[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, OHIO, MO., NEB., UTAH, USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 16



TEXAS----new execution date

Gregory Russeau has been given an execution date for June 18; it should be 
considered serious.

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)

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

Executions under Greg Abbott, Jan. 21, 2015-present----4

Executions in Texas: Dec. 7, 1982----present-----522

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



5------------Mar. 18-------------------Randall Mays---------523

6------------Apr. 9--------------------Kent Sprouse---------524

7------------Apr. 15-------------------Manual Garza---------525

8-----------Apr. 23-------------------Richard Vasquez------526

9-----------Apr. 28-------------------Robert Pruett-----------527

10-----------May 12--------------------Derrick Charles------528

11-----------June 18-------------------Gregory Russeau----529

(sources: TDCJ & Rick Halperin)

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

Texas Executed a Dad for Burning His 3 Young Kids to Death. Now a Letter is 
Casting Doubt He Did It.



Convicted in 1991 for the alleged arson murder of his 3 young daughters at his 
home in Corsicana, TX, he maintained his innocence for 13 years until being 
executed by the state in 2004.

Willingham claimed he woke up from a nap after inhaling smoke, and after 
looking around the house, he couldn't find his children. He left the burning 
house in a state of disorientation.

Johnny Webb - his cellmate in state prison - had a different story; a 
spontaneous confession that was a significant factor in the trial:

"...he had set the fire to cover up his wife's abuse of 1 of the girls. 
Autopsies of the girls showed no signs of abuse - but it was the strongest 
evidence the prosecution had other than the finding of arson by fire 
investigators. That finding has been discredited by a series of forensic 
experts."

It was a high-profile case that caught national attention due to the fire's 
tragic outcome. As such, there was pressure to issue a definitive conviction.

Recently, formerly undisclosed new evidence in the form of a letter has 
surfaced, undermining the validity of the prosecution and its key witness, 
Johnny Webb. In a recent interview with The Marshall Project, Webb stated:

"I lied on the man because I was being forced by John Jackson to do so, I 
succumbed to pressure when I shouldn't have. In the end, I was told, 'You're 
either going to get a life sentence or you're going to testify.' He coerced me 
to do it."

It may or not have been coercion, but regardless, Webb chose to testify:

"Jackson pointedly asked Webb on the witness stand whether he had been promised 
a lighter sentence or some other benefit for his cooperation. Webb told the 
judge and jury that he had not."

After the secured death penalty conviction, Webb wrote to the prosecutor from 
state prison, urging him to come through on his end of the secretive deal to 
have his own criminal sentence reduced. Soon after receiving the letter:

"Within days, the prosecutor, John H. Jackson, sought out the Navarro County 
judge who had handled Willingham's case and came away with a court order that 
altered the record of Webb's robbery conviction to make him immediately 
eligible for parole. Webb would later recant his testimony that Willingham 
confessed to setting his house on fire with the toddlers inside."

More controversy accounted in documents published by The Washington Post last 
year revealed that not only was Webb's prison sentence reduced by TX Criminal 
Justice officials - but an incriminating web of individuals helped secure Webb 
a financial incentive:

"During and after Webb was in state prison, he received thousands of dollars in 
aid from a wealthy local businessman, Charles S. Pearce Jr. Webb said in 
interviews that Pearce had helped him at the behest of Jackson; Patrick C. 
Batchelor, the district attorney; and the county sheriff."

Webb received such "high level attention" because he was "impatient" to get his 
sentence reduced, prompting the letters written to Jackson that threatened to 
go public with his falsified testimony. They urged him against such action, and 
persuaded him accordingly. But that did not help with Webb's own feelings of 
guilt.

That a man was by all appearances put to death by corruption is a mockery of 
the justice system. Regardless of where one stands on the issue of capital 
punishment, it seems hard not to agree with those at the Washington Post, who, 
in their write-up of the documents stated:

"Had such favorable treatment been revealed prior to his execution, Willingham 
might have had grounds to seek a new trial."

The State Bar of Texas filed a misconduct complaint, falsifying official 
records, withholding evidence and obstructing justice last summer as a response 
to the outpouring of this evidence.

(source: IJReview.com)








OHIO:

Kasich rarely uses clemency to pardon, commute sentences

Gov. John Kasich's clemency record

Cases received: 2,167

Cases decided: 1,521

Cases undecided: 646

Denials: 1,441

Pardons approved: 65

Commutations: 1

[source: Governor's office]

In his first 4 years in office, Gov. John Kasich used his executive clemency 
power more sparingly than any other Ohio governor in the past 3 decades.

He granted 66 of 1,521 requests, about 4.4 % of 1,521 non-death-penalty cases 
he received and acted upon from 2011 to 2014, according to information obtained 
by The Dispatch under a public-records request.

That makes him the most conservative with clemency of any Ohio governor going 
back to the 1980s, when the state began tracking gubernatorial clemency.

Last year, Kasich, a Republican who began his 2nd term in January, approved 17 
of 433 clemency requests he reviewed, about 4 %. All of the cases approved were 
pardons, some going back to crimes committed more than 25 years ago. A pardon 
wipes out a past criminal record.

Kasich commuted the death sentences of 5 killers during his 1st term, but 
allowed 12 to be executed. He recently used his executive authority to push 
back the entire execution schedule for a year, to January 2016, to allow time 
for the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to obtain sufficient 
quantities of new execution drugs as permitted by a change in state law.

Clemency is a unique executive power of Ohio governors, broad but defined by 
law. The governor can halt or postpone executions, commute or reduce a sentence 
so that a prisoner can be freed now or in the future, and grant pardons, 
erasing a past criminal record.

In the past 30 years, Ohio governors have used clemency in different ways, 
sometimes reflecting personal ideological persuasions.

Former Gov. Ted Strickland, a Democrat, approved 20 percent of 1,615 clemency 
requests he handled between 2007 and 2011. Most involved low-level, nonviolent 
offenses, but he did commute 5 death-penalty sentences to life without parole.

No Ohio governor in modern history has commuted a death sentence and set a 
prisoner free.

Republican governors George V. Voinovich (1991-98) and Bob Taft (1999-2007) 
each approved less than 10 % of the clemency requests they received. Gov. James 
A. Rhodes, a Republican, approved 17.5 % of clemencies in 1982, his last year 
in office.

Democrat Richard F. Celeste, governor from 1983 to 1991, used his clemency 
power most liberally, commuting the death sentences of 8 killers on death row 
in his next to last day in office. He also granted clemency to 25 female 
prisoners, reasoning they were victims of "battered-woman syndrome" and 
deserved mercy.

Celeste's actions caused an uproar, and the clemency process was legally 
challenged. The General Assembly changed the law to require governors to have a 
recommendation from the Ohio Parole Board before making any clemency decision.

The governor doesn't have to agree with the parole board, but merely have a 
board recommendation in hand. In fact, Kasich differed with the board in 23 
cases last year, each time rejecting clemency for inmates who had been 
favorably recommended.

Only Kasich, Strickland and Taft faced life-or-death clemency decisions as 
governor. No capital cases made it to the desks of Rhodes, Celeste and 
Voinovich.

(source: The Columbus Dispatch)








MISSOURI----impending execution

Missouri Supreme Court won't block execution of deputy's killer----Cecil 
Clayton scheduled to die Tuesday for 1996 shooting



The Missouri Supreme Court refused on Saturday to halt the execution of a 
deputy sheriff's killer over claims that he is mentally incompetent because of 
a brain injury he suffered in a sawmill accident.

Cecil Clayton, 74, is scheduled to be executed Tuesday for the 1996 shooting 
death of Barry County deputy Christopher Castetter. The father of 3 was 29 in 
1996 when he went to Clayton's home near Cassville to check on a suspicious 
vehicle report. Authorities said Clayton shot the deputy once in the head even 
before he got out of his car.

The defense, which sought a hearing to make the mental incompetence case, said 
the 1972 brain injury left Clayton mentally impaired with an IQ of 71. Clayton 
also has been diagnosed with several mental disorders, including dementia.

But the court rejected the argument in a 4-3 ruling, with the majority finding 
that "even though the effects of his brain injury and increasing age make it 
more difficult for Clayton, there is no evidence that he is not capable of 
understanding 'matters in extenuation, arguments for executive clemency or 
reasons why the sentence should not be carried out' " as required under state 
statute.

The dissenting opinion said Clayton's attorneys had "presented reasonable 
grounds to believe his overall mental condition has deteriorated and he is 
intellectually disabled." The opinion noted that Clayton had lost 20 percent of 
his frontal lobe from the traumatic brain injury and said that proceeding with 
the execution would be a violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and 
unusual punishment.

(source: KMBC news)






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

Local opponents to protest scheduled Missouri execution----Cecil Clayton, 74, 
scheduled to die by lethal injection Tuesday.



The Springfield chapter of Missourians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty 
will hold a protest vigil on Tuesday to mark the scheduled execution of state 
prison inmate Cecil Clayton at about 6 p.m. the same day at the state prison in 
Bonne Terre.

The vigil will be from noon to 1 p.m. at Park Central Square in downtown 
Springfield.

Clayton, 74, is the oldest person on Missouri's death row. He was sentenced to 
die for the 1996 killing of a Barry County deputy. On Saturday, the Supreme 
Court of Missouri rejected Clayton's claim that he was incompetent to stand 
trial because of a brain injury he suffered 30 years before he killed the 
deputy.

(source: ky3.com)








NEBRASKA:

End death penalty



Thank you for the article you printed on March 5 letting us know how families 
of murder victims see the death penalty in Nebraska ("Supporters of eliminating 
Nebraska's death penalty turn out at hearing," March 5). This is an important 
and timely issue. Knowing what someone goes through during the grieving 
process, I believe it is critical for families to be able to move forward. At 
the same time, they must be assured that the murderer will remain in prison for 
the rest of his or her life.

It is devastating to read the stories of people who have had family members 
murdered. I empathize with their pain. If, after everything they have been 
through, they can come to the conclusion that the death penalty should end, 
then I believe the rest of us can certainly agree with them.

One hears about lots of problems with the death penalty, like innocent people 
being executed, but one often doesn't hear about its impact on families of 
murder victims. I learned a lot from your article regarding how these families 
can remain "stuck" emotionally, waiting for an execution. Instead, they need to 
be able to move on with their lives. I'm more opposed than ever to the death 
penalty. Nebraska must end the death penalty now.

Charlotte Liggett, Lincoln

(source: Letter to the Editor, Lincoln Journal Star)




UTAH:

New murder trial begins Monday for ex-death row inmate who confessed to 
killing----Douglas Lovell spent years on death row after admitting that he 
murdered a woman to silence her rape testimony against him. Yet the Utah 
Supreme Court allowed him to withdraw his guilty plea and a jury will decide 
his fate in a trial starting Monday.



Douglas Lovell confessed to kidnapping and murdering Joyce Yost 2 weeks before 
she was scheduled to testify that he raped her.

That admission came 7 years after the South Ogden woman disappeared from her 
home. He hoped the 1993 plea deal would keep him off of death row, but that 
deal hinged on police finding Yost's body.

Even with Lovell along to help the bizarre 5-week search for the shallow grave 
he said he dug for Yost up Ogden Canyon in 1985 after he drugged and suffocated 
her, police could never find her body. A judge ordered him to die by lethal 
injection.

Now, nearly 30 years after Yost disappeared and after Lovell spent years on 
death row for killing her, an Ogden jury will begin hearing evidence Monday to 
determine whether Lovell is guilty of murdering Yost. In 2010, the Utah Supreme 
Court allowed him to withdraw his guilty plea after he argued that he had not 
been properly informed of his constitutional rights when the plea bargain was 
made.

Admitting to murder

Death didn't silence Yost's testimony. Using transcripts of her statements from 
a previous preliminary hearing, a jury found Lovell guilty in 1985 of 
kidnapping Yost, taking her to his Clearfield home and raping her. He was 
sentenced to 15 years to life.

He was serving time at the Utah State Prison when his ex-wife, Rhonda Butters, 
came to visit, secretly recording Lovell's confession for investigators.

"I committed a 1st-degree felony to cover another felony," Lovell said in the 
recording. "It's the death penalty. At the very least they're going to give me 
life without parole. If I cooperate with them, and go with them."

Prosecutors agreed to give Butters immunity, despite her admission that she had 
dropped Lovell off at Yost's home knowing he intended to harm the woman, then 
picked him up the next morning and helped him destroy evidence.

According to Butters, Lovell had tried to hire 2 different people to kill Yost, 
but they backed out. So he decided to do it himself, telling Yost he was only 
going to keep her until the rape trial was over, forcing her to pack a bag to 
make it look like she had left town.

Lovell was eventually charged with murder and pleaded guilty before a jury 
trial could begin. In a 1993 Associated Press interview, Lovell gave a detailed 
description of how he had murdered his accuser. Lovell had drugged Yost, 39, 
with so much Valium that she couldn't stand up, but he said he hadn't strangled 
her, like reports indicated.

"Her hands were tied behind her back, sort of to her side, tied with part of a 
towel or a sheet. She struggled a little when I put my hand over her mouth and 
blocked her nose. Then her body went stiff, and then went limp and I knew she 
was dead."

It was the deadly result of guilt and shame over the rape charges, Lovell said. 
Family and friends had turned on him, accusing him, and he was angry.

"It's complicated. I was embarrassed, ashamed at what I did," he said. "It was 
an issue of pride with my family and friends and it just started gears in my 
head and a denial thing set in, like I almost didn't believe I did what I did."

Cutting a deal

Lovell pleaded guilty in June 1993 to aggravated murder in the death of Joyce 
Yost.

"I've wanted to exactly do this for a long time," he said.

In exchange, Lovell expected to be spared the death penalty. He was asked if he 
would tell investigators where Yost's body was buried, giving them a chance for 
closure and a funeral.

(source: Deseret News)

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

Bishop: State can offer no justification for taking life by execution



Debate over the death penalty and a proposal to reinstate a firing squad in 
Utah "seems to suggest growing recognition among legislators of the precarious 
place any state occupies when it tries to take on a role best left to God," 
said Bishop John C. Wester.

"At its core, the death penalty is repugnant to us because of our firmly held 
belief that only God can give life and, consequently, only God can rightly take 
it away," the Salt Lake City bishop wrote in the Intermountain Catholic, the 
diocesan newspaper.

He made the comments in the Feb. 27 issue of the paper. On March 10, the state 
Senate passed a measure to reinstate execution by firing squad for those 
convicted of capital crimes. The state House passed it in February.

Utah's lawmakers argued they needed a backup method of capital punishment if 
the drugs used in lethal injection are not available. There is a shortage of 
lethal drugs for executions and their use in carrying out the death penalty has 
become more controversial after the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in 
Oklahoma; he writhed in pain for 40 minutes before dying of apparent heart 
failure.

In April, the U.S. Supreme Court will heard oral arguments in Glossip v. Gross, 
a case brought by four death-row inmates in Oklahoma. On March 9, the court 
said it would take a Florida case challenging the state's protocol for handing 
down a death penalty sentence.

Currently, the 32 states that have the death penalty use lethal injections and 
many are looking at new methods for carrying it out. Utah would become the only 
state to allow firing squads if Republican Gov. Gary Herbert signs the measure 
into law. He has not said if he will sign it.

"The death penalty in any form is abhorrent," Bishop Wester said, but with 
regard to the firing squad method, "strapping a person to a chair with a hood 
over his head and a bull's eye on his heart creates a disturbing image of the 
individual as little more than a target at a shooting range."

"Our Catholic faith rests on a belief that every life is a gift, and every 
moment of life is an opportunity for God to work within each of us," he said.

But if the state can choose to take life, "we give the state the power to shut 
down God's acts of grace within an individual," he continued. "God does not 
abandon even the most violent criminal. He offers salvation to everyone at all 
times, but when the state carries out an execution it terminates the convicted 
person's opportunity to return to a right relationship with God against God's 
wishes, thus aborting any chance the person may have had to repent and be 
forgiven for his or her crime."

Bishop Wester said there is no justification the state can offer "for its 
continued practice of interfering with God's merciful judgment in order to 
impose the death penalty for capital crimes."

Writing before the state Senate voted on the firing squad bill, he had 
expressed hope that given the floor debate over it, it seemed an "opportune 
time for legislators to discuss the sanctity of life and how it is denigrated 
by the current state policy of sanctioning the killing of people as 
retribution."

He called for the lawmakers to abandon the bill and choose to commission an 
in-depth study of the death penalty in Utah.

"With a little grace, a close look at the penalty will reveal its many flaws 
and result in the eventual abolition of the death penalty, returning Utah to 
the reverence for creation that God intended," Bishop Wester said.

(source: The Pilot)








USA:

Death Sentences, With or Without a Jury



In the states that continue to put their own citizens to death, virtually every 
part of the process is warped by injustice and absurdity. In Florida and 
Alabama, death row inmates are challenging perverse state laws on the jury'a 
role in capital trials. The Supreme Court, which has been intervening more 
often in death penalty cases, last week agreed to review the Florida law.

In death penalty trials, juries that reach a guilty verdict are usually 
required in the trial's subsequent penalty phase to make factual findings, such 
as whether the crime was especially heinous, that will determine whether the 
defendant is sentenced to death.

But Florida lets the judge make these findings, and does not require that the 
jury be unanimous in voting for a death sentence. After Timothy Lee Hurst was 
found guilty of a 1998 murder of a co-worker in Pensacola, his jury split 7 to 
5 in favor of executing him, with no record of whether the majority even agreed 
on the reason. (Mr. Hurst claims he is intellectually disabled and thus 
ineligible to be executed.) In other words, Mr. Hurst was effectively condemned 
by a single vote by an unidentified juror.

Alabama also allows death to be decided by a single vote: that of the judge, 
who may override a jury verdict of life in prison and replace it with a death 
sentence, relegating the jury's status to that of an advisory body. The Supreme 
Court declined to hear a challenge to the Alabama law in 2013, prompting a 
sharp dissent from Justice Sonia Sotomayor. She concluded that the state's 
judges, who are elected - and who have unilaterally imposed death sentences 101 
times after the jury voted for life - "appear to have succumbed to electoral 
pressures."

The Alabama law, Justice Sotomayor wrote, undermines "the sanctity of the 
jury's role in our system of criminal justice," and very likely violates the 
court's own rulings requiring juries, not judges, to find any fact that would 
increase a defendant's sentence. 2 new challenges to that law are before the 
court - one involving a death sentence imposed by a judge after a jury voted 12 
to 0 for life - but it hasn't decided whether to take them up.

This disregard for the jury's role is all the more offensive given the Supreme 
Court's reliance on jury verdicts as a key measure of America's "evolving 
standards of decency," the test it uses to decide whether a punishment is so 
cruel and unusual that it violates the Constitution.

How can those "evolving standards" be accurately measured if the "verdicts" for 
death are so deeply divided or are in fact imposed by a judge who is rejecting 
the jury's call to spare a life?

The Florida and Alabama jury laws are only more proof of the moral disgrace of 
capital punishment in this country. In Georgia, officials hide their 
lethal-injection drug protocol behind state-secret laws. Missouri has executed 
an inmate before the Supreme Court ruled on his final appeal. Texas has been 
trying for years to kill a man suffering from paranoid schizophrenia.

Until capital punishment is abolished nationwide, the United States will remain 
a notorious exception in a world that has largely rejected state-sanctioned 
killing.

(source: Editorial, New York Times)

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

The free-market case for opposing the death penalty



There are lots of ways to execute a prisoner. But in the U.S., at least, the 32 
states that still execute prisoners have decided on lethal injection. On its 
face, lethal injection seems like a clinical, modern, hopefully low-pain, and 
usually low-key way to kill somebody. Except when it isn't, as we saw in last 
year's crop of botched executions.

The prolonged, evidently painful deaths of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma, Joseph 
Wood in Arizona, and Dennis McGuire in Ohio were tied to experimental drug 
cocktails necessitated by a shortage of traditional death drugs. This shortage 
is due largely to a ban by European countries on exporting certain drugs to 
U.S. states that practice capital punishment.

The free market is making a case against capital punishment. So far, the states 
that actively execute prisoners have been willfully plugging their ears.

But now, Texas is down to its last dose of pentobarbital, the lethal injection 
drug it has used since 2012. As other states' supplies of proven drugs dry up, 
they're working toward dusting off old methods - firing squad (Wyoming, Utah), 
the electric chair (Tennessee), and even the gas chamber (Oklahoma).

>From 1982, when Texas became the 1st state to use lethal injection, until 2011, 
the national 3-drug cocktail was essentially the same: a sedative to numb the 
prisoner (sodium thiopental), a paralytic agent (pancuronium bromide) to 
immobilize him, and a drug (potassium chloride) to stop the heart.

Then, in 2011, Hospira, the only U.S. company that sold sodium thiopental, 
announced it would "exit the sodium thiopental market" entirely, after its 
Italian plant refused to send any of the sedative to the U.S. because of its 
use in capital punishment. When states' sodium thiopental stocks ran out, they 
turned to pentobarbital, used to induce comas and euthanize animals - until its 
Danish manufacturer, Lundbeck, found out and barred its sale to states that 
employ lethal injection. Other producers of the drug have also prohibited its 
sale to U.S. correctional facilities.

States then started using the sedative benzodiazepine midazolam - Lockett and 
Wood were midazolam guinea pigs - despite the wishes of its originator, Roche. 
States have also been ordering pentobarbital and other lethal-injection agents 
from domestic compounding pharmacies - but the details of those deals are 
extremely hazy.

With just a single dose of pentobarbital left and 317 inmates on death row, 
Texas is stocking up on midazolam. It's not clear if Texas can't get 
pentobarbital because the compounding pharmacies are refusing to sell it to 
them, or because they can't get the raw ingredients - the Professional 
Compounding Centers of America told The Texas Tribune that it stopped providing 
pentobarbital ingredients to its customers in January 2014.

Most compounding pharmacies aren't regulated by the Food and Drug 
Administration, and their products are uneven. Which compounding pharmacies are 
Texas, Oklahoma, Ohio, Georgia, Missouri, and other states buying drugs from? 
They're not saying.

Why not? "Disclosing the identity of the pharmacy would result in the 
harassment of the business and would raise serious safety concerns for the 
business and its employees," Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokesman 
Jason Clark explained to The Texas Tribune last month.

Georgia passed a law shielding its lethal injection drug sources from the 
public, and Missouri won a lawsuit from death row inmates who wanted to know 
what was in the lethal cocktail they were to be subjected to, who made it, and 
who quality-tested the drugs. In December, a Texas court ordered the state to 
reveal where it obtained its lethal injection drugs. (TDCJ is appealing, and 
doesn't have to name names during the appeals process.)

In April 2014, after Clayton Lockett's 45-minute death, The Washington Post's 
Brady Dennis and Lena H. Sun explained how states obtained their new drugs:

In their scramble to carry out death sentences, prison officials from different 
states have made secret handoffs of lethal-injection drugs. State workers have 
carried stacks of cash into unregulated compounding pharmacies to purchase 
chemicals for executions.... "It looks like a street-level drug deal," said 
Dean Sanderford, a lawyer for Lockett. "And they're keeping all the information 
secret from us." [The Washington Post]

Just ponder that for a moment.

Providing lethal injection drugs to state prisons is so toxic that no European 
country will do it and no American company is willing to do it openly. 
Gunmakers and abortion clinics advertise their services, but pharmacies and 
drugmakers won't publicly associate with a form of punishment approved of by 63 
% of Americans.

That's the market talking, and it's saying it wants no part of this.

There are lots of reasons to oppose the death penalty. It is significantly more 
expensive than incarcerating prisoners for life. It doesn't appear to deter 
crime.* There's a good chance America has executed at least one innocent 
person. Capital punishment puts the state in control of life and death, and 
turns state employees into literal executioners.

The American Board of Anesthesiologists and the American Medical Association 
prohibit their members from helping administer capital punishment.

If you believe in free-market capitalism - and presumably a good number of the 
76 percent of Republicans who favor capital punishment do - then the scarcity 
of lethal injection drugs should be a signal that life without parole may be a 
better option.

But, you may argue, what about the other forms of execution? Well, states are 
only returning to them reluctantly. And the reason seems to be that shooting 
people, hanging them, electrocuting them, and gassing them are too flamboyantly 
deathly for many Americans.

Lawmakers in Utah "stopped offering inmates the choice of firing squad in 2004, 
saying the method attracted intense media interest and took attention from 
victims," explain The Associated Press' Brady McCombs and Lindsay Whitehurst. 
And in 2010, when Utah's last prisoner "was put to death by 5 police officers 
with .30-caliber Winchester rifles," the execution "drew international 
attention."

If you take away the lab coats and the sedatives, capital punishment begins to 
look uncomfortably close to its probable purpose: State-sanctioned, ritualized 
revenge killings. (That's largely why my colleague Ryan Cooper wants to bring 
back the guillotine, the gallows, and the firing squad - to remind us of what 
we're really doing.)

Utah State Rep. Paul Ray (R) - the main proponent of bringing back the firing 
squad - says that when prison officials selected the 5 police officers to carry 
out past execution, they start in the areas where the crime happened. "We've 
always had a lot more volunteers than actually had spots," he tells AP.

Revenge is a very human emotion, and people assigned the death penalty 
typically committed really atrocious crimes. But justice is supposed to be 
rational and impartial.

When the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals declined to rehear a 3-judge panel's 
decision to stay Wood's execution in July 2014, Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, a 
Reagan appointee, dissented, arguing that Arizona "should and will prevail in 
this case" and correctly predicting that the Supreme Court would lift the stay. 
But his dissent turned into a history lesson on lethal injection, which he 
called a flawed "enterprise doomed to failure":

Using drugs meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is 
a misguided effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look 
serene and peaceful.... But executions are, in fact, nothing like that. They 
are brutal, savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that 
reality. Nor should it. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we 
should be willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous 
brutality on our behalf.... If we, as a society, cannot stomach the splatter 
from an execution carried out by firing squad, then we shouldn't be carrying 
out executions at all. [Kozinski]

If drug companies refuse to sell state prisons lethal drugs - perhaps they 
object to "subverting medicines meant to heal the human body to the opposite 
purpose," as Kozinski writes - the states may have no choice but to return to 
older methods, or risk subjecting their condemned wards to cruel and unusual 
punishment.

* "Much psychological and sociological research suggests that many criminal 
acts are crimes of passion or committed in a heated moment based only on 
immediate circumstances, and thus potential offenders may not consider or weigh 
longer-term possibilities of punishment and capture, including the possibility 
of capital punishment," says a February 12, 2015, report from NYU Law's Brennan 
Center for Justice. "In line with the past research, the Brennan Center's 
empirical analysis finds that there is no evidence that executions had an 
effect on crime in the 1990s or 2000s."

(source: The Week)

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

The Firing Squad Makes a Comeback



Utah's shocking decision to reinstate the firing squad as a method of execution 
is a response to embargoes and boycotts - and may accelerate the decline of the 
death penalty.

Last week, Utah's legislature passed a bill reintroducing the firing squad as 
an alternate form of execution when lethal injection drugs are unavailable. The 
bill will go to Republican Governor Gary Herbert's desk this week. He has not 
yet said whether he will sign it.

One thing is sure, however: Utah's firing squads cast a harsh light on the 
American system of death, which is an anomaly amid a global decline in capital 
punishment.

In fact, Utah is not actually the 1st state to consider alternatives to lethal 
injection. Last month, the Wyoming House comparatively quietly voted to 
reinstate the firing squad, with the stipulation that the prisoner must be made 
unconscious beforehand - all this even though Wyoming's death row is empty. 
Oklahoma has proposed reversion to the gas chamber with the use of nitrogen gas 
to starve the body of oxygen.

Why is all of this happening? Because of a nationwide shortage of lethal 
injection drugs. A European Union embargo on Danish pharmaceutical company 
Lundbeck's export of pentobarbital and Illinois-based Hospira's refusal to sell 
sodium thiopental to corrections facilities have helped create a nationwide 
shortage of the most common drugs used in lethal injection. As a result, Ohio 
has postponed all executions for the rest of the year, Georgia dramatically 
postponed the execution of Kelly Gissendaner just minutes before she was to be 
put to death because her lethal injection drugs were not mixed correctly, and 
many states (including Pennsylvania and South Carolina) are already out of the 
drugs. Texas used its 2nd-to-last dose Wednesday night. Thus, pressure is 
building to follow Utah's lead and reinstate another method of execution.

Now, on a scientific level, it is not clear that the firing squad or gas 
chamber are necessarily riskier or more painful than lethal injection, properly 
performed. At a human level, however, the reintroduction of discarded methods 
of execution is troubling because it reminds us of the death penalty's morbid, 
anachronistic nature, like a product of an earlier time when justice was less 
discerning, less "civilized."

That image is not inaccurate. In fact, the decline of capital punishment 
everywhere in the world has followed from this process. Globally, legal capital 
punishment is largely restricted to the Islamic world and East and Southeast 
Asia. In Europe, Latin America, and the South Pacific region, the death penalty 
is virtually extinct. Executions have even dwindled to only a handful each year 
in all of Sub-Saharan Africa and the former Soviet bloc combined. India carries 
out about one execution per decade. There are, to be sure, some surprising 
holdouts: The most obvious is Japan, a respectable liberal democracy, yet one 
with a secretive death penalty process and lack of public debate on the issue. 
But such exceptions are increasingly rare.

Although lethal injection is the most widely used method of execution in the 
United States (and, for the moment, the only method actively used), just 5 
other countries authorize death by lethal injection, according to Cornell 
University Law School's Death Penalty Worldwide: China, Vietnam, Thailand, 
Taiwan, and - although it no longer carries out executions - Guatemala. Each of 
these countries now faces the same shortage of lethal injection drugs as the 
United States. In 2013, Vietnam, like Utah, considered reverting to firing 
squad instead of lethal injection, but ultimately opted to concoct home-grown 
chemicals rather than rely on the international pharmaceutical market.

If not by injection, how do the countries with the death penalty carry out 
executions? Hanging is the most common method, and remains on the books in 60 
countries. Firing squad is the 2nd-most common form (29 countries), followed by 
firing by a single shooter (23 countries). Stoning is in 4th place: though 
legal in 9 countries (more than lethal injection), it is often restricted to 
only a handful of very specific offenses and rarely used. 5 countries authorize 
beheading. Meanwhile, only the United States uses electrocution and the gas 
chamber, making these methods about as unusual as "pushing individuals from an 
unknown height," a legal method of execution in Iran and prominently used in 
the Islamic State.

The domesticated death penalty is becoming feral.

The triumph of lethal injection in the United States is part of a much longer 
trend, going back 2 centuries, to "civilize" capital punishment. The English 
example is instructive. In 1824, condemned prisoners in England were no longer 
required to carry their hanging rope to the scaffold. Gibbeting, the public 
display of a hanged prisoner after death, ceased in 1832. Shortly thereafter, 
black curtains were draped around the base of the scaffold to prevent the 
public from seeing the gruesome death. In 1868, the practice of public 
execution ceased altogether, though it continued in the Empire for longer. It 
wasn't found unconstitutional in India until 1986.

Methods of execution have continued this "civilizing" trend. The ax gave way to 
the guillotine's precision and consistency. Hanging was perceived to be an 
improvement on the violent methods of execution that predated it, and firing 
squad, electrocution, and gas chamber were said to be improvements on hanging. 
Lethal injection revolutionized the process of capital punishment by turning it 
into a seemingly medical procedure that was not apparently painful as a result 
of a hefty dose of a sedative.

In this respect, Utah's legislation looks like a reversal of this civilizing 
process. The crisis of lethal injection has already led to experimental drug 
cocktails, procurement of drugs from veterinary clinics and unregulated 
compounding pharmacies, and several botched executions. The domesticated death 
penalty is becoming feral.

One might argue that attempting to civilize executions a fool's errand. No 
"civilized" method of execution can reconcile the underlying problems with the 
capital punishment system as it currently exists: inadequate assistance of 
counsel, racial sentencing disparities, higher structural costs, and wrongful 
convictions. If that is true, then Utah's action may continue the global 
erosion of the death penalty by unmasking it for what it is: institutionalized 
death. Capital punishment has nowhere left to hide.

(source: The Daily Beast)

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

Crime and punishment



Who can agree with the degree of sadistic cruelty toward one's fellow man in 
our justice system?

Incarceration is, however, an effective deterrent to crime. Loss of freedom 
alone is a punishment beyond compare. Hazing, ridicule and these dehumanizing 
efforts lead to nullifying a positive rehabilitating tool and often the inmate 
is hardened, becoming worse than before. Change in criminal behavior must be 
the desired outcome. Otherwise, we exacerbate our society's ills.

Murderers' and rapists' fates are sealed and the death penalty does 
(biblically) apply. All other crimes are fixable, with the respect and dignity 
the inmate regains at release. We must all live equally under the same laws and 
are subject to equal punishment under our just laws.

Respect yourselves and each other, thereby assuring our nation's future.

Russ Olenick

Raeford

(source: Letter to the Editor, Fayetteville (NC) Observer)