[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----KY., ARK., MO., OKLA., UTAH, CALIF., USA

[Rick Halperin]

March 20



KENTUCKY:

Prosecutors may seek death penalty in apartment shooting case



Prosecutors told the Clark Circuit Court Thursday they may seek the death 
penalty against suspects charged with the Dec. 23, 2014, shooting death of a 
woman at a Winchester apartment complex.

Lillian Barnett, Lamont Wilkerson, Aaron Stailey and Christopher Robinson were 
arraigned before Judge Jean Chenault Logue Thursday.

Not guilty pleas were entered for all 4 defendants and pre-trial conferences 
were scheduled for May 7.

Christopher Robinson was indicted in February for capital murder, 1st-degree 
burglary and 2 counts of 1st-degree assault and Barnett, Stailey and Wilkerson 
with complicity on all counts in the death of 19-year-old Amber Caudill, who 
was shot after Wilkerson, Stailey and Robinson allegedly forced their way into 
an apartment on Oxford Drive.

According to police, Barnett dropped the men off at the apartment where they 
planned to break in and steal drugs. Justin Meadows and Crayvone Ritchie were 
inside, and Meadows shot once and struck Robinson in the chest. Robinson 
returned fire, shooting and injuring Meadows and Ritchie. A stray bullet went 
through the floor, killing Caudill in the apartment below, investigators said.

Assistant Commonwealth Attorney Heidi Engel said the prosecutor's office has 
not yet elected the death penalty in the case, though they are all eligible. 
Engel said the decision is up to Commonwealth Attorney David Smith, who will 
submit his decision in writing at a later date for all four suspects.

Engel also said the death penalty has also not yet been elected in the cases of 
Aaron Spencer and Brandon Guy, who were charged with arson and murder in the 
2012 death of Kenneth Payton Jr. Payton's home on East Broadway was set on fire 
after he was killed.

(source: centralkynews.com)








ARKANSAS----new death sentence

Jury sentences man to death for 2011 killing



A Garland County Circuit Court jury deliberated for just under 3 hours Thursday 
before sentencing a Pearcy man to death by lethal injection for the 2011 
shooting death of a Hot Springs woman, his 3rd murder conviction since 1978.

Randy William Gay, 56, was convicted Tuesday of capital murder in the May 10, 
2011, death of Connie Ann Snow, 49, after the 9-woman, 3-man jury had 
deliberated for about 30 minutes.

After testimony Wednesday and closing arguments Thursday, the jury recommended 
a sentence of death, which was accepted by Judge John Homer Wright.

Wright denied a last-minute motion by Gay's attorney, Mark Fraiser, to set the 
recommendation aside in favor of a sentence of life in prison without parole. 
After Wright formally sentenced Gay -- who showed no reaction when the verdict 
was read -- Gay said, "Take care, judge," and Wright replied, "You, too."

"We've been waiting for this for 1,437 days," Snow's daughter, Mary Beth Snow 
Lansdell, said moments after the verdict was announced. "My family can finally 
move on now, and my mother finally has justice."

Lansdell said she was happy not only for her mother but also for "the rest of 
his victims. He'll never be able to hurt anyone else ever again, not even in 
prison."

Gay had 2 previous convictions for second-degree murder: 1 in the 1978 shooting 
death of his father-in-law, James Kelly, and another in the 1991 shooting death 
of his own father, Glen Harold Gay.

Even though Gay's sentence sets off an automatic appeals process that could 
take many years, Lansdell said, "We've waited a long time to get to where we're 
at today. This has been a long time coming."

Prosecuting Attorney Terri Harris thanked the jurors, who sat through seven 
days of "graphic testimony" and had to consider more than 70 mitigating 
circumstances presented by Gay's attorneys, along with the three aggravating 
circumstances presented by the prosecution -- his 2 prior murder convictions 
and a felony terroristic threatening conviction in 2008.

"This is not something that anyone takes great relish in, but based on the 
verdict I think justice has been served," Harris said. "The family can finally 
have some closure now. We've been working on this case for 3 1/2 years."

In her closing remarks to the jury, Harris went back over Wednesday's testimony 
about Kelly, "a father, grandfather and musician who died a violent death at 
the age of 41" at the hands of Gay.

She also noted the defense presented testimony about the abusive nature of Glen 
Gay toward his son. "The disconcerting part of the case was the attempt to 
minimize that murder and Randy Gay's reasoning behind why he killed his own 
father.

"[Glen Gay] got beaten up in court and was not here to defend himself," she 
said. "Are we supposed to turn a blind eye to a second murder?"

In his closing, Fraiser said there was evidence presented to support every one 
of the mitigating circumstances involved in the cases, especially concerning 
Gay's relationship with his father.

He noted testimony that Gay's mother had tried to abort him and then abandoned 
Gay and his sisters at a young age, before their father grew abusive to them. 
Even when his father later tried to be his friend, he did so by encouraging him 
to drink alcohol and ignore his responsibilities.

"I can't conceive what that must have done to a young mind," he said, noting 
that Gay's father was a big influence on him, which led to them being "too much 
alike. He didn't start out that way. He was made that way by how he was raised 
and treated."

Fraiser noted that Gay was always a model prisoner during his previous prison 
terms and had qualified for parole each time. "This indicates that [Gay] 
functions best in a controlled environment where he is not allowed to be around 
alcohol because alcohol is the thread that goes through this whole case."

He noted before the jury's deliberation that Gay "will never leave the 
Department of Correction alive. He is there now and will remain there until he 
is pronounced dead. It's up to you to decide if that day will be decided by God 
or by the state of Arkansas."

In her rebuttal, Harris noted that "a lot of kids have been treated worse than 
[Gay] growing up. His father was strict. There's nothing exotic or unusual 
about being raised in that environment. There was no evidence of him showing up 
at school with black eyes or bruises."

She said his abuse of alcohol was "a life choice" he made to avoid reality and 
facing "the day to day problems we all have to live with. That's a choice we 
all make."

She said prison was "a substitute parent" for Gay, and if he had obeyed all the 
rules growing up like he did while in prison "he wouldn't be sitting here 
today."

She noted prison would not be a punishment for Gay because "that's his home. 
All you're doing is sending him home."

Harris said Gay "caused the violent deaths of three people for no particular 
reason." In asking for the death penalty, she told the jury, "The time for 
leniency for this defendant has come to an end, and it needs to end today."

(source: Arkansas Online)

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

Family of Randy Gay's 3rd victim rejoices over death sentence



A Garland County jury sentenced Randy William Gay, 56, to death for the 2011 
death of Connie Snow Thursday.

Snow was killed and her body dumped in the Ouachita National Forest. Gay was 
charged for Snow's death Tuesday.

Gay is now the 33rd inmate on death row in the state. The last people to be 
sentenced to death in Arkansas were in Lee and Lincoln Counties in 2014.

Just moments after the verdict, Mary Lansdell, the oldest daughter of Connie 
Snow, and her husband Tracey told Channel 7 Gay's sentencing was a relief.

"I feel anxious, grateful, anxiety, happy , relief, and just ... our family can 
get closure," Mary said. "Justice is finally served. I want to thank the courts 
and everybody that was in there and everybody that participated in helping us 
get this conviction and this verdict. I just want to thank them for their time. 
They have brought so much to my family."

The Jury took a little over 3 hours to come to their decision. Both lawyers and 
Snow's family agreed that the trial took a toll on everyone.

Both the state and the defense made their closing arguments Thursday. Both made 
thorough Cases.

Gay's lawyer, Mark Fraiser, focused on Gay's upbringing and background, asking 
the jury to act with Mercy and Grace. Emphasizing that Gay can appropriately 
function in a controlled atmosphere like prison.

"If you take an eye for an eye the whole world will be blind," Fraiser said in 
court Thursday.

Prosecuting Attorney Terri Harris represented The state. She focused on Gay's 
history, emphasizing that Gay has used the corrections system as a substitute 
parent instead of choosing to change for the better making life in prison with 
no parole an inappropriate sentence.

"All you are doing is sending him home," Harris said in court Thursday.

Mary Landsdell said that the experience in court was strenuous. "The most 
horrifying thing we've had to experience. Wouldn't wish it on anybody. Losing 
somebody as brutally the way we did it's heart breaking, it's hard to explain," 
Tracey said.

As for Snow's family they said Thursday night will be about celebration.

"Tonight? Family dinner! Celebration," Lansdell said.

"4 years, I think we are all going to unwind. This whole trial that we just had 
to experience and the details we have been exposed to...we are going to spend 
time together as a family like Connie would have wanted us to do," Tracey said.

According to Chief Deputy Prosecutor, Michelle Lawrence the Gay's case will go 
into an automatic appeal.

Gay exchanged final words with Judge John Homer Wright, moments before he was 
taken to ADC saying, "Take Care Judge Wright."

The last person to be executed on death row in Arkansas was Eric Nance in 2005. 
Gay will be the only person from Garland County on death row.

(source: KATV news)








MISSOURI:

Prosecutors seeking death penalty in Jonesburg triple killing



Prosecutors are now seeking the death penalty against the man accused in a 2014 
triple killing near Jonesburg. Shawn Kavanagh is accused of going on a stabbing 
spree while looking for his estranged wife on Valentine's Day in 2014.

The woman survived, but an 8-year-old boy and 2 others were killed.

Kavanagh's next court appearance is scheduled for June 25.

(source: ABC news)








OKLAHOMA:

Can Executions Be More Humane?----A law professor suggests an untested 
procedure as an alternative to lethal injection.



Michael Copeland has a unique resume: former Assistant Attorney General of the 
tiny Pacific island nation of Palau, professor of criminal justice at East 
Central University in Ada, Oklahoma - and now, the proponent of a new execution 
method he claims would be more humane than lethal injection.

Copeland is one of the brains behind House Bill 1879 proposed by Oklahoma State 
Representative Mike Christian. The bill, passed by the Oklahoma House last 
week, would make "nitrogen hypoxia" a secondary method to lethal injection. 
Oklahoma State Senator Anthony Sykes will be introducing it to the senate 
shortly.

Copeland explained the execution method last September to the Oklahoma House 
Judiciary Committee at Christian's invitation. Copeland says that Christian had 
been suggesting the firing squad, but Copeland thought there might be a better 
way. Along with 2 other professors from East Central University, Christine C. 
Pappas and Thomas M. Parr, he is drafting a white paper about the benefits of 
nitrogen-induced hypoxia over lethal injection.

This isn't Oklahoma's 1st time engineering new execution methods. The modern 
lethal-injection protocol was first proposed by an Oklahoma state medical 
examiner named Jay Chapman in 1977. But Copeland, who spends most of his time 
teaching criminal justice policy, procedure, and research methods, has no 
background in medicine. This is his first foray into execution technologies.

Hypoxia occurs when a person lacks an adequate supply of oxygen. "Normally, the 
air we breathe is 79 % nitrogen and 21 % oxygen," Copeland explains. Nitrogen 
hypoxia during an execution "would be induced by having the offender breathing 
a gas mixture of pure nitrogen." Copeland points out that "nitrogen is an inert 
gas, and therefore doesn't actually cause the death. It is the lack of oxygen 
that causes death."

According to Copeland, death from nitrogen hypoxia is painless. "In industrial 
accidents, it often happens because the victim does not know they are in a 
hypoxic environment," he said. "That suffocating feeling of anxiety and 
discomfort is not associated with hypoxic deaths." He says nitrogen-induced 
hypoxia is well-researched, although the ideal delivery system for an execution 
has not yet been established. 2 ideas include a medical-grade oxygen tent 
around the head or a facemask similar to those used by firefighters.

The condemned person might not even know when the "the switch to pure nitrogen 
occurs, instead he would simply lose consciousness about 15 seconds after the 
switch was made," he added. "Approximately thirty seconds later, he would stop 
producing brain waves, and the heart would stop beating about 2 to 3 minutes 
after that."

Since the botched execution of Clayton Lockett last April, Oklahoma's death row 
has been in the national spotlight. Lockett died 43 minutes after the process 
began - far longer than a typical lethal injection - and appeared to writhe in 
pain. The Supreme Court is now reviewing the state's lethal-injection protocol 
to determine whether or not it is humane. Meanwhile, three scheduled executions 
in the state have been postponed.

Copeland says that conditions for lethal-injection executions will only get 
worse. States are scrambling to find the drugs and the health professionals to 
use them, and both are required for lethal injection to take place. "You have 
anti-death penalty zealots around the globe that protest, that bring attention 
to the manufacturers of these drugs," Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt 
told a local chamber of commerce last summer. Pruitt said that as long as 
activists pressure manufacturers, there will be supply issues.

As more drug manufacturers create end-user agreements that prevent states from 
using their drugs for executions, departments of corrections are searching for 
other ways to carry out death sentences. The situation is acute. Last week, 
Akorn became the latest drug company to make rules about how certain drugs are 
used, South Carolina announced it had run out of drugs, and Texas said it had 
only one dose of pentobarbital remaining.

Oklahoma is not alone in its quest for new execution methods. The electric 
chair is Tennessee's new backup method, while Utah will use the firing squad if 
lethal injection is not possible. Other states, including Louisiana and 
Oklahoma, are researching methods involving gas. According to the Death Penalty 
Information Center, 4 states have gas chambers as backups to lethal injection: 
Arizona, California, Missouri, and Wyoming.

>From its 1st use in the execution of Gee Jon in Nevada in 1924 to its link to 
Nazi gas chambers, lethal gas as method of execution has a problematic history. 
American lethal-gas executions typically used hydrogen cyanide as the mechanism 
of death. Inmates were strapped to chairs in gas chambers and the ensuing 
chemical reaction would cause visible signs of pain and discomfort: skin 
discoloration, drooling, and writhing.

But nitrogen hypoxia would likely not produce the gruesome deaths that resulted 
from cyanide gas executions. Copeland says that "you don't have to worry about 
someone reacting differently." The condemned person would feel slightly 
intoxicated before losing consciousness and ultimately dying.

Other death-penalty experts are more skeptical. "It's only been partially 
vetted, superficially researched, and has never been tried," said Richard 
Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Using it 
would be an experiment on human subjects." State death rows would be strapping 
someone down without any idea what would happen next, he feared.

"We'd need testimony from the best experts on this," Dieter says. "Right now, 
this is sailing through a legislature and not a peer-review process. I'm no 
doctor, but let's hear from them. I don't completely dismiss the idea that this 
could become approved or that it's as good as they say because lethal injection 
is in a bind."

If the bill becomes law and Oklahoma successfully executes someone using this 
method, it could spread from to state very quickly, Dieter says. Older methods 
like firing squads are a little too brutal for the American public, but 
something new could be accepted. If so, he says, "it could lead to an awkward 
spurt of executions."

Copeland says he is not a death penalty absolutist. "I think the state has a 
unique obligation for justice - it's the state's obligation," he explains. "But 
I don't think the death penalty is a deterrent compared to life without 
parole." If we must have the death penalty, he argues, it should be humane.

"Nitrogen is ubiquitous. The process is humane, it doesn't require expertise, 
and it's cheap."

Christine C. Pappas, one of Copeland's co-researchers, echoes this point. In an 
email exchange, she said that if the Supreme Court invalidates lethal injection 
as an execution method, it would not necessarily mean the end of the death 
penalty. States could find other ways to kill. "If we are to have the death 
penalty, which is something that Oklahomans really want, I believe it should be 
as painless as possible," she argues. Pappas is opposed to capital punishment 
and says she's faced criticism from abolitionists who think she's in league 
with death-penalty advocates.

"What's missing is the question of whether or not we should be executing people 
at all," said Ryan Kiesel, the executive director of the Oklahoma ACLU and a 
former 3-term member of the state House of Representatives. He argues that the 
state legislature is missing the big picture. "Instead, we???re having this 
bizarre academic exercise with professors playing doctors dressed up as 
executioners. Behind all of those masks, there's no legitimate expertise to 
help legislators consider this method."

Kiesel says they need to step back and take a look at facts that are, in his 
words, an indictment of the death penalty itself. He points to the central role 
that race and class play into death sentences and to Oklahoma's 10 death-row 
exonerations. Those factors, he argues, should give legislators pause. "It's a 
fool's errand to inject humanity into something that at its very core is a 
brutal act," he added. "You can't make it more humane."

But Copeland thinks that it is death penalty abolitionists who have made 
executions inhumane by restricting access to drugs. It will only get worse. 
Some corrections officials at the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and 
Corrections agree. On February 18, they submitted a report to the state House 
of Representatives proposing the use of nitrogen-induced hypoxia and cited 
Copeland's forthcoming paper.

(source: The Atlantic)








UTAH:

Utah Governor Gary Herbert 'Leaning Toward' Firing Squad

Utah's governor says he's "leaning toward" signing a bill that would make 
firing squad the method of execution if the state can't come up with the drugs 
for lethal injections.

At a news conference on Thursday, Gov. Gary Herbert said he prefers the needle 
to the bullet but has to make sure there's a backup to carry out capital 
punishment.

State lawmakers approved the bill a week ago, making Utah the latest state to 
look for alternative methods in the wake of nationwide drug shortages. Death 
penalty opponents have been urging the Republican governor to veto it.

"I'm leaning toward signing it," Herbert told reporters. "The debate is really 
more than just the firing squad. It's should we have capital punishment or 
not?"

A handful of death-row prisoners in Utah are eligible for the firing squad now, 
but only if they choose it. The bill would let the state impose it against an 
inmate's will.

"It's not our preference, but we need to have a fallback," he said.

States across the country are having difficulty obtaining the chemicals for 
lethal injections because manufacturers won't sell them for the purpose of 
killing someone, and new drug combinations devised to fill the void are under 
attack as too painful.

(source: NBC news)








CALIFORNIA:

San Quentin Death Row Inmate Who Raped, Killed Teen Stepdaughter Dies In 
Hospital



A San Quentin State Prison death row inmate convicted of the 1998 rape and 
murder of his stepdaughter in Sacramento County died Wednesday at a nearby 
hospital, state prison officials said Thursday.

Leon Chauncey Cooper, 54, was pronounced dead at 4:40 p.m. Wednesday. His cause 
of death is pending the results of an autopsy, according to prison officials.

Cooper was sentenced to death on May 25, 2001, for the rape and murder of his 
15-year-old stepdaughter LaRhonda Johnson, a sophomore at Florin High School 
east of Sacramento, prison officials said.

Cooper had also been previously convicted in 1996 for the sexual battery of 
Johnson???s then-18-year-old sister, according to prison officials.

Since 1978, when California reinstated the death penalty, 66 inmates on death 
row have died from natural causes, 23 have committed suicide, 13 have been 
executed in the state, 1 was executed in Missouri, 6 have died from other 
causes and 2 are pending the cause of death, prison officials said.

(source: CBS news)








USA:

40 Years of Death Row: 1,359 Executed; 890 Convictions Overturned



Being sentenced to death by the courts in the United States does not mean a 
convicted individual is going to die at the hands of an executioner. Quite the 
contrary.

Federal statistics covering 40 years of the death penalty reveal that 8,466 
people were sentenced to death from 1973 to 2013. But only 1,359 were executed 
during this time, according to Frank Baumgartner, the Richard J. Richardson 
Distinguished Professor of Political Science at the University of North 
Carolina-Chapel Hill, and Anna Dietrich, a UNC-CH graduate whose senior thesis 
was on this topic.

That translates into an execution rate of 16%.

A total of 3,194 had their sentences overturned on appeal, with 890 having 
their convictions thrown out. Another 1,781 had their death-penalty sentence 
overturned, but guilt was sustained. 523 got off death row because the law was 
declared unconstitutional.

The likelihood of carrying out a death sentence in an average state in the U.S. 
is 13%. Virginia is the only state to have executed more than 50% of the prison 
inmates it has sentenced to death.

"Those sentenced to death are almost 3 times as likely to see their death 
sentence overturned on appeal and to be resentenced to a lesser penalty than 
they are to be executed," Baumgartner and Dietrich wrote.

"Regardless of one's view of the death penalty in principle, these numbers 
raise questions about how the death penalty is applied in practice. The wide 
differences across states in the odds of carrying out a death sentence are 
potentially troubling from an equal protection standpoint," they added.

(source: allgov.com)

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

Capital punishment and the brutality of class rule in America



The latest abomination in a US death chamber took place on Tuesday night in 
Missouri when Cecil Clayton, 74, was injected and killed with a single dose of 
pentobarbital. The condemned inmate was executed despite overwhelming evidence 
of his intellectual disability.

In 1972, Clayton was working in a lumberyard when a piece of wood broke off the 
sawmill and struck him in the head. Surgeons were forced to excise a fifth of 
his frontal lobe - the area of the brain that controls judgment, inhibition and 
impulsive behavior - to remove shards of bone that had pierced deep into his 
brain.

The accident had a shattering impact on Clayton's life. The former devoted 
husband and father developed severe memory loss and began to suffer from 
hallucinations and paranoia.

A quarter century later, Clayton was convicted and sentenced to death for the 
1996 murder of a Missouri sheriff's deputy. He remained on death row for nearly 
two decades as his appeals worked through the legal system. Numerous 
psychiatric exams revealed that the condemned prisoner had diminished 
intellectual capacity, social functioning deficits and dementia.

But Missouri authorities were determined to see this intellectually disabled 
man put to death, despite his inability to comprehend "the nature and purpose 
of the punishment about to be imposed on him," as required by Missouri law. 
Clayton's attorneys' pleas for mercy fell on deaf ears. The Missouri Supreme 
Court denied his right to a competency hearing, Governor Jay Nixon (the same 
man who ordered out the National Guard against protests in Ferguson, Missouri 
last year) denied him clemency, and the US Supreme Court denied a last-minute 
petition for a stay of execution.

Disturbingly, a complete record of the horrors of America's death row is too 
long to list here, but include the following:

March 2, 2015: Kelly Renee Gissendaner came within hours of death for the 
second time in less than a week when her "execution team" in Georgia said the 
drugs to be used in her lethal injection "appeared cloudy." Gissendaner, who 
had only an indirect role in the murder for which she was convicted, clearly 
turned her life around in prison. Her new execution date has yet to be 
scheduled.

July 23, 2014: Arizona inmate Joseph Wood was subjected to a nearly 2-hour 
lethal injection procedure utilizing untested drugs. According to a witness 
description: "He gulped like a fish on land. The movement was like a piston: 
The mouth opened, the chest rose, the stomach convulsed."

April 29, 2014: Clayton D. Lockett suffered an agonizing execution after being 
injected with an untested lethal concoction of three drugs. The Oklahoma death 
row inmate shook uncontrollably, gritted his teeth, and mumbled 15 minutes into 
the gruesome procedure. Authorities called off the execution, but Lockett died 
45 minutes after it had begun.

Millions of people in the US and internationally have been rightfully shocked 
and outraged by these horrifying spectacles repeated time and again on 
America's death row. But the overwhelming response of state authorities, the 
courts at every level, and the federal government is to do whatever is 
necessary to keep the state-sanctioned killing machine in operation.

The death penalty is defended at the highest levels of the government and the 
judiciary, from the Supreme Court to the Obama administration and both 
big-business parties. Since the US Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty 
in 1976 after a brief hiatus, it has consistently ruled to uphold the 
constitutionality of capital punishment. While ruling the execution of the 
intellectually disabled and those sentenced for crimes committed as juveniles 
unconstitutional, the court has repeatedly upheld the death penalty itself.

And despite the ruling barring execution of the intellectually disabled, the 
justices have rarely halted an execution on this basis. Indeed, in the killing 
of the clearly mentally disabled Clayton, one senses that the state decided a 
certain principle was at stake: the principle of unlimited and unchecked power. 
It killed because it could, and wanted to make clear that it would.

The barbaric practice of capital punishment is only one expression of the 
violent and criminal character of the American state. Police officers who kill 
unarmed people are immune from prosecution, while America's prisons are packed 
with 2 million human beings, more than any other country in the world.

These are all symptoms of a deeply diseased society, corrupted through and 
through by social inequality and the aristocratic principle that the wealthy 
and powerful can do whatever they want, while the poor and powerless are to be 
humiliated and degraded.

Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria, a leading figure of the Enlightenment, 
wrote on the death penalty in his widely influential treatise On Crimes and 
Punishments in 1764:

"What must men think, when they see wise magistrates and grave ministers of 
justice, with indifference and tranquility, dragging a criminal to death, and 
whilst a wretch trembles with agony, expecting the fatal stroke, the judge, who 
has condemned him, with the coldest insensibility, and perhaps with no small 
gratification from the exertion of his authority, quits his tribunal to enjoy 
the comforts and pleasures of life?"

Reading these words, one can envision the black-robed Supreme Court Justices as 
they deny stays of execution, the governors who refuse to grant clemency or 
pardons, and the execution teams in prisons injecting concocted lethal mixtures 
into the condemned veins. One can also picture President Obama in the White 
House situation room drafting his "kill list" of those targeted for drone 
assassinations.

The continued practice of capital punishment is at odds with the democratic 
conceptions held by the early American leaders, including James Madison and 
Thomas Jefferson. Madison, key in drafting the US Constitution and the Bill of 
Rights, a death penalty opponent, wrote: "I should not regret a fair and full 
trial of the entire abolition of capital punishment by any State willing to 
make it." Jefferson opined that the notion of "an eye for an eye" was a 
"revolting principle."

The opposition of Jefferson and Madison to capital punishment was based on the 
Enlightenment principle of hostility and opposition to arbitrary state 
violence, which was associated with the Ancien R???gime and the feudal 
aristocracy of Europe.

Some 2 1/2 centuries later, the current political establishment's support for 
state-sanctioned killing speaks volumes about the decayed state of class rule 
in 21st century America. The criminal character of the state is an expression 
of the class whose interests it represents: the corporate and financial 
oligarchy, whose wealth is derived from swindling and speculation, standing on 
top of a society riven by historically unprecedented levels of inequality.

(source: World Socialist Web Site)

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

Death penalty violates God's law



Re: "Tsarnaev deserves public execution" (Letters, March 7)

For the writer to call for the death of this man or any man shows just how 
slavish we have become. It is written that "Thou shall not kill." The writer 
must not be a believer in the word of God.

It is also written that "We must obey the law in the land in which we dwell." 
So let the law do its work in this horrible matter.

Also, the real citizens born and bred are the American Indians.

CHARLES T. ASHLEY Jr.

Camden

(source: Letter to the Editor, Courier-Post)