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

[Rick Halperin]

NOTE----News posts to this listserve will resume on Jan. 13






VIRGINIA:

LIFE ON DEATH ROW ---- Don't execute Sussex Prison inmate No. 1100057


It was with heartbreaking irony that the Richmond '80s-era rock group, the 
Dads, performed their reunion show the same week former member Bryan Harvey's 
murderer, inmate No. 1100057 at Sussex State Prison in Waverley, lost an appeal 
in the Federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals to save his own life.

Harvey, his wife Kathyrn and daughters Stella and Ruby along with Percyell and 
Mary Tucker, their daughter Ashley Baskerville, Treva Terrell and Sheryl Warner 
were all victims of Offender No. 1100057 and his nephew's murdering rampage 
from late 2005 to New Year's Day 2006.

Convicted and sentenced to death for the unspeakable murders of 9-year-old 
Stella and 4-year-old Ruby Harvey, No. 1100057 has now spent an entire decade 
on death row at Sussex maneuvering through the labyrinthine appeals process 
trying to evade execution. Despite this most recent setback, he can still 
appeal to either the entire 4th Circuit or the U.S. Supreme Court. This is all 
death penalty protocol, designed to provide condemned inmates all the 
considerations they never gave their victims.

Social media and the Richmond Times-Dispatch comments section reflected 
deep-rooted vitriol toward No. 1100057's seemingly endless appeals process "Fry 
him," reader after reader wrote, "just kill him already."

Don't fry No. 1100057 - it lets him off too easily. Here's why:

According to a complaint filed in United States District Court in Alexandria on 
Nov. 20, 2014, No. 1100057 was a party with first 4, then 3 other plaintiffs in 
a lawsuit against Virginia Department of Corrections Director Harold Clarke and 
Sussex 1 Prison Warden Keith Davis. The suit protests "cruel and unusual 
punishment" at that maximum-security facility.

***

The suit's document is a sobering look at No. 1100057's 1st decade on death 
row. He is locked in a 9-foot by 8-foot concrete box for 22 or 23 hours a day, 
with only a sink, toilet, a thin mattress and 4-inch wide window. The door is 
solid steel, with a tiny slit at eye level and a slit at the bottom for meal 
delivery. The lights are never completely turned off. He is video-monitored 
24/7 from a computerized control room, where corrections officers armed with 
shotguns can blast him if necessary with rubber pellets from ports built in the 
walls.

Up until October, No. 1100057 was only allowed to leave his cell for a 
supervised 10-minute shower 3 days per week, and for 1 hour of outdoor 
recreation 5 times per week in a small outdoor cage with no exercise equipment. 
The document reiterates that No. 1100057 "is not allowed to use the gymnasium 
or prison yard, nor is (he) given an opportunity for in-pod recreation."

More specifically, No. 1100057 is cut off from human contact and spends nearly 
every minute of every day alone. Although Sussex's death row currently houses 
seven inmates, they are separated by several empty cells within a 44-unit pod, 
making communication impossible. No. 1100057 is never allowed access to 
general-population inmates for any educational, vocational, or behavioral 
programming, and he is not allowed to attend group religious services.

According to the complaint, No. 1100057's treatment "inflicts great mental 
suffering as well as physical distress. It is unrelated to any legitimate 
penological goal, and constitutes a form of psychological torture that amounts 
to the gratuitous infliction of cruel and unusual punishment upon (him)."

***

In the face of this legal challenge, Virginia quietly granted a few more 
privileges to death row inmates, but its policies are still among the most 
stringent in the nation. For example, instead of 1 hour, the prisoner now gets 
90 minutes a day in the "dog yard." He was granted restricted television 
privileges and a few minutes a day to send monitored emails.

Certainly no one who knew and loved the Harvey family feels sorry for those who 
inflicted such cruel and unusual punishment on them. But we are a far more 
civilized people than No. 1100057 and his nephew. Instead of exercising 
vengeance, Virginia should keep twisting the screws of this deliberate form of 
execution - a lingering, eventual death at the end of a deprived and unnatural 
existence.

While the Dads' musical reunion celebrated the lives and talents of our 
friends, it should also serve as a reminder that the Harveys' killer is a 
lifeless shadow, sealed inside a 71-square foot cement coffin. There will never 
be scholarships or remembrances in his name. Let the appeals end, and leave him 
to an unbearably sluggish minute-by-minute, decades-long existence of denied 
freedoms, maddening isolation and constant armed surveillance.

Forget the death penalty. No. 1100057 should survive for his crimes. Alone and 
forgotten, just a shackled and fading number on a prison ledger.

(source: Dale Brumfield is an author and adjunct university professor living in 
Doswell----richmond.com)






ALABAMA:

Court records show pharmacists refused death penalty drugs


At the height of Alabama's search for lethal injection drugs, state officials 
were turned down by every pharmacy they contacted for help, according to court 
records filed Wednesday.

State officials asked every licensed compounding pharmacist in Alabama to make 
batches of pentobarbital - once the primary drug used to kill inmates - and all 
refused. Attempts to buy the drug from four other states also failed, court 
documents state.

Those refusals could point to a rough road ahead for the death penalty, despite 
a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year that cleared another drug, midazolam, for 
use in executions.

"Alabama's experience is not at all unique," said Robert Dunham, director of 
the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based group that studies the 
death penalty. "This is part of the medical community's rejection of lethal 
injection as a practice."

Alabama officials are trying to resume executions by lethal injection after a 
2-year hiatus caused by legal challenges and shortages of key execution drugs.

Tommy Arthur, condemned to death for the 1980s murder-for-hire of Muscle Shoals 
resident Troy Wicker, is one of several inmates who have challenged the state's 
current approach to execution: injecting an inmate with midazolam to deaden 
pain, rocuronium to still the muscles and potassium chloride to stop the heart.

Midazolam has been used in botched executions in other states, including an 
Oklahoma execution in 2014 in which it took an inmate more than 30 minutes to 
die after the drugs were injected. Inmates say the use of midazolam is cruel 
and unusual, but the U.S. Supreme Court approved its use in an Oklahoma case 
last summer, seemingly clearing the way for executions in Alabama as well.

Lawyers for the state on Wednesday asked a federal court for a summary judgment 
that would end Arthur's appeals and send him to the execution chamber.

But Arthur's lawyers are trying to flip the script in the case. Before the 
state adopted midazolam as a death penalty drug, Arthur filed a similar 
challenge against the use of pentobarbital, Alabama's main execution drug 
before 2014. Now that he's faced with execution by a new drug, Arthur wants to 
switch back to pentobarbital, a drug he claims is less cruel than midazolam.

Lawyers for the Alabama attorney general's office say they can't return to 
pentobarbital, because no one will sell the drug to the Department of 
Corrections.

"These sources have either indicated they cannot obtain the ingredients for 
compounded pentobarbital, were not capable of compounding pentobarbital, or 
refused to be a supplier for the ADOC" lawyers for the attorney general's 
office wrote in a court document.

Mysterious source

The court documents, among hundreds of pages filed in Arthur's case last week, 
shed light on Alabama's often secretive attempts to obtain drugs for use in 
lethal injection. Several states have struggled to get their hands on drugs 
because a growing number of drug suppliers refuse to sell them, citing ethical 
objections or opposition to capital punishment.

In 2014, lawmakers considered a bill that would make the sources of execution 
drugs a state secret, not subject to open records laws. Lawmakers at the time 
said drug companies feared backlash from death penalty opponents.

"The people who make the drugs are subject to lawsuits and harassment," Rep. 
Lynn Greer, R-Rogersville, said at the time. "It gets to the point where nobody 
wants to make the drug."

A month after Greer filed his bill, state officials acknowledged that they had 
no pentobarbital on hand - which explained why no inmate has been executed 
since 2013.

The secrecy bill never passed, but state officials still refuse to release the 
names of death penalty drug suppliers, citing a gag order in the Arthur case. 
The new court documents show that even with that secrecy in place, the state 
simply couldn't find a supplier, despite contacting "nearly 30" sources.

Compounding problem

The state sought those drugs from compounding pharmacies, specialty pharmacies 
that mix small batches of drugs on-site. They had to: Pharmaceutical companies 
will no longer sell pentobarbital to prison systems. Fewer than 2 dozen 
pharmacies in the state are accredited to make injectable drugs that way.

Arthur???s lawyers supplied the state with a list of 19 Alabama pharmacies they 
said were potential sources of pentobarbital. (All 19 names are blacked out in 
court documents.) But the state's lawyers argue they've contacted all 19, plus 
others, and been turned down.

"While Arthur alleged that as many as 10 states intend to use compounded 
pentobarbital for executions, the process of obtaining compounded pentobarbital 
is difficult to impossible for most," the state's lawyers wrote.

That might not matter now, given that Alabama has switched to midazolam, a drug 
that's more readily available on the market.

But pharmacists' resistance to compounding execution drugs may soon turn out to 
be important in the search for midazolam as well, said DPIC's Dunham.

"In the future, midazolam is going to be available from compounding pharmacies 
if it's available to prisons at all," Dunham said. Big pharmaceutical companies 
are beginning to back away from supplying the drug to prison systems, he said, 
after some companies discovered their drugs were being used by states for 
execution without the company's permission.

2 major suppliers of midazolam - Illinois-based Akorn and New Jersey-based 
Becton-Dickinson - have declared in the past year that they're opposed to 
selling the drug to Alabama for executions.

While the state hasn't identified its midazolam supplier, the state's lawyers 
used "package inserts," essentially instructions for use of a midazolam, from 
Akorn and Becton Dickinson in court filings this year. Both companies have 
denied selling the drug directly to Alabama prisons, and Akorn even asked the 
state to return any Akorn-made midazolam it had on hand for executions.

Individual pharmacists are also backing out of the lethal injection business. 
Last year, the International Academy of Compounding Pharmacists and the 
American Pharmacists Association both voted to discourage their members from 
supplying drugs for executions.

Akorn and Becton-Dickinson both got another mention in court documents last 
week, when Arthur's lawyers filed a transcript of a deposition in which an 
expert witness says he found the Becton-Dickinson insert on the Internet.

"It was one of the available generic package inserts for midazolam," the expert 
witness, Stephen Bannister, says in the deposition. Bannister said lawyers 
later told him the Akorn insert was the "reference" in the Arthur case.

Attempts to reach Arthur's lawyer, Suhana Han, for comment were unsuccessful. 
Joy Patterson, a spokeswoman for the Alabama attorney general's office, said 
the office wouldn't comment on the filings.

Arthur's case is scheduled for a final hearing later this month.

Summary: Alabama execution drugs, past and present

Thiopental: Also known as sodium pentothal - the drug cited as a "truth serum" 
in countless dime-store spy novels - thiopental was once the key drug in 
Alabama's execution protocol. A general anesthetic, thiopental was given to 
condemned inmates to deaden the pain of the drugs later administered to stop 
the heart. Supplies grew short after the drugmakers stopped selling it to 
prisons. In 2011, the state handed over its supply to the Drug Enforcement 
Agency, which had seized drugs other states obtained on the black market. 
Alabama got its thiopental from Tennessee.

Pentobarbital: After thiopental, Alabama switched to pentobarbital, commonly 
used to put down injured or stray animals. By March 2014, the state had run out 
of the drug. Neither pharmacists nor other states would sell the drug to the 
prison system, court documents revealed last week.

Midazolam: In September 2014, Alabama replaced pentobarbital with midazolam. 
Opponents say it's primarily an anxiety drug, not a painkiller with the potency 
of thiopental. The U.S. Supreme Court, however, approved the use of thiopental 
last summer, possibly clearing the way for executions to resume after a 2-year 
hiatus.

(source: Anniston Star)