[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----VA., USA

[Rick Halperin]

May 19



VIRGINIA:

Column: Bishops' Statement on Death Penalty Debate----To build a culture of 
life we must respect the sanctity of even "unlovable" lives.



This year, through the advocacy of the Virginia Catholic Conference, our Church 
spent considerable time opposing legislation related to the death penalty. The 
proposed measure would have permitted the Commonwealth to arrange with 
compounding pharmacies to mix drugs for use in executions, hiding from the 
public the identities of the pharmacies and materials used. Thankfully, this 
bill was defeated. So, too, was a measure the Virginia General Assembly 
considered last year - also opposed by the Conference - that would have forced 
death row inmates to be electrocuted if lethal injection drugs are not 
available.

Meanwhile, Pope Francis delivered a message which sharply contrasted these 
disturbing debates. "There is discussion in some quarters about the method of 
killing, as if it were possible to find ways of 'getting it right' ....," the 
Pope wrote in a recent letter about the death penalty. "But there is no humane 
way of killing another person."

Pope Francis' keen observation adds an exclamation point to the rejection of 
these "method of execution" bills. In Virginia, we are indeed having the wrong 
debate - a reality clearly visible in light of all we celebrate during this 
Easter season.

In these final joyful weeks of Easter, the Church continues to celebrate the 
gift of eternal life offered through the Resurrection. In our pilgrimage to 
that life, we follow Jesus, who loved and forgave us from the Cross, by living 
out the teaching of our faith that all human life is sacred, from the moment of 
conception until natural death.

This conviction is reflected in our understanding that the poor and vulnerable 
have the 1st claim on our consciences, in our opposition to abortion and 
euthanasia, and in our responsibility to welcome immigrants and refugees. But 
our faith also challenges us to declare sacred even the least lovable among us, 
those convicted of committing brutal crimes which have brought them the 
ultimate penalty, the penalty of death.

The Church's teaching on the death penalty is succinctly stated in a 2005 U.S. 
Bishops' statement, "A Culture of Life and the Penalty of Death:" "No matter 
how heinous the crime, if society can protect itself without ending a human 
life, it should do so." This statement is the teaching of the Catechism, and 
for decades Popes John Paul II, Benedict XVI, and Francis consistently have 
urged us to embrace it.

To be sure, this teaching challenges many people, including ourselves when we 
reflect on violent crimes and lives lost in senseless and unimaginable ways. 
The deep pain, grief, and suffering of those who have lost loved ones to 
violence cry out for our care and attention. More killing, though, is not the 
answer: The death penalty does not provide true healing for those who mourn, 
nor does it embody the Gospel of Life, which each of us is called to affirm 
even in the most difficult circumstances.

It is also important to note that people have been executed despite serious 
doubts about their guilt, and inmates who languished on death row for decades 
have been freed after their innocence was proven. Since 1973, some 152 death 
row inmates nationwide - including 1 in Virginia - have been exonerated. We 
must also be aware of the racial inequity inherent in the system, and that the 
death penalty has been administered to individuals with severe intellectual 
disabilities.

These circumstances further illustrate that, in Virginia and elsewhere, we are 
having the wrong debate. We should no longer debate which inmates we execute or 
how we execute them. Instead, we should debate this: If all human lives are 
sacred and if a civilized society such as ours can seek redress and protect 
itself by means other than taking a human life, why are we continuing to 
execute people?

By ending the use of the death penalty we would take one important step - among 
significant others we must take - to abandon the culture of death and embrace 
the culture of life.

As Pope Francis reminds us, there is no humane way of taking a life. Let us not 
choose whether to use lethal drugs, electric chairs, gas chambers, or firing 
squads. Let us take the more courageous step and choose life instead, even when 
it seems "unlovable."

(source: Bishop Francis X. DiLorenzo And Bishop Paul S. Loverde, Catholic 
Diocese of Arlington---- connectionnewspapers.com)








USA:

Death Penalty



There was little surprise in a federal jury voting death for Boston Marathon 
bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and little ground for sympathy to be found in the 
record of the defendant himself beyond his sheer youth. While the evidence 
presented at trial seemed to confirm the picture of his enraged older brother 
Tamerlan as the radicalized instigator of their brutal and nihilistic marathon 
plot, Dzhokhar's protracted and active role ahead of time, and his stone-cold 
activities in the hours following the bombing - calmly cruising the dairy aisle 
at Whole Foods - are not the material from which a strong mitigation case is 
made. To spare him, the jury would have had to vote against capital punishment 
itself; since they were "death qualified" ahead of time in the selection 
process this was never in the cards.

But while perhaps inevitable, Tsarnaev's federal-court death sentence is still 
profoundly unsettling for most Bostonians - and should be unsettling nationwide 
too. Tsarnaev was sentenced to death in a state which had abolished capital 
punishment 31 years ago; in a city whose residents had overwhelmingly preferred 
him to be imprisoned for life; and in a courtroom in which sat survivors and 
family members left bereft by the Tsarnaevs' warped jihad who themselves were 
deeply divided about his fate. What does it mean that a killer is sentenced to 
die by lethal injection against the wishes - expressed in law, polls and the 
words of many survivors - of the very community he injured? What is the purpose 
of a federal prosecution imposing capital punishment on a region which wants 
none of it, at a moment when capital punishment has been abandoned by more than 
one third of all states?

State death-penalty law, for better or worse, is usually a deep reflection of 
local history, culture and debate. That's true in the states which still 
routinely execute prisoners - Texas, Oklahoma and the deep-South death penalty 
strongholds; those which shut their death rows decades ago, such as West 
Virginia and Michigan; and of the nine states which have abolished capital 
punishment since 1980, including Massachusetts.

The federal death penalty, on the other hand, is a different story: largely a 
recent invention, radically expanded during a few brief years of Bill Clinton's 
presidency. Ever since, the federal death penalty - both in the laws passed by 
Congress and the cases selectively pursued by U.S. attorneys - has been all 
about politics of the most cynically expedient variety. Most relevant to the 
Tsarnaev case, the federal death penalty has been a convenient vehicle for 
Washington Republicans and Democrats alike to profit from the same terrorism 
panic which after 9/11 saddled us with the Patriot Act.

Up until 20 years ago, the federal death penalty was limited to treason and a 
handful of other rare offenses not covered by state criminal laws. But in 1994, 
the Clinton administration - responding to the 1st World Trade Center bombing 
and otherwise hoping to burnish its tough-on-crime credentials - radically 
expanded capital punishment, writing terrorism in among dozens of new federal 
death-penalty offenses into that year's sweeping criminal-justice reform 
package. It didn't do much good; 7 months after the bill was signed, Timothy 
McVeigh and 2 co-conspirators bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma 
City (a tragedy whose 20th anniversary was marked during the Tsarnaev trial). 
So the next year, Clinton and Congress went even further, pushing through the 
Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This package - surely one of the 
most deceptively-labeled bills of all time - limited habeas corpus and 
otherwise weakened the protections offered to state and federal death-row 
prisoners alike, most having nothing to do with terrorism, national security or 
anything other than conventional murder.

Between them, these two reforms gutted the federal appeals rights of 
conventional death-row prisoners. By putting crimes previously prosecuted by 
states onto the federal books, they also enabled U.S. attorneys to push capital 
trials into non-death-penalty jurisdictions, occasionally leading to notable 
conflicts. In 2011, for instance, federal prosecutors in Rhode Island - a state 
without capital punishment since the 80s - insisted on pursuing capital charges 
against a gas-station robber who would otherwise have been tried, convicted and 
sentenced in state criminal courts. Then-Governor Lincoln Chafee, incensed at 
this imposition of a death-penalty trial on his state, committed a singular act 
of civil disobedience: for almost 2 years he refused to hand the offender over 
to the feds. The dispute was only settled when the robber pleaded guilty in 
return for life without parole.

But terrorism? As far as national security is concerned, the federal death 
penalty has been meaningless. It did nothing to deter Oklahoma City, the 9/11 
attacks, or ideologically motivated lone-wolves like Nidal Malik Hassan, the 
Fort Hood shooter, or the Tsarnaevs. Meanwhile Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and other 
9/11 conspirators won't even be tried under the Antiterrorism and Effective 
Death Penalty Act, since the same politicians who clamor for the death penalty 
for terrorism suspects are unwilling to entrust Guantanamo prisoners to U.S. 
courts.

In 1994, the death penalty could at least be claimed as policy in the 
overwhelming majority, if not totality, of states. The Clinton administration's 
promotion of capital prosecution could perhaps be defended as effective 
electoral politics. Now, with the death penalty abolished in 18 states, that 
consensus is over.

Whether the federal government will even have a mechanism for eventually 
executing Tsarnaev is now in a matter of debate. The last time a terrorist 
bomber was executed was McVeigh, killed by lethal injection in Indiana in June 
2001. At his execution, news reporters noted tears streaming from one 
otherwise-immobile eye as the court-approved 3-drug poison regimen pumped 
through his veins. Those tears caught the attention of a Columbia University 
anesthesiologist named Dr. Mark Heath; from operating room experience Heath 
recognized it not as a sign of emotion but as a classic scientific indication 
that the pain-masking sedative in the federal government's killing cocktail was 
wearing off, with McVeigh still paralyzed but now in unspeakable agony. From 
McVeigh's teardrop and Heath's diagnosis flowed 15 years of medical journal and 
law review articles, lawsuits and worldwide alarm about the procurement of 
drugs for America's lethal injections. International pressure led drug 
companies to refuse to supply state corrections departments with the cocktail's 
ingredients. During the Tsarnaev trial, the lethal-injection debate reached the 
Supreme Court, with a fractious and macabre argument among the justices over 
whether the injection of substitute death-row cocktails, improvised from 
shadowy suppliers, amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

It should be clear by now that the federal death penalty, far from reflecting 
social consensus or meaningful deterrence, is entirely political in nature - 
designed to sell the capital punishment back to states that clearly rejected 
it, and to inoculate Democratic and Republican presidents alike in the 
country's most ardently pro-execution regions. But the criminal-justice culture 
war has turned around. In a new libertarian wave, Congress, the president and 
state legislatures are variously ratcheting down the drug war, reversing 
3-strikes criminal laws and trying desperately to empty overcrowded, expensive 
and dangerously ill-functioning prisons. In 1994, Bill Clinton Democrats played 
the federal death penalty card to retain their hold in divided states. But 
since then 6 states, including four that today have Republican governors - New 
Jersey, New Mexico, Maryland and Illinois - have since turned back from the 
death penalty.

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It's a different time. 3 of Hillary Rodham Clinton's Democratic rivals - 
Chafee, Maryland's former Governor Martin O'Malley and Vermont Senator Bernie 
Sanders - are death-penalty opponents. Chaffee, who 4 years ago had taken that 
principled stand against federal prosecutors, and O'Malley, who as Governor 
abolished capital punishment in Maryland, made statements of respect for the 
Boston jury, but made clear their determination to stay the abolitionist 
course. Sooner or later the federal death penalty will be a Democratic campaign 
issue, and Hillary Clinton will be challenged on her views.

While Boston Mayor Marty Walsh and Governor Charlie Baker both expressed hope 
that the verdict would bring, in Baker's words, "some kind of closure," they, 
like the rest of Boston, kept their response low-key. They understood that this 
verdict is not one that most people in their city and state would seek. They 
clearly did not want to be part of any national cheering section. And while 
closure may be what politicians are expected to seek, there's no evidence the 
federal death penalty - or any capital punishment law - provides it. For Boston 
Tsarnaev's federal death sentence can only prolong the agony, keeping the 
bomber front and center for years to come. In the words of Bill and Denise 
Richard, whose son was killed and daughter maimed in the Marathon bombing, "As 
long as the defendant is in the spotlight, we have no choice but to live a 
story told on his terms, not ours."

(source: Bruce Shapiro, The Nation)