of his testimony, 
the last time Evans published a paper related to his pharmacology research was 
in 1996. Moreover, his 300-page expert witness report included more than 150 
pages of printouts from drugs.com, an online consumer website whose disclaimer 
reads, "not intended for medical advice, diagnosis or treatment."

Last month, 16 professors of pharmacology filed a brief with the Supreme Court 
that disputes Evans' testimony. "It is widely recognized in the scientific and 
medical community that midazolam alone cannot be used to maintain adequate 
anesthesia," the doctors asserted, describing how the drug's potency does not 
increase with dosage - a so-called "ceiling effect." They concluded that 
midazolam "is incapable of rendering an inmate unconscious prior to the 
injection of the 2nd and 3rd drugs."

Dr. Kelly Standifer, one of the brief's authors and chairwoman of the 
Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of Oklahoma College of 
Pharmacy, told ProPublica that she was "a little horrified" when she read 
Evans' testimony. "My 1st impression was that it was wrong. These kinds of 
doses are not given by any clinician. To say that they would know what this 
dose would do? I don't think anyone can say that."

Let's not be too hard on Evans. Sources say that the night before he testified, 
he also stayed at a Holiday Inn Express.

(source: Radley Balko, Washington Post)



CALIFORNIA:

DA to seek death penalty against Jones in 2013 Fairfield homicide



The Solano County district attorney will seek the death penalty against Anthony 
L. Jones, accused of the 2013 kidnapping, rape and strangulation of a 
13-year-old girl whose nude body was found in Allan Witt Park.

Jones, 33, has pleaded not guilty to a murder charge with three special 
circumstances. He is jailed without bail.

He was arrested in February 2013, several days after the body of Genelle Renee 
Conway-Allen was discovered Feb. 1, 2013. She was last seen getting into a car 
driven by Jones, according to testimony at Jones' probable cause hearing.

The decision to seek the death penalty in the case was announced Monday. Jones 
is next scheduled to appear in court June 30, when dates for a jury trial may 
be set.

(source: The Daily Republic)








USA:

Hillary Clinton's forgotten death penalty shift----Clinton helped save a 
condemned black man before she went tough on crime. Where does she stand now?

As a young lawyer, Hillary Clinton helped save a mentally handicapped black man 
from the electric chair. This is not a fact she has promoted in her years as a 
tough-on-crime U.S. senator or amid her quest to become the Democratic 
presidential candidate in 2016.

Politico discovered her role buried in an appeal to save Henry Giles, a 
convicted murderer, back in 1976, when Clinton headed the legal aid clinic at 
the University of Arkansas. A brief filed by the Cummins Prison Project, a law 
school effort to defend prisoners at one of Arkansas's most notorious prisons, 
played an important role in winning leniency for Giles because of his mental 
impairment, court documents show.

Hillary Clinton's involvement in the case illustrates a profound shift in her 
views over time on an issue she last discussed publicly in her 2000 race for 
the U.S. Senate. Her comments then - that the death penalty had her 
"unenthusiastic support" - riled the most liberal wing of the Democratic Party. 
The death penalty poses a complicated issue for Clinton, whose husband, Bill 
Clinton, carried out executions as Arkansas governor and loudly defended 
capital punishment as he sought to establish himself as a law-and-order 
Democrat during his 1992 White House bid.

But times are changing, and politicians from both parties are calling for a 
reexamination of a criminal justice system rife with racial disparities, 
including the question of which inmates live and die. With Baltimore rioting 
and nationwide protests around a police shooting in Ferguson, Mo., presidential 
candidates are likely to be pulled into the debate. The Supreme Court on 
Wednesday hears yet another challenge to the death penalty's constitutionality, 
this one centered on a drug used by some states in lethal injections.

Interviews released this week for a book project by New York University's 
Brennan Center for Justice, in which Clinton and other presidential contenders 
share their views on criminal justice solutions, show just how different the 
politics of these issues are today. "Marking a clear political shift on crime 
and punishment in America, these sentiments are a far cry from politicians 
racing to be the most punitive in the 1980s and 1990s," the introduction reads.

Even Bill Clinton, who as president talked tough on crime and pushed hard to 
increase the police presence in U.S. cities, acknowledges that reforms are 
needed. "[W]e have overshot the mark," he writes in the book's foreword.

In her essay for the book, Hillary Clinton reflects on her Arkansas years 
advocating for "prison inmates and poor families. I saw how our criminal 
justice system can be stacked against those who have the least power and are 
the most vulnerable." She writes about the need to "restore balance" by 
reducing prison populations and building trust between police and communities.

But she says nothing about capital punishment or how her views evolved, from a 
liberal young lawyer whose clinic argued that the death penalty was 
unconstitutional to the supportive wife of a governor and president charged 
with enforcing the law.

And nowhere has Clinton reflected on the case of Giles, still serving time in 
an Arkansas prison thanks in no small part to the work of her team.

***

Henry Giles went to trial in early 1975, in Forrest City, Arkansas, charged 
with murdering shoe store clerk Evelyn Drummond. In only a few weeks, Giles, a 
20-year-old mentally impaired black man, was sentenced to death by an all-white 
jury.

The news hardly warranted a shrug back in Arkansas, where capital punishment 
was in force and a defendant's mental handicaps were not then considered a 
mitigating factor in death penalty sentencing. The U.S. Supreme Court did not 
rule execution of the mentally disabled unconstitutional until 2002 (and it 
didn't set a national standard for what constitutes a mental disability until 
2014).

But one of the first lawyers to flag the constitutional question in Arkansas 
was Hillary Rodham, an idealistic Yankee lawyer passionate about social 
justice. In 1976, she and other lawyers at the university law clinic filed a 
64-page amicus brief on behalf of Giles, openly repudiating some aspects of the 
state's capital punishment law. Ultimately, the argument set a new precedent in 
Arkansas, relevant until a few years ago, that jury forms needed to reflect the 
facts of the case for a sentence to stand.

Rodham had followed her boyfriend, Bill Clinton, to Arkansas, bringing 
impeccable liberal credentials. A Wellesley graduate, she'd written her college 
thesis about controversial community organizer Saul Alinsky, interned at a 
Berkeley, Ca. law firm, and tried to topple Richard Nixon as an aide to the 
House Judiciary Committee.

Both she and Bill took teaching jobs at the University of Arkansas Law School 
in Fayetteville in the fall of 1974, and they married a year later. Bill used 
the school as a political launching pad. Hillary signed on to direct the 
school's legal aid clinic and run 2 prison projects.

One of her missions was to provide better legal representation for prisoners 
inside the Cummins Prison Farm in Lincoln County, Arkansas, considered the 
worst prison in the state.

Nancy Pietrafesa, a college friend of Hillary's who later went to Arkansas to 
work for Bill Clinton during his 1st term as governor, said she and Hillary 
firmly agreed that "the so-called justice system in that state was a moral 
outrage."

Young lawyers assigned to Rodham's prison project on Fridays traveled to 
Cummins with project staff attorney Patrick O'Rourke, staying overnight in a 
guest house where they were waited on by convicted felons. O'Rourke said that 
Hillary was eager to assign more law students, including women, to the project 
to provide them with more clinical experience. "It kind of freaked out the 
guards having women inside the prison after dark," O'Rourke said, but Rodham 
didn't mind. She had visited the prison herself with Robert Newcomb, the 
project's former staff attorney, once before.

1 prisoner they encountered was death row inmate Giles, whose attorneys were 
mustering arguments to try to save him from the electric chair.

Giles's attorneys appealed in June 1975, disputing the fairness of the 
all-white jury, white prosecutor, and white judge. They also questioned the 
validity of the confession obtained by police.

"Your Honor, Henry Giles does not know the degree of the charges against him," 
the attorneys wrote in their motion, adding, "[Giles] does not know he has been 
on trial." A chief concern was the fact that the jury had not listed any 
mitigating circumstances, including Giles's youth and mental deficiencies, on 
forms they were required to fill out in rendering a verdict.

(source: Read more: 
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/04/hillary-clintons-forgotten-death-penalty-shift-117441.html#ixzz3YhoDw8gD)

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

'It's problematic': inventor of US lethal injection reveals death penalty 
doubts ---- Dr Jay Chapman sought to develop a more humane method of execution 
but miscarriages of justice leave him ambivalent about capital punishment



Dr Jay Chapman, the pathologist who invented the lethal injection that has been 
the dominant execution protocol in the US for 40 years, says he has growing 
doubts about the death penalty in the wake of mounting evidence of wrongful 
convictions.

Chapman, 75, said that he had revised his view of capital punishment despite 
having been the architect of the lethal injection in 1977. "I am ambivalent 
about the death penalty - there have been so many incidents of prosecutorial 
misconduct, or DNA testing that has proved a prisoner's innocence. It's 
problematic." The forensic pathologist, who still practises in Sonoma County, 
California, was speaking to the Guardian on the eve of a landmark hearing at 
the US supreme court in Washington on Wednesday. The case will see the court's 
9 justices come together for the 1st time since 2008 to consider whether the 
present-day practice of executions meets the constitutional prohibition on 
cruel and unusual treatment.

How are execution drugs supposed to work?

In 2008, in Baze v Rees, the justices ruled that the triple lethal injection - 
the protocol devised by Chapman - was constitutional. But since then the widely 
deployed 3-ingredient cocktail of anaesthetic, muscle relaxant and potassium to 
stop the prisoner's heart has been thrown into disarray as a result of a 
European-led boycott of medical sales to US corrections departments.

As supplies of the lethal drugs have run out, death penalty states have turned 
to increasingly maverick alternatives to fill the gap. Some have purchased 
medicines unlawfully from abroad, others have ordered them from scarcely 
regulated compounding pharmacies, and many have turned to pharmaceuticals 
previously unused in death chambers.

Wednesday's supreme court hearing will focus on one such drug, midazolam, which 
has been used in a string of recent executions that caused public uproar as a 
result of their botched nature or prolonged duration. In the most notorious 
such incident, the execution of Clayton Lockett in April last year, the 
prisoner was witnessed to writhe and groan on the gurney and was pronounced 
dead after 43 minutes.

The country's highest court will consider in oral arguments whether a state may 
use midazolam in executions in the face of criticism that the drug was an 
unreliable way of producing deep unconsciousness in a condemned prisoner. 
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who has led the push for a review, has said that death 
row inmates had ???committed horrific crimes, and should be punished. But the 
8th amendment guarantees that no one should be subjected to an execution that 
causes searing, unnecessary pain before death."

In his Guardian interview, Chapman said midazolam "would not be my drug of 
choice". He said that its properties were such that it could be taken in 
relatively large doses before reaching lethal levels.

In other words, it was paradoxically precisely because midazolam is considered 
relatively safe in medical situations that it is regarded as dangerous as a 
lethal injection drug. Midazolam could expose prisoners to very long executions 
or to the risk of pain if they were not put into a coma-like condition.

But Chapman discounted as specious the argument that has been raised by some 
lawyers representing death row inmates that midazolam was being applied 
experimentally in executions. "People talk about the drug not being 'tested'. 
What does that mean? Should we be lining people up against the wall and testing 
them with different lethal drugs?"

Chapman's own association with America's modern way of executions came about 
almost by chance - as he is keen to emphasise, never having wanted to be 
labelled as the "father of the lethal injection". It was 1977, and Gary Gilmore 
had just volunteered to be the 1st person to be executed in America after a 
lengthy moratorium imposed by the US supreme court.

Gilmore's execution sparked a debate that fanned out to other states including 
Oklahoma where Chapman was asked by a legislator to come up with a more humane 
method than either the firing squad - which Gilmore had opted for - or the 
electric chair used previously in Oklahoma. "We had discussed what happened to 
Gary Gilmore," Chapman recalls. "At that time we put animals to death more 
humanely than we did human beings - so the idea of using medical drugs seemed a 
much better alternative."

There was no magic formula to solving this problem, Chapman said. "We simply 
took the standard set for anaesthesia in surgical procedures, then all we did 
was take the amounts of drugs to lethal levels recommended by a toxicologist."

He finds it bizarre that his name has become linked to the lethal injection. 
"This wasn't my field, and it wasn't my purpose in life - I'm a forensic 
pathologist and my main purpose was to set up a medical examiner's system for 
Oklahoma, which is what I did."

But Chapman hadn't counted on the power of being the 1st state to invent and 
apply the new lethal injection protocol. "I had no idea, I was so naive. I was 
young - I had no idea that it would spread so quickly across the states. All of 
a sudden it was all over the place."

In the 4 decades since he composed the lethal injection protocol he's been 
increasingly distressed by a succession of botched procedures. "Unconscionable 
things have occurred, like the needle being applied in the wrong direction or 
drugs being injected not into the vein but into tissue," he said.

Chapman believes these gruesome incidents have highlighted problems not with 
the lethal injection itself, but with "the people administering it who lack the 
skills they need."

His most serious qualms about the death penalty in America relate not to the 
idea of using drugs to kill prisoners but evidence that some people awaiting 
execution might be innocent. "I've done autopsies for 50 years and I know what 
people are capable of doing to others. There are some criminals who have no 
redeeming features and who will never be rehabilitated - in those cases I would 
support the death penalty. But I've also seen the misconduct that can occur, 
and the problem is: how do you sort out one from the other?"

(source: The Guardian)

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

Killing capital punishment

[Lily Hughes assesses the prospects for ending the racist and barbaric death 
penalty once and for all, in an article first published in Jacobin.]



Officials in Oklahoma and other states are scrambling to figure out a way to 
kill people.

Concerned over a lack of access to lethal injection drugs, the Oklahoma 
legislature passed a bill in late April approving the use of the gas chamber 
for executions.

This comes on the heels of Utah's move in March to bring back the firing squad 
as an alternative to lethal injection, an announcement that spurred another 
round of debate about executions. While the Denver Post editorial board wrote 
that the firing squad was "not a solution," a Bloomberg editorial titled "Death 
by firing squad is more humane than lethal injection" circulated widely.

When Utah Gov. Gary Herbert signed the bill authorizing the use of the firing 
squad, he admitted that he found the method "a little bit gruesome." Compared 
to the sanitized image of lethal injection as a painless "medical" procedure, 
the firing squad appears antiquated and barbaric, a remnant of Wild West 
justice.

In fact, Utah only got rid of the firing squad in 2004--and even then the state 
still offered it as an option to people sentenced before that time. Ronnie 
Gardner, who was the last person to be put to death in Utah, chose the firing 
squad for his 2010 execution.

While use of the death penalty is rare in Utah--the state has carried out 6 
executions over the last 5 decades--its notorious history gives it an outsized 
reputation. In fact, it was in Utah that the country's 1st execution was 
carried out following a 4-year moratorium in the 1970s.

A 1972 Supreme Court ruling found the application of the death sentence 
racially biased, which precipitated a national ban on the punishment. After 
individual states introduced new death penalty statutes, the Court cleared the 
way in 1976 for the resumption of capital punishment.

Almost 40 years later, the return of the firing squad and the gas chamber comes 
at a critical time in the national death penalty debate. As lethal injection 
drugs are becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, support for capital 
punishment has dropped to its lowest point in four decades--and a growing 
number of states are banning its use.

The death penalty, it seems, is dying.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

A recent study from the Pew Research Center found that national support for the 
death penalty has declined over the last 40 years.

The decrease has been especially pronounced in the last two decades. As of this 
month, support for the death penalty is at 56 %, a dramatic drop from 78 % 
approval in 1996. The study also found that a majority of people on both sides 
of the issue don't believe that the death penalty deters crime. And an even 
larger majority believe that innocent people are at risk of being executed.

The drop in support for the death penalty has been reflected in the number of 
states that have gotten rid of the death sentence, particularly over the last 
decade. There are now 18 states without the death penalty, and another eight 
states that have placed moratoriums on its use.

Since 1976, 1,407 executions have been carried out in the United States, with 
over 80 % taking place in the South. Texas alone accounts for over 1/3 of these 
executions, having killed 524 women and men since the death penalty was 
reinstated there in 1982.

In 2000, the U.S. carried out 98 executions, the most in a single year since 
1976. Since then, the amount of executions has dropped; in 2014, there were 
35--the lowest number in 2 decades.

The decline in popularity and use of the death penalty has been largely been 
driven by concerns about innocence. As of this month, 152 people have been 
exonerated from death row nationally. These cases have helped fuel a national 
discussion about how innocent people end up on death row and in prison.

The defining factors in who receives the death penalty are still race and 
class. Studies show that black defendants are three times more likely to 
receive the death penalty than white defendants in similar cases. Almost 80 % 
of death row prisoners have been executed for killing a white victim, although 
about half of all murder victims are black. Over 20 % of executed black 
defendants were sentenced by all-white juries.

Meanwhile, roughly 90 % of people sentenced to death were too poor to afford 
their own attorney. Studies in several states have shown that anywhere from 20 
to 25 % of people on death row were represented by lawyers who had been 
disciplined or later disbarred for incompetence.

Combine these factors with police and prosecutorial misconduct and an appeals 
court system that is inclined to rubber-stamp death penalty convictions, and 
you have a recipe for wrongful convictions.

High-profile movements around innocence cases have helped keep these issues in 
the spotlight. The execution of Troy Davis in Georgia in 2011 sparked outrage 
and action on a national scale. Thousands of people believed in Davis's 
innocence and took to the streets to protest his execution.

There have been other well-documented cases of people who were innocent and 
executed -- people like Cameron Todd Willingham, Ruben Cantu and Carlos DeLuna, 
all killed by the state of Texas.

But innocence is not the only reason people are turning away from the death 
penalty. There is a growing consensus that the death penalty is cruel and 
unusual in any form, for any person. This feeling has helped fuel the current 
debate regarding execution methods.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently, the debate about the death penalty has been centered on lethal 
injection, the primary method of execution in all states that have the death 
penalty.

The method was created in the '70s by Oklahoma's state medical examiner, Jay 
Chapman, who billed it as a less painful method of execution. Adopted by 
Oklahoma in 1976, it was first used by Texas in the 1982 execution of Charles 
Brooks Jr.

For a time, many states still used alternative means, including the electric 
chair in Florida as late as 1999. In fact, many states besides Utah have 
alternative methods of execution on the books--including the electric chair, 
the gas chamber, and the firing squad.

However, in most states, lethal injection has been the sole manner of execution 
for decades. In many states, this has involved a three-drug protocol, including 
a sedative, a paralytic and a final drug that stops the heart. The method has 
persisted despite the fact that it has never been sanctioned by the Food and 
Drug Administration (FDA).

According to a 2012 study by a team of researchers at Amherst College, lethal 
injection is the most mistake-prone of any execution method. Their study found 
that out of nine thousand executions carried out in the United States between 
1900 and 2011, 3 % were botched--but for lethal injection that number jumped to 
7 %.

In an interview in Scientific American in 2010, molecular biologist Theresa 
Zimmers discussed a report she and her colleagues produced about the use of 
lethal injection:

There's no record of a medical or scientific inquiry into whether this would be 
the best method. And there isn't any medical evidence to support this approach. 
Part of the paradox is that it looks like a medical procedure, but it hasn't 
been rigorously tested. There are no controlled trials, data collection, 
analysis or peer review of the processes to determine whether it works the way 
it's been said to work.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

In 2007, a challenge to the constitutionality of lethal injection protocols was 
brought before the Supreme Court. In Baze v Rees, 2 death row prisoners from 
Kentucky argued that death by lethal injection amounted to cruel and unusual 
punishment. The court agreed to hear the case, resulting in an eight-month halt 
to all executions nationwide.

Although the justices ultimately ruled that lethal injection did not amount to 
cruel and unusual punishment, the debates, both legal and societal, were far 
from over. In the mid-2000s a movement began taking shape, especially in 
Europe, to push drug companies to stop selling their products for use in 
executions. The campaign has been so effective that a number of states have 
been forced to change their lethal injection procedure.

In some states, like California, this has required lengthy public input and 
approval from courts. In others, like Texas, states have simply dropped the 
3-drug cocktail and administered a series of relatively unknown and untested 
drugs in a single-drug protocol. Texas and Oklahoma, for example, have turned 
to local compounding pharmacies, which are unregulated by the FDA.

Oklahoma used drugs obtained from a compounding pharmacy in the gruesome 
botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 2014. Reports described a chaotic scene 
in the execution chamber as officials tried to call off the execution at one 
point, and witnesses saw Lockett writhe in pain on the execution table.

States have also resisted efforts to force prisons to reveal the source of the 
execution drugs they are using. In Texas, lawmakers have authored a bill to 
keep secret the names of the compounding pharmacies that are supplying 
execution drugs--because, they say, the pharmacies refuse to sell the drugs if 
they cannot remain anonymous.

"We're going to reach the point...where we can't conduct any execution, where 
we can't carry out capital punishment in Texas," state Rep. John Smithee said 
before a House committee in April.

Unknown drugs and botched executions have led to a new round of legal 
challenges over whether lethal injection violates the constitutional ban on 
cruel and unusual punishment. These developments beg the question: can any 
method of execution be considered humane?

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

The increasingly desperate attempts by various states to continue carrying out 
the death penalty may be the last gasps of a dying system.

Over the years, a wide variety of anti-death penalty activists--including 
family members of prisoners, former prisoners, lawyers, scholars, students, 
elected officials and community activists--have built sustained campaigns to 
stop executions and to expose the many insoluble flaws in the system. The work 
that these dedicated activists have done has brought the United States the 
closest it's been in decades to outright abolition.

There are of course many debates within the abolitionist movement--how much to 
focus on race, what kinds of alternatives to offer in lieu of the death 
penalty, which voices must be prominent in the movement.

But for a growing number of young activists, there is a recognition that the 
death penalty is but the sharpest edge of a justice system that oppresses the 
poor and people of color. The movement to end the death penalty should be 
considered one facet of the struggle against the system of racialized control 
that Michelle Alexander calls the New Jim Crow.

Linking the abolition struggle to the growing movement against police violence 
and mass incarceration is vital. Campaigns to support individuals on death row, 
amplifying the voices of prisoners and their families, are central to this 
approach.

This kind of work will continue to chip away at the death penalty system. Even 
in Texas, or as abolitionists call it, "the belly of the beast," these efforts 
are making a difference.

Several former prisoners recently traveled there to take part in a campaign to 
stop the planned March 5 execution of innocent death row prisoner Rodney Reed, 
and participate in a "Day of Innocence" lobby day at the state capitol. Reed 
did win a rare stay of execution, and a few weeks later an abolition bill was 
introduced for the first time in both the Texas House and Senate.

Speaking at a rally for her son a few days before he won the stay, Sandra Reed 
offered these words: "I will not give up this fight. I will not, regardless of 
what the outcome will be. There are too many innocent men that have gone, that 
are waiting, and that will go if we don't stop this murdering machine."

The rush to revive macabre execution methods like the gas chamber and the 
firings squad illustrate the lengths that sections of the ruling elite will go 
to preserve a powerful tool of repression. As support for and use of the death 
penalty continues to decline, these attempts appear to be the desperate acts of 
those on the losing side of the struggle.

(source: Socialist Worker)

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

Law and Psychology: Jurors Face the Heart of Conflict



2 high-profile, emotionally-charged criminal trials are currently underway in 
Colorado and Boston. The trial of James Holmes, the gunman who allegedly killed 
12 and injured many others in the Aurora movie theater begins today. Also 
today, the lawyers for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev will begin their plea to the jury to 
spare his life.

These cases represent the intersection and overlap of two areas of expertise-- 
law and psychology, yet there are few clear answers to guide the jury. What 
makes this even more difficult is that these jurors are called to face a 
challenging conflict. In deciding whether these two men live or die, they have 
to to overcome the impulse for vengeance of innocent lives lost, while placing 
themselves inside the minds of their admitted killers.

In Boston, the defense team will weave together and offer for consideration, a 
narrative of the life of Mr.Tsarnaev. They will try to explain how a young man, 
considered by his friends and others to be "a normal kid" could become a 
terrorist and commit mass murder. This testimony will be offered not only to 
humanize him, but to diminish his culpability and avoid the death penalty by 
providing a psychological context for his crimes. Since he was only 19 at the 
time, they will argue that the environment he grew up in overwhelmed his 
capacity for clear thinking and good judgment and made him vulnerable to acts 
of violence and influence by his older brother.

This is where mental health, family dynamics and trauma psychology will be come 
into play. Lawyers will claim that a legacy of intergenerational trauma rooted 
in Chechen conflict over many years instilled a feeling of hopelessness, anger 
and despair in the Tsarnaev family. Dzhokhar's life was upended when his family 
fled their home and moved to the US when he was 8 years old. An environment of 
family instability and chaos created more emotional instability. His parents 
failed to assimilate, ultimately divorced and returned to Russia, and left him 
in the care of his older brother. Jurors will try to form a narrative and weave 
together a picture of the defendant's inner life and emotional development to 
decide if any of these traumas justifies some measure of leniency in the 
punishment phase of his trial.

In the case of James Holmes, the legal issue again hinges on mental health, but 
this trial raises the question of insanity at the time a crime was committed 
which means Colorado jurors have to determine whether Mr. Holmes was sane when 
he pulled the trigger. In Colorado, the prosecution carries the burden of proof 
to prove sanity. Again, jurors are being asked to confront difficult issues and 
profound conflicts related to state of mind and legal culpability, where 
innocent victims lives were taken in a heinous crime of violence. Ordinary 
citizens must squarely confront their own and society's widely held stereotypes 
and deeply held beliefs about insanity, gun violence, personal responsibility 
and mental health. Because we cannot take an x-ray or brain scan to determine 
one's state of mind, and there is no DSM diagnosis of "insanity" this question 
is far from straightforward. In fact, the methodical, premeditated planning of 
a crime, as in the Holmes case, can be evidence of a deranged mind as easily as 
it can be proof of controlled and conscious premeditation.

In these cases, we ask ordinary citizens to go beyond their assumptions and 
biases, manage their conflicting emotions and take on the difficult task of 
determining punishment for 2 heinous crimes that cry out for retribution. Our 
fellow citizens have an important task in front of them, for the sake of the 
victims and for our society as they tackle the difficult and sometimes awful 
truths of civilized life. For this task, we hope they have the right frame of 
mind.

(source: Mindy Utay, Huffington Post)

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

Capital Punishment Is Bad For Business ---- To stop executions, death penalty 
abolitionists have threatened companies' bottom lines.



Lawyers for the State of Oklahoma will tell the Supreme Court justices on 
Wednesday that the cocktail of drugs the state uses to execute convicted 
murderers does not subject them to "cruel and unusual" punishment, which is 
proscribed by the Constitution. Indeed, the State says it has long been the 
leader in efforts to find a "more humane alternative to electrocution" - which 
in turn was considered more humane than hanging, which was considered more 
humane than execution by a firing squad.

3 convicted murderers, whose executions have been stayed by the Court pending a 
decision on the merits in the case, Glossip v Gross, say there is nothing 
humane at all about Oklahoma's current lethal injection protocol. They argue 
that the anesthetic the state uses creates a substantial risk they will suffer 
"severe pain, needless suffering and a lingering death."

The case has landed in the Supreme Court because the anesthetics Oklahoma used 
for more than 30 years without incident - in the execution of 104 men and 6 
women - are no longer available. And for this, Oklahoma posits a striking and 
novel thesis: the responsibility lies with death penalty abolitionists.

Last year when Oklahoma found itself unable to obtain the anesthetics it had 
long-used, the Department of Corrections experimented with a new one, 
midazolam, when it executed Clayton Lockett, who was convicted of the rape and 
murder of a nineteen-year-old woman. After being injected with the anesthetic, 
which is supposed to render the condemned insensate so he doesn't feel anything 
when the next drugs are dripped into his veins, Lockett, began writhing, 
moaning, kicking his leg, twitching. It took him 43 minutes to die.

Even before summarizing the evidence that midazolam is safe and effective, 
Oklahoma argues that it was forced to use it because of a campaign by death 
penalty abolitionists. They have "pressured manufacturers" of previously used 
anesthetics "to cut off supplies to the States," Oklahoma declares in the first 
paragraphs of its 82-page brief.

It is not clear how, as a matter of constitutional law, the Supreme Court 
justices will view the reasons why Oklahoma uses midazolam, and in its brief 
the State cites no authority for the proposition that actions of death penalty 
opponents renders the use of the protocol constitutional. If the current 
protocol does in fact subject the condemned to suffer undue pain, is it 
constitutionally relevant why the state used it?

But there is some truth to the state's contention that death penalty opponents 
have played an active role in the resulting shortage of lethal injection drugs. 
Using adverse publicity, lawsuits and lobbying, lawyers representing death row 
inmates and anti-death penalty organizations have persuaded pharmaceutical 
companies not to supply drugs for capital punishment.

Regardless of how the Court rules in Glossip, the contentious debate about the 
death penalty will continue - no one expects the Supreme Court as currently 
constituted to rule outright that the death penalty is unconstitutional, even 
as it goes about limiting the methods that can be used. Most of the campaigns 
against capital punishment will be waged outside the courts. Some will focus on 
pharmaceutical companies, but as they are successful, states will adopt other 
methods. Utah has already said it will use the firing squad.

Liberal abolitionists may find some surprising support from political 
conservatives, who capital punishment has simply become too expensive, in part 
because of the lengthy appeals process, which are designed to guard against 
executing someone who is innocent. California, which has the largest death row 
population, spends $90,000 more per inmate on death row than on one in the 
normal prison population, according to a study 3 years ago when the state came 
close to repealing capital punishment in a referendum. Last week, Nebraska's 
Republican legislature voted to repeal capital punishment, and one of the 
arguments was that it was too costly.

Lethal injection was first proposed in the 19th Century by a New York doctor 
who argued it would be cheaper than hanging. Britain rejected it because of 
opposition from the British Medical Society. (In the 1960s, Britain abolished 
capital punishment altogether, even though polls showed a majority of the 
public supported it.) By the 1980s, the three-drug protocol developed by 
Oklahoma had been adopted by virtually all capital punishment states.

Lawyers for death row inmates won some lower court victories with the argument 
that lethal injection would inflict unnecessary pain and suffering and was 
therefore proscribed by the Eighth Amendment ban on "cruel and unusual 
punishments." But in 2008, the Supreme Court ruled otherwise, in a case out of 
Kentucky, Baze v Rees.

"The firing squad, hanging, the electric chair and the gas chamber have each in 
turn given way to more humane methods, culminating in today's consensus on 
lethal injection," Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the plurality. (Only 
Justices Ruth Ginsburg and David Souter dissented).

(source: Raymond Bonner is a former foreign correspondent and investigative 
reporter at The New York Times, and the author of Anatomy of Injustice: A 
Murder Case Gone Wrong----politico.com)