[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TENN., IND., MO., ARK., NEB., USA

[Rick Halperin]

December 1



TENNESSEE----impending execution

'It's taken so long': Lee Standifer's last night and David Earl Miller's road 
to execution



Lee Standifer felt like she'd just begun to live.

Then she met David Earl Miller.

"I remember talking to her that day," said her mother, Helen Standifer. "She 
must have just met him, but she didn't mention him. She just chit-chatted, the 
way girls do. We were going to a show for her birthday that weekend, and she 
was looking forward to it."

She never heard her daughter's voice again. Standifer died hours later — 2 days 
before her 24th birthday — beaten and stabbed, her body dragged through the 
dirt and dumped in the woods by a man she barely knew.

'It won't bring my daughter back'

Miller was 23 when he killed Standifer in South Knoxville that night of May 20, 
1981. He was 24 the 1st time a Knox County jury sentenced him to die for the 
crime. He turned 61 this summer, the longest-serving inmate on Tennessee's 
death row and one of just a few to be sentenced to death twice.

He'll die in the electric chair Thursday unless a court intervenes — 36 years 
and 5 days after his original execution date.

Helen Standifer saw Miller for the first time across the courtroom days after 
her daughter's death. She faced him again and again in the years that followed 
— at hearings, at trial, at each time a jury weighed whether her daughter's 
life mattered enough that Miller deserved to die. She never got an apology, 
never got an explanation - not that anything would ever be enough.

She won't be there to face him if he dies in the chair Thursday - or any other 
day.

"I'm not going," said the mother, now a widow and living in Chandler, Ariz. "I 
just don't see that it accomplishes anything. It won't bring my daughter back. 
It doesn't give me any comfort or satisfaction. I don't see any point in being 
there.

"I went to all the trials, because I knew someone had to stand up for my 
daughter. Someone had to represent her and speak for her. And if we had to go 
through another trial, I would stand up for my daughter again. But this has 
become about him, and I don't want to acknowledge him or honor him in any way. 
It's taken so long, and I just want it to be finished."

The gurney and electric chair sit inside the execution

No room for regret

Miller doesn't fit into the mother's memories. When she looks back, she sees 
the face of the bubbly young woman who greeted each day with the joy and 
enthusiasm of a child. "I can still see my daughter bouncing out of the car at 
Christmastime," the mother said. "She would even tie jingle bells on her 
shoelaces. She was one of the happiest people you could ever know. It didn't 
matter how old she was. She always had a smile for everybody, and if you met 
her once, you were her friend."

Doctors diagnosed Lee Standifer with mild brain damage as a child. Today the 
diagnosis might be different.

"We never did know the cause," the mother said. "Her vocabulary and her reading 
ability were always above average, but her comprehension was not always on 
target."

Standifer's father, Richard, worked as a chemical engineer, and the family 
moved around the country with him as he transferred through various jobs and 
projects. She attended special education classes in Colorado until the family 
moved to Tennessee in 1975. Her disability didn't keep her from attending 
Farragut High School, where she graduated the following year.

Between classes, she helped her mother with crafts — knitting, painting, wire 
sculptures — traveling to shows and making friends wherever she went.

'I've finally begun to live'

Police later described Standifer as a grown woman with a mental age of around 
12. Her parents knew she wasn't ready to drive or attend college. But they knew 
she deserved a chance to live her own life.

First she moved in with her younger sister, Audrey, while the sister attended 
the University of Tennessee. When her sister graduated, the parents found her a 
room at the YWCA on Clinch Avenue downtown and a job at Cavalier Food Products, 
where she packed boxes on an assembly line.

Every day she rode the bus to work and back. Every day she called her mother. 
Most weekends she came home to visit.

"It was a gradual transition," the mother said. "Most people would have found 
the work mind-numbing, but she loved it. She was always early, never late. She 
was just so glad to be out on her own.

"I'm sure there were people who thought we were doing wrong by putting Lee out 
in the world. She may not have lived long, but at least she lived her life. I 
didn't live it for her. I'm just sorry it didn't last longer."

All the bus drivers knew her by name. She never hesitated to say hello to a 
stranger.

"I feel like I've finally begun to live," she told her mother on the day she 
died.

A new friend

Lee Standifer never told her mother the name of the man she'd met. To this day 
she's not sure how her daughter and the man who killed her crossed paths.

Maybe on the bus. Maybe at the bus station, where Miller worked part-time at a 
lunch counter. Maybe at the library a few blocks away on Church Avenue.

"She spent the weekend before at home with us, and she said she'd met a new 
friend at the library," the mother said. "I think she just met him once. He 
probably said, 'Let's go do something,' she said yes, and that was it."

Standifer told a friend just before she left she "wasn't sure" about the man 
she'd met. She didn't know about his history — about how he'd drifted across 
the country after a childhood of daily physical and sexual abuse, about the 
trail of crimes he'd left including two arrests on suspicion of rape, about how 
he supported himself as a prostitute sponging off a closeted Baptist minister 
in South Knoxville.

Standifer hung up with her mother around 5:30 p.m. on May 20, a Wednesday. She 
left the YWCA with Miller soon after.

Witnesses saw them together in the hours that followed — at the Hideaway 
Lounge, a bar on Gay Street now demolished; at the library, where Miller 
checked out a book that included a description of murder during sex; at the bus 
station cafeteria; in the back of a taxi that carried them to the pastor's home 
on Wise Hills Road.

Arrest and appeals

Standifer didn't show up for work the next day. She didn't call home. Her 
mother feared the worst.

"You never know what can happen," the mother said. "You can't know."

She called police to report her daughter missing. She learned the next night 
her daughter's body had been discovered, bound and battered with a fire poker, 
in the woods beside the pastor's house. Miller was missing.

Police caught up with Miller a week later when he tried to pass a counterfeit 
bill at a bar in Columbus, Ohio. He returned to Knoxville in handcuffs, hiding 
his face from the cameras as officers marched him to jail.

The years of court dates that followed run together into a blur in the mother's 
memory. First came the trial in March 1982, when a jury found Miller guilty of 
first-degree murder and sentenced him to death.

The Tennessee Supreme Court threw out that sentence two years later, with 
justices finding no fault in Miller's conviction but ruling prosecutors 
shouldn't have told the jury about his history of rape arrests. The court 
ordered a new sentencing hearing — a mini-trial before a new jury to decide 
whether he deserved death.

The Tennessee Supreme Court upheld David Earl Miller's 1982 murder conviction 
for killing Lee Standifer but threw out his 1st death sentence. He was 
sentenced again to die in 1987.

The 2nd jury deadlocked on a sentence. A 3rd reached the same decision as the 
1st — death — and sentenced him for the last time in February 1987. 31 years of 
appeals followed. Standifer's mother, father and sister moved across the 
country. Her father died in 2014. The appeals dragged on.

"There have been so many appeals," said the mother, now in her 80s. "I wouldn't 
have been averse to a life sentence. But that wasn't an option (at the time of 
the trial). This was the only way to go. I miss my daughter, and I want my 
memories to be of her."

(source: Knoxville News Sentinel)








INDIANA:

Judge smacks legislature, says retroactive law doesn't prevent release of death 
penalty records



The state Department of Corrections has to release records on how it carries 
out executions, including names of lethal drugs and the companies that make 
them, a judge ruled.

Marion Circuit Court judge Sheryl Lynch upheld her ruling from 2016 that a 
Washington, D.C. lawyer, A. Katherine Toomey, is entitled to the records she 
requested through Indiana's Access to Public Records Act.

Lynch said the legislature's 2017 retroactive law meant to subvert such 
requests does not apply to Toomey. The law was controversial because of how it 
passed. Around 2 a.m. on the final day of the 2017 legislative session, it was 
added to a budget bill, 2 pages out of 175.

"The General Assembly may not change the result of (Toomey's) litigation," 
Lynch wrote. "While other requests may be precluded by the Statute, blocking 
Toomey’s request after this Court had already ordered the Department to produce 
the documents violates ... Indiana’s Constitution."

It's unclear if the state will appeal. A spokeswoman for the Attorney General's 
office said "we will discuss our options moving forward."

The DOC lost an appeal of Lynch's original 2016 summary judgement ruling and 
then the Indiana Supreme Court declined to hear the case.

Behind the scenes, the state worked to pass a law to keep death penalty 
information secret. The DOC and House Speaker Brian Bosma said last year that 
anything less than anonymity would prevent companies from selling lethal drugs 
for executions.

Judge Lynch's order quoted an email from the DOC's deputy commissioner to the 
Governor's legislative chief. Commenting on a draft of the secrecy bill, the 
DOC deputy commissioner wrote that it "should be helpful in resolving the 
Toomey case, and serve the other purposes."

Lynch wrote, "As applied to this case, the General Assembly’s passage of the 
Statute overstepped its authority and violated the Indiana Constitution’s 
Separation of Powers by disturbing a pending case and upsetting this Court’s 
judgment."

David Dickmeyer, a lawyer for the state, had argued it was appropriate for 
Judge Lynch to change her summary judgment ruling because of "an extraordinary 
circumstance."

He said that making the death penalty records public would subject 
manufacturers and vendors of execution drugs to "public shaming, public 
protests, hate mail and lawsuits."

Peter Racher, Toomey's Indianapolis lawyer, said, "The stonewalling should have 
ended years ago."

Toomey's online profile says she "represents groups opposing the death penalty 
in various types of litigation, including public records cases concerning the 
sources and use of pharmaceuticals needed for lethal injection."

A once-common drug used in executions isn't produced anymore in the U.S. and 
isn't legal to import. Drug companies are suing to prevent their products from 
being included in whatever deadly chemical cocktail a state might have devised.

Indiana is not the only state to have passed secrecy laws on execution 
protocol. A report released last week by the Death Penalty Information Center 
said 13 states passed secrecy laws since 2011.

"During the past 7 years, states have begun conducting executions with drugs 
and drug combinations that have never been tried before," the report said. 
"They have done so behind an expanding veil of secrecy laws that shield the 
execution process from public scrutiny. ... This retreat into secrecy has 
occurred at the same time that states have conducted some of the most 
problematic executions in American history."

A Gallup poll from last month said 56 % of adults in the U.S. favor the death 
penalty for convicted murderers.

But 49 % said the death penalty is applied fairly — the lowest percentage since 
2000.

Matthew Wrinkles, who murdered 3 people, is the last person executed in 
Indiana. That happened Dec. 11, 2009.

There are 9 people sentenced to death in Indiana, according to the Department 
of Corrections. No execution dates are scheduled. When the state notifies the 
Indiana Supreme Court that all appeals have been exhausted, the Supreme Court 
sets an execution date.

(source: Indianapolis Star)








MISSOURI:

Former executioners: SCOTUS must stop lethal injection in Missouri case



This month, the Supreme Court heard arguments in a case that will ultimately 
determine whether Missouri can proceed with its plan to execute Russell 
Bucklew. As former corrections officials who have participated in executions 
ourselves, we feel strongly that the court should step in and force Missouri to 
change course.

At its core, this case is about whether Missouri can use a lethal injection to 
execute Bucklew, even though he has a rare medical condition that could lead to 
him choking on his own blood during the execution.

The prospect of a botched procedure raises serious constitutional concerns — 
carrying out this procedure on Bucklew may well violate the Eighth Amendment’s 
ban on “cruel and unusual punishment" by resulting in an excruciating death. 
Bucklew suffers from cavernous hemangioma, an exceptionally rare condition that 
has caused tumors filled with blood to grow in his throat. These tumors bleed 
easily and block his airway when he is lying on his back. The veins in his arms 
are also compromised, making it difficult to place an intravenous needle. As a 
result, Bucklew could suffer severe bleeding or have a vein fail during the 
procedure, possibly while also struggling to breathe.

Compounding these factors, Bucklew’s attorneys argue, Missouri does not appear 
to be taking sufficient steps to make sure the execution team is adequately 
prepared for possible medical complications.

During oral argument, the two sides disagreed over how much information the 
anesthesiologist would receive. There is evidence they would only see a 
one-page summary of Bucklew’s condition.

The last time the state prepared this form, when it sought to execute Bucklew 
in 2014, it omitted crucial information about his breathing and vascular 
problems. Failing to provide the execution team with all relevant information 
would dramatically increase the odds of an unconstitutionally cruel execution.

Bucklew requires special care in his cell, where he receives a biohazard bag, 
gauze and a soft-food diet. If he requires this attention on a daily basis, the 
state can’t reasonably assume that no special planning would be necessary for 
his execution.

Corrections officers are responsible for treating the inmates under their care 
humanely and legally — and it appears that in this case the state is setting up 
its employees to fail in that mission.

Carrying out an execution is the most solemn task a corrections officer could 
ever perform, and we don’t doubt that the team in Missouri will try to be as 
professional as possible. But we also know that mistakes and complications can 
occur, with awful consequences.

In 2014, the botched execution of Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma gained 
international attention after Lockett died of a heart attack. And earlier this 
year in Alabama, the execution of Doyle Lee Hamm was halted after officials 
repeatedly tried and failed to set an IV to administer the drugs because of his 
compromised veins.

The court’s ruling will turn on whether the execution is likely to result in 
illegal suffering for Bucklew. But we believe it is just as important to 
remember that if the procedure goes wrong, there will be other victims as well. 
We have seen firsthand that even in the best of circumstances, participating in 
executions can be immensely traumatic for those tasked with this grave 
responsibility. Our colleagues, like many corrections officials who have been 
involved in executions, have struggled with anxiety, depression and substance 
abuse. A botched procedure only heightens these psychological scars.

Over the summer, we joined with corrections colleagues from across the country 
to file an amicus brief with the Supreme Court to share why our experiences 
compel us to oppose the execution plan in this case. We firmly believe that if 
Missouri proceeds as planned, this execution will go badly, and, as we warned 
the Supreme Court, it will make the state’s “public servants parties to 
barbarism."

There is no doubt about Bucklew’s guilt. He was convicted of murdering Michael 
Sanders. He was also found guilty of kidnapping and raping his former 
girlfriend, Stephanie Ray. The impulse to want to see him suffer a fate worse 
than his victims’ is one we can understand. Even so, an execution at all costs 
says far more about us than it does about the person we seek to kill.

Missouri has other ways to seek finality and justice in this case, and we urge 
the court to act accordingly.

Semon Frank Thompson was the superintendent of the Oregon State Prison from 
1994 to 1998, where he oversaw 2 executions.

Jerry Givens served as the executioner for the Commonwealth of Virginia, 
performing 62 executions between 1982 and 1999.

(source: USA Today)








ARKANSAS:

Judge barred from death penalty cases asks nation's high court to review 
dispute with Arkansas Supreme Court



Attorneys for Pulaski County Circuit Court Judge Wendell Griffen said this 
morning they are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to review the judge’s ongoing 
legal dispute with the justices of the Arkansas Supreme Court.

The petition for a writ of certiorari filed with the country's highest court 
comes after Griffen’s complaints against the Arkansas Supreme Court have 
already been dismissed by the state's judicial watchdog, a federal district 
judge in Little Rock and the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in St. Louis. 
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The protracted legal fight began in April 2017, when the Supreme Court ordered 
Griffen removed from all cases and future cases involving the death penalty.

That decision was a reaction to Griffen's action in front of the Governor's 
Mansion, where he strapped himself to a cot in protest of capital punishment, 
on the same day he issued a ruling that temporarily threatened the state's 
plans to carry out several executions.

Griffen has argued that the justices violated his religious and free speech 
rights by punishing him for the protest and alleged, without evidence, that the 
justices engaged in out-of-court communications with the attorney general's 
office while considering an appeal of Griffen's actions.

A U.S. District Court judge, James Moody, had initially dismissed the court 
itself from Griffen’s federal lawsuit earlier this year, but allowed the suit 
to continue against each of the 7 justices individually.

That decision was reversed by the 8th Circuit, which tossed the case.

"In addition to terminating the case, this ruling obviously prevented Judge 
Griffen from engaging in the discovery process, which we believe would have 
added significant support to his case and which the Justices fiercely opposed," 
said a news release from Griffen’s attorneys.

Chief Justice Dan Kemp could not be reached for comment Friday morning.

A separate complaint that led to charges of wrongdoing by the justices was 
dismissed by the Arkansas Judicial Discipline and Disability Commission earlier 
this month. The commission is still reviewing Griffen’s actions at the 
anti-death penalty protest.

(source: arkansasonline.com)








NEBRASKA:

Woman charged in death, dismemberment pleads not guilty



A woman accused of helping kill and dismember a Lincoln woman has pleaded not 
guilty to 1st-degree murder and unlawful disposal of human remains.

The Lincoln Journal Star reports that the pleas for 24-year-old Bailey Boswell 
were entered Thursday in Saline County Court.

Prosecutors say Boswell and 52-year-old Aubrey Trail strangled Sydney Loofe, 
and Boswell helped Trail cut up Loofe's body and stuff the remains into trash 
bags. The remains were found Dec. 4 in Clay County, weeks after Loofe was 
reported missing.

Both Boswell and Trail face the death penalty if convicted.

(source: Associated Press)








USA:

America Is In The Middle Of A Death Penalty Crisis----Our death penalty 
practices are unconstitutional. Period.



This past July, 8 death row prisoners in Alabama requested to be killed via gas 
chamber, fearful their deaths would be painful and prolonged if lethal 
injection was used instead.

In August, when Tennessee executed a man via lethal injection, he jolted and 
pushed against his restraints as he choked and gasped for air.

In October, South Dakota executed an intellectually disabled man who 
participated in the state’s Special Olympics as a child.

Just this month, Tennessee executed a man with an electric chair first used in 
1916. Days later, 4 other Tennessee death row prisoners requested death by 
firing squad, instead.

Capital punishment has a sordid history in this country ? one that many 
Americans know little about. But if ever there was a time to unearth that past 
and do away with the death penalty entirely, it’s now: Drug manufacturers are 
doing all they can to keep their products out of our execution practices. 
States are resorting to increasingly dangerous and deceptive measures to ensure 
executions continue; some have even returned to methods once thought too 
barbaric to endure. Botched executions are a common occurrence. And who are we 
sentencing to die? Overwhelmingly, poor people, people of color, people with 
intellectual disabilities and mental illnesses ? and, sometimes, the innocent.

The death penalty in America is in crisis.

The U.S. has employed a variety of execution methods in its short history, 
including firing squads, gas chambers, hangings and electrocution. Such methods 
often led to gruesome deaths. It wasn’t uncommon for prisoners to catch on fire 
during electrocutions, such as in the case of John Evans, who was executed in 
April 1983 via Alabama’s electric chair. Witnesses had to be dismissed from 
Jimmy Lee Gray’s September 1983 gas chamber execution in Mississippi; they were 
horrified by his throaty gasps for air. Gray eventually died after repeatedly 
banging his head against a steel pole inside the chamber.

Eventually, officials began looking for a more humane way to execute prisoners. 
Enter Jay Chapman, an Oklahoma medical examiner. When a state legislator 
reached out to him in the late 1970s for advice, Chapman suggested using a 
three-drug cocktail to kill prisoners: a barbiturate to anesthetize the person; 
pancuronium bromide to paralyze the body and halt breathing; and potassium 
chloride to stop the heart. He did this despite having zero pharmacological 
training.

This 3-drug cocktail (with some variations) was used throughout the U.S. for 
about 30 years. But in 2011, the European Union implemented an export ban on 
the relevant drugs. Born out of the EU’s staunch opposition to capital 
punishment, this strategy has been successfully preventing states from 
obtaining the proper drugs for the better part of the past 5 years.

This hasn’t stopped America from executing its death row prisoners; instead, 
authorities have started concocting dangerously experimental drug combinations 
or returning to older execution methods. This means our prisoners have become 
human guinea pigs, since there’s no way to test these drug combinations before 
using them.

Midazolam, for example, is now frequently used during executions to induce a 
pain-free unconsciousness before death, but is startlingly ineffective. In 23 
of 27 autopsies of individuals executed using the drug, signs of froth or foam 
were found in the lungs ? pulmonary edema. In layman’s terms? Prisoners given 
midazolam experience liquid in their airways and blood entering their lungs 
while they’re still breathing. They are, essentially, drowning to death. Why? 
Because midazolam is not really an anesthetic. It’s used in medical settings 
for low-level sedation, not total unconsciousness.

Many U.S. states don’t require officials to reveal how they obtained lethal 
injection drugs, thanks to a host of secrecy laws passed in recent years. These 
laws are meant to shield the people involved in administering executions. Now, 
they shroud the entire process. A Department of Corrections director in 
Arkansas once gave $250 cash to an unknown supplier in exchange for midazolam. 
Other states turn to compounding pharmacies (companies that make drugs to 
order), allowing the buyer to bypass mainstream pharmaceutical suppliers (and 
regulations). On Wednesday, BuzzFeed News broke a story on lapsed safety and 
other violations at the previously secret compounding pharmacy that supplies 
Texas with its lethal injection drugs. The pharmacy’s license has been on 
probation for 2 years after the Texas State Board of Pharmacy discovered it had 
compounded the wrong drug for three children (resulting in one child being 
rushed to the emergency room) and blatantly forged quality control documents.

These practices are dangerous and can lead to botched executions. Eric Robert 
was executed in 2012 with a dose of pentobarbital produced by a compounding 
pharmacy. His eyes actually opened during the lethal injection ? a clear sign 
the drug wasn’t working. An investigation later revealed the batch of 
pentobarbital used to kill him was contaminated. And executions can easily be 
botched in other ways, too, like when needles are improperly placed, which is 
how Clayton Lockett ended up dying a torturous death during his infamous 
43-minute execution in 2014.

For their part, pharmaceutical companies continue to fight back as states 
increasingly look for ways around restricted drug sales and export bans. When 
Oklahoma first used pentobarbital instead of the standard sodium thiopental in 
2010, Danish pharmaceutical company Lundbeck restricted the sale of the drug 
for execution use. British manufacturer Hikma followed in Lundbeck’s footsteps. 
Even Pfizer is now restricting distribution of drugs that could be used to 
execute prisoners.

The Supreme Court has ruled that for the death penalty to be considered 
constitutional, it cannot be cruel and unusual, and it cannot be arbitrarily 
applied. An estimated 17,250 people were murdered in the U.S. in 2016, and 31 
new death sentences were imposed. Were the 31 people who received death 
sentences responsible for the grisliest crimes? Were they the most 
irredeemable? No and no. Race, socioeconomic status, the county in which the 
crime was committed and the quality of the lawyers ultimately played the most 
decisive roles in who received a death sentence. There are no wealthy people on 
death row.

And America regularly gives death sentences to innocent people, too. This 
month, Clemente Aguirre became the 164th person to be exonerated from death row 
since 1973. Troy Clark and Daniel Acker, who were executed within a 24-hour 
period in Texas this past September, never wavered in their proclamations of 
innocence. About one out of every 25 people sentenced to death are innocent of 
the crime for which they’re convicted, and we know of at least 15 people who 
were executed despite strong evidence of their innocence.

We also execute an alarming number of people with intellectual disability and 
mental illness. Research published in October found that roughly 25 percent of 
people executed in the U.S. over an eight-year period had been diagnosed or 
treated for mental illness. And between 1976 and 2002, the U.S. executed 44 
people with intellectual disability (formerly referred to as mental 
retardation). The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Atkins v. Virginia in 2002 that 
executing inmates with “mental retardation” was unconstitutional. Nonetheless, 
America continues to execute people with intellectual disability.

Lastly, we cannot discuss the death penalty in America without tracing its 
roots to lynching and other forms of racial violence and oppression in the 
South. Almost 80 % of death row prisoners since 1976 were sentenced to die for 
killing a white person, despite the fact that roughly 50 % of murder victims 
are black. Only 20 white people have ever been executed for the murder of a 
black person. And despite comprising only 13 % of the national population, 41.7 
% of death row prisoners are black.

For many Americans, the idea of a torturous execution is acceptable ? 
justified, even. But this doesn’t change the fact that the American death 
penalty as we know it violates our Constitution’s ban against cruel and unusual 
punishment and our constitutional guarantee of due process and equal protection 
under the law. Our death penalty practices are unconstitutional. Period.

Death sentences, executions and public support for capital punishment are in 
decline across the U.S. Each death-row exoneration chips away at public faith 
in the system’s ability to get it right, and every botched execution serves as 
a stark reminder that there is no way to ensure death comes without suffering.

It’s unlikely ? though not impossible ? that the Supreme Court will abolish the 
death penalty in this generation. And despite President Donald Trump’s recent 
endorsement of some criminal justice reform measures, he remains a staunch 
death penalty advocate. It’s therefore more likely that the fight to end 
capital punishment will head to the states in the coming years.

There’s cause for optimism there: In just the last 10 years, 6 state 
legislatures have voted to abolish capital punishment, and district attorneys 
across the country are declining to seek the death penalty with more and more 
frequency. Just last month, the Supreme Court of Washington struck down the 
state’s capital punishment statute, writing that “the death penalty is invalid 
because it is imposed in an arbitrary and racially biased manner.” In doing so, 
Washington became the 20th state to do away with the death penalty. 27 U.S. 
states still have capital punishment fully on the books; the 3 remaining states 
allow for the death penalty but currently have a gubernatorial moratorium on 
executions.

Still, some states continue fighting to retain the right to kill prisoners. 
They fight to uphold a fallacy of justice: the notion that suffering and pain 
are somehow redemptive. They fight to uphold a punishment that is ineffective, 
costly and long shunned by the rest of the industrialized Western world. No 
person ? regardless of their worst act ? should be subjected to a death like 
that at the hands of their own government.

It should shock us to hear that prisoners are now fighting for the right to 
choke to death in a gas chamber as nitrogen surrounds them, or to be hit by a 
barrage of bullets, or to be strapped to a chair and electrocuted by 
decades-old equipment in order to avoid a botched lethal injection. The death 
row inmates in Tennessee currently asking for death by firing squad are arguing 
such a death would actually be less painful than what our lethal injection 
protocol has become.

If lethal injections were supposedly our last chance for humane, dignified 
executions, and prisoners are now requesting archaic and barbaric alternatives, 
at what point do we concede? At what point do we accept that the death penalty 
has no place in a democratic country that professes to follow the Constitution 
and care about human rights?

Now. That point is now.

(source: Opinion; Hannah Riley is communications manager at the Southern Center 
for Human Rights in Atlanta. She previously worked in criminal justice reform 
at the Innocence Project in New York----Huffington Post)