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

[Rick Halperin]

January 15


ARIZONA:

Arizona Wants To Speed Up A Death Penalty Case Because Its Drugs Are 
Expiring----Arizona's supply of midazolam expires at the end of May. The state 
is hoping that a challenge brought by death row inmates can be wrapped up with 
enough time to carry out the executions.


Arizona is trying to carry out more executions after a brief moratorium brought 
about after the state carried out the longest execution in American history.

In that execution, Joseph Wood took nearly two hours to die, and witnesses 
reported him gasping during that time.

After the state commissioned a review, U.S. District Judge Neil Wake is 
allowing a lawsuit brought by five death row inmates challenging the state's 
new methods to go forward.

The problem for Arizona: They need the case to wrap up soon because their 
sedative expires at the end of May.

At a status hearing on Tuesday, Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Sparks said 
the state was having problems getting more.

The judge seemed receptive to speeding up the case, saying he would be 
"expecting accelerated discovery."

As of yet, the inmates haven't even filed their new complaint yet - but 
summarized it at the hearing as asking for more transparency and asking that 
the 2nd drug be removed.

The 2nd drug in a 3-drug protocol is a paralytic, and is used to cover any 
movement or twitching by the inmate. The inmates seem prepared to argue that 
it's a "cosmetic" drug used only to mask any pain the inmate may be feeling due 
to the other drugs.

The inmates' attorneys were only informed of the drug???s expiration date on 
the day of the status hearing, and said the case shouldn't be in "crisis 
litigation" to meet the May deadline.

5 inmates brought the lawsuit, and the case would have to wrap up fairly 
quickly for the state to be able to execute all 5 of the inmates. Executions 
take considerable amounts of planning, and as a result, states try to space out 
when they occur.

In Oklahoma, for example, when the state had a 43-minute botched execution in 
2014, officials and executioners there blamed scheduling 2 executions for 1 day 
as a big reason why things went wrong.

The state didn't offer a date to the judge on when the case would have to be 
wrapped up to carry out the executions, and Arizona Attorney General Mark 
Brnovich's office didn't respond to a request when asked by BuzzFeed News.

The shortest time frame the state has carried out 5 executions was in 2012. But 
in that case, the 5 executions took place over a span of 5 1/2 months.

(source: BuzzFeed News)






USA:

Where the Democratic Presidential Candidates Stand on Criminal Justice


The 3 rivals for the Democratic presidential nomination will debate Sunday 
night in Charleston, S.C., their 4th debate of the campaign season. In the 
Republican debate, on Thursday, gun control and policing took center stage for 
a brief period. With Charleston's recent history of violence - the massacre of 
nine parishioners in a black church last June and the police killing of an 
unarmed black motorist in North Charleston in April - criminal justice issues 
are likely to arise again. Here's how the 3 Democrats stand on some of those 
issues, as reviewed by The Marshall Project.

Hillary Clinton

In the 1970's, Hillary Rodham was a young, idealistic lawyer who represented 
people convicted of rape and murder and opposed the death penalty. Then she was 
the wife (and a vocal supporter) of Bill Clinton, the tough-on-crime, pro-death 
penalty governor of Arkansas. Then she was First Lady, and in 1994, vouched for 
a crime bill that significantly contributed to mass incarceration. After that, 
she was a senator, and said that the death penalty had her "unenthusiastic 
support." Now, as she seeks the Democratic nomination for the presidency, she 
sounds more like the young lawyer she once was, saying, ":It's time to end the 
era of mass incarceration."

Clinton has tried to use her support for gun control against her main 
Democratic rival, Bernie Sanders, whose positions on the issue are complicated. 
As a senator, for example, she voted against a bill - supported by Sanders - 
that immunized most gun sellers from liability following shootings.

But in 2008, as she vied in the primary with then-Sen. Barack Obama for mostly 
white states like West Virginia and Pennsylvania, she often positioned herself 
as a supporter of gun rights.

"You know," she said, "my dad took me out behind the cottage that my 
grandfather built on a little lake called Lake Winola outside of Scranton, and 
taught me how to shoot."

Her position on the death penalty has also undergone changes. In 1976, Hillary 
Rodham Clinton was the director of the legal aid clinic at the University of 
Arkansas, where she defended inmates, many of them black, on death row.

But when her husband became governor, she stood by as he oversaw the state'i s 
1st executions since 1964, including that of a mentally-disabled man who did 
not understand he was about to die.

In 2000, she said that the death penalty had her "unenthusiastic support"; more 
recently, she has said that she supports it but only in "limited and rare" 
circumstances.

On racial justice, Clinton explained to Black Lives Matter activists last 
August why she has taken an evolving approach: "Your analysis [of racism] is 
totally fair," she told them. "It's historically fair. It's psychologically 
fair. It's economically fair. But...there was a different set of concerns back 
in the 80s and the early 90s. We have to look at the world as it is today and 
try and figure out what will work now."

Bernie Sanders

Bernie Sanders is a liberal mainstay on nearly every policy issue, except when 
it comes to guns. The senator hails from Vermont - a state with an entrenched 
hunting and gun culture, as well as lax gun laws. His actions as a lawmaker 
have produced a mixed record, and he has upset gun-control and gun-rights 
advocates alike. He has D- rating from the N.R.A..

Shortly after his election to the House of Representatives in 1990, Sanders 
voted against the Brady Bill, which mandated federal background checks and a 
waiting period for gun purchases. In total, he voted against the bill 5 
separate times. He also supported allowing Amtrak riders to carry guns in their 
checked luggage. In 2005, Sanders voted in favor of an N.R.A.-backed bill that 
protects gun makers from being sued for negligence when people use the guns to 
commit crimes. He recently changed his stance, saying he would support revising 
the law to allow gun manufacturers who "act irresponsibly" to be held liable.

In the Senate in 2013, shortly after the massacre of 20 children at Sandy Hook 
elementary school in Connecticut, Sanders voted for a bill that would have 
established universal background checks and an assault weapons ban, and also 
would have closed the "gun-show loophole," though the bill failed to pass.

He has insisted that those who support strict gun control fail to understand 
the position of constituents like his. "I think that urban America has got to 
respect what rural America is about, where 99 % of the people in my state who 
hunt are law abiding people," he said recently. As a liberal politician who 
represents a rural state, he contends that he's the best candidate to find a 
consensus on gun policy.

Sanders has been opposed to the death penalty throughout his political career. 
In Congress, he voted against the expansion of capital punishment at every 
opportunity, with one exception: in 1994, he voted in favor of the final 
version of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which expanded 
the federal death penalty. An amendment to that bill, which Sanders voted for, 
would have replaced all federal death sentences with life in prison, but that 
amendment ultimately failed. In October, he took to the Senate floor to argue 
that the government "should itself not be involved in the murder of other 
Americans."

Sanders has been active in civil rights work since his college years. He 
attended the 1963 March on Washington and saw Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., give 
his "I Have A Dream" speech. But as a legislator from the overwhelmingly white 
state of Vermont, he has come under pressure from rights advocates for his 
failure to specifically address racial-justice issues.

Shortly after Black Lives Matter activists jumped on stage and shut down a 
Sanders rally this summer, he won praise from the movement when he unveiled a 
racial justice platform that focuses on different forms of violence against 
people of color in the United States: physical, political, legal, and economic. 
He laid out proposals to address each category, from passing "ban the box" laws 
(removing questions about a job applicant's criminal record from employment 
applications) to restoring provisions from the 1965 Voting Rights Act to 
outlawing for-profit prisons.

Martin O'Malley

As governor of Maryland, O'Malley signed legislation that made it the 18th 
state to repeal the death penalty. Now on the campaign trail, ending the 
federal death penalty is part of his criminal justice platform. After Dzhokhar 
Tsarnaev was sentenced to death for the Boston Marathon bombings, O'Malley told 
reporters, "The death penalty is ineffective as a deterrent, and the appeals 
process is expensive and cruel to the surviving family members."

On gun regulation, O'Malley pushed through a package of reforms in 2013 that 
made Maryland one of the strictest states in the country. The laws included a 
ban on multiple kinds of assault weapons, limits on magazines, fingerprinting 
for a handgun license and the denial of guns to anyone who has been committed 
to a mental institution.

His platform on guns is the most expansive of the 3 Democratic candidates. In 
addition to the list of changes that Sanders and Clinton are calling for, he 
has also suggested creating a national firearms registry, setting an age 
threshold of 21 for all gun sales, and mandating fingerprints for all gun 
licenses.

While O'Malley often mentions his concern for people of color in his economic 
and criminal-justice policy proposals, his relationship with those communities 
has been fraught. O'Malley angered Black Lives Matter protesters in July, when 
he responded to their interruption of his speech by saying that "all lives 
matter." He later apologized and embraced the slogan at a Democratic debate.

His record as mayor of Baltimore, where protests erupted after Freddie Gray 
died in police custody last April, has also drawn criticism. O'Malley has been 
accused by many of establishing a zero-tolerance policing strategy, aimed at 
reducing the city's high murder rate but that instead led to the targeting and 
abuse of black communities.

(source: themarshallproject.org)