July 26
USA:
Family outraged by overturned death penalty conviction
People who knew and loved Terry King of North Clarendon are stunned Friday
after a federal judge threw out the conviction of Donald Fell, the man police
say killed her in a drug-fueled spree. The ruling yesterday ordered a new
trial, but that could mean the family is facing another lengthy legal process
years after they thought they were close to getting justice.
"It's like a nightmare that never goes away, you just get to thinking things
might be normal and pow, up it comes again," said Bob Maxham, King's
brother-in-law.
Bob Maxham says he's been quiet during the 14 years since his sister-in-law,
Terry King, was murdered. But for his wife, Barbara Tuttle, and the rest of
King's loved ones he says he cannot be quiet anymore.
"It just boggled my mind, I couldn't believe they were going to put this put
these people through this again," said Maxham.
The ruling Thursday throws out the 2005 conviction of Donald Fell, who was on
death row for kidnapping King outside the Rutland Price chopper in 2000, then
killing her as she begged for her life.
Judge William Sessions finding that revelations after the trial that a juror
went to the crime scene and told jurors information not presented at trial
undermined the verdict writing:
"Juror 143 violated the fundamental integrity of Fell's trial by deliberately
undertaking an independent investigation," said Sessions.
Fell's legal team, which worked to uncover the juror misconduct, told WCAX in a
statement, "we are extremely gratified by the Court's decision to grant Mr.
Fell a new trial."
When the jury came back with the death penalty verdict in 2005, King's family
thought the 5 years of legal wrangling then had been long.
"I thought of my sister, at that moment and i just became overcome with
emotion, because I said this is for you Terry," said Tuttle in a previous
interview with WCAX.
Tuttle is recovering from surgery and declined to talk about the new ruling on
camera, but her husband spoke for her blaming the judge.
"If it was his wife that was kidnapped and butchered, you can bet he'd feel
different about it," said Maxham.
While Sessions presided over Fell's trial that ended with a death sentence, he
had earlier ruled the death penalty unconstitutional. King's sisters were
outspoken proponents of the death penalty for Fell. And Maxham says it is not
likely they would agree if prosecutors try to avoid another trial by making a
plea deal that does not include death.
"The family, of course they want to see him put to death. I guess its how
strong are they? How much more of this can they take? But they really have to
take it, what are they going to do," said Maxham.
The ruling raises questions about what happens now for King's family and for
Fell. It shines a light on the problem of juror misconduct. Reporter Kristen
Kelly spoke with former federal prosecutor Jerry O'Neill Friday.
O'Neill: "When you read the case there is no doubt that Judge Sessions made the
right decision. There is a piece in his opinion where he references an supreme
court opinion, which says death is different in the federal system and the
thoughtful states like New York. If you're going to put someone to death, you
have a lot of procedural protections. Once someone's dead, you can't set aside
the conviction and when you read through the opinion and you see what this
particular juror did, the underlying conduct and how he lied to the court about
it, it's difficult not to reach the conclusion," said O'Neill.
Kelly: And explain what is so egregious about what the juror did?
O'Neill: Well the juror did as reported in the opinion several things, the
principal one of which is contrary to specific instruction from court. He went
down and did his own investigation, he went down to the scene looked at it,
came back and told other jurors about it, provided an affidavit after trial
then lied about it in court.
The reason why it's so bad is we want jurors to decide the case based upon info
they received in the courtroom, we don't want them doing their own
investigation.
Kelly: So how is this allowed to happen? You've tried a whole bunch of cases,
have you ever seen this happen before, a juror doing their own investigation?
O'Neill: I have not, not that I'm aware of had an instance with a juror doing
his own investigation, but I stress that I'm aware of, you never know what
jurors are going to be doing and Judge Sessions gave them clear instructions
with respect to this. Crystal clear instruction about it. There's nothing that
anybody on the defense team, the U.S, attorney's office or the judicial system
did wrong. It's one juror.
O'Neill says sequestering juries is one way to try to stop juror misconduct,
but it is expensive. Defense attorneys also do not like sequestered juries
because they are more likely to convict.
Kelly: One thing that one member of the family said to us was that because of
Judge Sessions' views on the death penalty, he should not have been handling
this case in the 1st place.
O'Neill: Judges are supposed to make their decisions based on the facts and the
law. He made a decision finding the statute was unconstitutional, the second
circuit reversed, and i don't think anybody could say he has handled this
anything other than absolutely straightforwardly, whatever his personal views
have been since then.
Kelly: Talk about the difficulty now, I mean prosecutors, what do they do to
retry the case? Offer a plea deal? The family has been through a lot.
O'Neill: I think Judge Sessions realizes this and how difficult this is going
to be for the family. He really regrets it himself. He didn't have a choice.
The government can do one of three things. It can appeal his decision, I don't
think they would be successful in getting it overturned, but I could be wrong.
They can work out some kind of plea agreement in connection with it, or they
can retry the case. Those are the three options.
Kelly: And if you try to retry a case what, 14 years after the crime, what are
the difficulties of that?
O'Neil: Well, you certainly have potential difficulties with witnesses having
died, you have potential difficulties with witnesses having failed in their
memories, but you have a transcript from the earlier trial. If someone has died
you can use the transcript of that. If someone has failing memory you can use
that transcript to refresh that recollection, and let's be realistic, in this
instance, the facts aren't much in dispute, the question is what the
disposition should be.
(source: WCAX news)
*******************
Most US people executed not evil: Study
A new study shows that prisoners put to death in the US are hardly ever the
worst of the worst criminals.
The study, published in Hastings Law Journal, examined 100 executions carried
out between 2012 and 2013, many of these people are not cold, calculating,
remorseless killers.
"A lot of folks even familiar with criminal justice and the death penalty
system thought that, by the time you executed somebody, you're really gonna get
these people that the court describes as the worst of the worst," Robert Smith,
the study's lead researcher and an assistant professor of law at the University
of North Carolina, told The Huffington Post.
"It was surprising to us just how many of the people that we found had evidence
in their record suggesting that there are real problems with functional
deficits that you wouldn't expect to see in people being executed," Smith
added.
One of the people studied as part of the research is Daniel Cook whose mom used
alcoholic drinks as well as drugs while she was pregnant with him. Cook's
mother and grandparents molested him and his dad abused him by burning his
genitals with a cigarette.
Even later when he was placed in foster care, a "foster parent chained him nude
to a bed and raped him while other adults watched from the next room through a
1-way mirror," said Harvard Law Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr.
The prosecutor who presented the death penalty case against Cook said he would
never have done had he known about his brutal past. Nevertheless, he was put to
death on August 8, 2012.
The US Supreme Court has found that executing inmates with an intellectual
disability or severe mental illness can violate the Eighth Amendment, according
to which cruel and unusual punishment are barred.
In addition, the court has found that severe childhood trauma can be a
mitigating factor in a defendant's case, showed a press release accompanying
the report.
Smith also noted that the courts had found, regardless of the heinousness of
the crime, the prosecution must also prove the defendant is "morally culpable."
He further argued people ended up executed did not have a chance to receive
adequate representation at the trial level. In other words, juries were often
unaware of defendants' intellectual or mental health problems or their family
history of extreme abuse.
He concluded that the reason why traumatic childhoods are raised is not
necessarily aimed at making juries feel bad for the person on trial, but
because of "decades of research" which shows these types of trauma can provoke
the kinds of "functional deficits" that were visible in most of the cases
studied in the report.
(source: Press TV)
**********************************
Are US Executions Really Humane?----As the nation is horrified by another
botched execution, a capital defense lawyer in Texas, legal scholar in New York
and the former warden of San Quentin work against capital punishment.
There were only 3 people in the room: Jeanne Woodford, the chaplain and the man
strapped to a gurney with tubes coming out of his arms. After hearing the man's
last words, Woodford signaled the corrections officer who was "working the
chemicals," which means in prison argot that he started infusions of lethal
chemicals that flowed into the man on the gurney. As warden of California's San
Quentin, Woodford presided over this high-tech ritual of punishment four times.
After a stint as Executive Director of the California Department of Corrections
and Rehabilitation, she threw in the towel to become Executive Director of
Death Penalty Focus, the abolitionist organization that sponsored the 2012 SAFE
referendum seeking to replace the death penalty with life without parole.
Though the referendum failed to pass, Woodford is still hard at work in the
movement to abolish capital punishment in California.
Meanwhile, across the continent, in the gentility of Fordham University's
school of law, Arthur A. McGivney Professor Deborah W. Denno writes scholarly
articles about "working the chemicals" that are published in the nation's
leading law journals and quoted at death penalty hearings before the United
States Supreme Court.
Until lately, the chemicals Denno wrote about were sodium thiopental, an
ultra-short acting barbiturate that, given intravenously, is supposed to
deliver almost instantaneous sleep so that the condemned person will be
impervious to the rest of the evening's proceedings; pancuronium bromide, next
on the menu, which is related to curare, plant extract poisons from Central and
South America traditionally used on arrows which paralyze the body's skeletal
muscles (including the muscles of breathing); and for the coup de grace, a jolt
of potassium chloride, which stops the heart. This deadly mixture was known as
Carson's Cocktail, so named after the Oklahoma pathologist, A. Jay Carson, MD,
who concocted it as a "humane" alternative to the electric chair.
Since the early 1980s, the Carson Cocktail was the gold standard for
dispatching society's sinners (and the innocent too, if recent exonerations are
factored in). But since thiopental supplies have dried up because of the EU's
resistance to the death penalty states embracing the death penalty have been
forced by the courts to seek other drugs with results like this week's botched
execution in Arizona. Now Professor Denno must address the ghoulish new and
often secretive lethal chemicals in use even as states calls for bringing back
the electric chair or firing squad.
In Texas, attorney Kathryn Kase despaired as the Lone Star State executed its
500th person since the resumption of the death penalty. Kase wears 3 hats. She
is Executive Director of the Texas Defender Service, where she supervises a
staff of 10 lawyers. She is herself a courtroom lawyer specializing in death
penalty cases. And she and her staff mentor Texas lawyers in need of capital
litigation tactics.
Kase's organization was founded as a public-defender body with a focus on the
death penalty, but not specifically an abolitionist organization dedicated to
ending the death penalty. When she puts on her administrative hat, Kase must
play hardball as a politico, convincing fellow politicians of the importance of
the Texas Defender Service and wringing money out of the state government and
foundations.
Woodford, Denno and Kase could not be more different in personality and
background, yet all have thrust themselves into the battle against capital
punishment. There was a time when working in capital punishment was considered
men's work that was too gruesome for women. Not anymore.
Jeanne Woodford, whose manner is crisp and to-the-point, took a BA degree in
criminology and worked her way up to the highest rank of the California
Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. Woodford told us that she chose
criminology because there were few women in the field and because she wanted to
bring a more even-handed standard of justice to criminology as practiced in
California.
Woodford is dismayed that, since the 1950s, penology has been dominated by a
punitive rather than rehabilitative philosophy; people want their pound of
flesh, even though punishment deepens sociopathic behavior, she says. Mere
confinement accomplishes nothing and rehabilitation is essential whenever
possible, says Woodford.
An unabashed abolitionist, Woodford says she is not "soft on crime" but as a
"policy person" she finds no respectable evidence that the death penalty is a
deterrent. By the time the legalities are done, it also costs more to execute a
person than to incarcerate him or her for life she says. There is, she adds, a
small element of the criminal population that it is so dangerous that it
requires lifelong incarceration.
Woodford's demeanor is so crisp that we felt a little trepidation about asking
her how she felt about overseeing the execution of 4 men when she was warden of
San Quentin in light of her views on the death penalty. "That," Woodford
replied, "Was a policy issue."
We asked Woodford what, specifically, changed her mind about capital punishment
and she told us she has always opposed it on moral and practical grounds and
that nothing has changed her opinion. Woodford says she sees hope that
behavioral science is beginning to change peoples' minds about the issue.
One could not imagine a woman more different from Jeanne Woodford than Kathryn
Kase. Funny, streetwise and a gifted lawyer, Kase started out as a journalist
in San Antonio, Texas, got bored covering police court, and craved the action
on the other side of the bar. Kase went to law school and moved to New York,
where she worked for brief periods for private law firms. She then returned to
Texas, where she says she found her calling in the Texas Defender Service, of
which a more thankless labor could not be imagined.
By most accounts, Texas really needs Kase. By 2011, Texas governor Rick Perry
had presided over more executions than any governor in modern history - 234.
The numbers continues to grow.
Speaking to Randi Hensley of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty in an
internal memorandum, a Texas lawyer agreed. "Once guys get on death row in
Texas, there's about a 90% chance they will die," said the lawyer: "There are
no public defenders, no money, no experienced death penalty lawyers."
While the lawyer's observations are somewhat exaggerated, not by very much:
organizations like the Texas Defender Service and the death penalty "clinic" at
the University of Texas are so short staffed that they find themselves
desperately filing appeals moments before the chemicals began to flow. Press
reports of Texas executions have been chilling.
As Kathryn Kase dukes it out in the rough and tumble of Texas courthouses and
the statehouse, Deborah Denno continues to highlight the cruelty of lethal
injections in her academic work. Soft-spoken and poised, Denno says her turning
point was the electrocution of Willie Francis, who walked the long road twice
because the 1st execution was bungled.
When lethal injections supplanted the "hot squat" (the electric chair) as a
more "humane" means of extinguishing human life, Deborah Denno made the cruelty
of lethal injections her academic focus. Denno's work is invaluable in helping
to paint for the public a complete picture of executions, from electrocution to
the death gurney says Steve Hall, executive director of the Texas abolitionist
group StandDown.
In a field once dominated by men, Kase, Denno and Woodford are bringing new
passion to the fight against the death penalty along with a small pool of
capital defenders like Judy Clarke and Maurie Levin. This week's shocking
botched execution may bring more Americans to their side of the issue.
(source: Robert Wilbur is a psychopharmacologist who also writes semi-popular
articles on capital punishment, prison reform, and animal rights. Martha
Rosenberg is a regular contributor to Epoch Times----The Epoch Times)
************************
US Right Activists Seek Ban On Execution by Lethal Injection
Death sentences in some US states by lethal injection has come under heavy
criticism as a barbaric act and the clamour is up for its legal review by the
apex court, reports Global Post. The latest trigger is the protests that
followed after a convict struggled in agony for almost 2 hours to breathe his
last after the botched execution.
Convicted killer Joseph Wood gasped and snorted as he lay on a gurney for 2
hours after officials from the US state of Arizona injected him with an
untested lethal drug cocktail.
News of the botched deaths also tarnished the international reputation of
United States. According to Richard Dieter, who heads the Death Penalty
Information Center lethal injection is unacceptable and is a torture on a
gurney where the person struggles for hours to die. Opponents of capital
punishment also endorse the view that lengthy executions are torture and
forbidden by the US Constitution.
Steven Hall, head of a legal rights pressure group opposing capital punishment
wanted the Supreme Court to get involved in examining the issue. In the US
Capital punishment is practised by the federal government and some states. But
18 states have banished death penalty.
Shortage of Execution Drug
The main reason for the botched executions that add agony to convicts is the
acute shortage of the lethal drug cocktail. The cocktail is a mixture of
sedative mid-azolam and hydromorphone. But European manufacturers have halted
the exports of such tried and tested drugs.
The US firms lack patents to produce lethal drugs and do not want their brands
to court controversies. This leaves the states to rely on compounding
pharmacies lacking federal approval to compose the drug mixtures for injection.
Obama Review
According to WSJ blogger Ashby Jones this is not the 1st time that a botched
execution is stirring the power elite of USA following of a botched medical
execution. The autopsy of convict Clayton Lockett executed in April showed that
there was difficulty in placing the intravenous line into his body. The report
of agony prompted President Obama to order a review of the process of death
penalty in the U.S.
With the latest Joseph Wood episode more eminent people including federal
judges have come forward with pointed criticisms about the way death penalty is
administered and the need for a relook.
(source: IBTimes)
***************
Death penalty debate: Is it possible to kill people in a way that society can
stomach?----It's no longer just about morality and deterrence
We can send a man to the moon but we can't complete an execution in less than 2
hours?
I'm sorry if that sounds heartless. But what can one say after the botched
execution of Joseph Rudolph Wood III in Arizona on Wednesday?
Reporter Michael Kiefer of the Arizona Republic was a witness to the execution.
He reported that the lethal injection began at 1:54 p.m.
"Then at 2:05, Wood's mouth opened. 3 minutes later it opened again, and his
chest moved as if he had burped. Then 2 minutes again, and again, the mouth
open wider and wider. Then it didn't stop.
"He gulped like a fish on land. The movement was like a piston: The mouth
opened, the chest rose, the stomach convulsed. And when the doctor came in to
check on his consciousness and turned on the microphone to announce that Wood
was still sedated, we could hear the sound he was making: a snoring, sucking,
similar to when a swimming-pool filter starts taking in air, a louder noise
than I can imitate, though I have tried.
"It was death by apnea. And it went on for an hour and a half. I made a pencil
stroke on a pad of paper, each time his mouth opened, and ticked off more than
640, which was not all of them, because the doctor came in at least 4 times and
blocked my view."
Wood was declared dead 2 hours after the execution began.
The concept of a humane execution may be a moral contradiction. But no matter
what one's views are on the death penalty, the execution of Joe Wood was
inhumane.
Actually, that isn't true. Wood was executed for the murder of his
ex-girlfriend and her father in 1989. A relative, Richard Brown, was there as a
witness to Wood's execution. After it, he said to reporters, "This man
conducted a horrifying murder and you guys are going, 'let's worry about the
drugs.' Why didn't they give him a bullet? Why didn't we give him Drano?"
Society seems unable to ignore or turn aside that gut-level need for the
ultimate retribution. Presumably that is part of why the death penalty is still
used.
But it is possible that the death penalty debate might heat up. The arguments
are entirely not the traditional ones: Is the death penalty a cruel and unusual
punishment? Is it moral? Is it a deterrent to crime?
The debate now is more about whether the death penalty can be administered in a
way society can stomach. It isn't just about botched executions like Wood's, of
which there have been several. It is also about the length of process, which is
costly and cruel.
A few days before Wood's execution, the United States Court of Appeals for the
Ninth Circuit issued a stay in the execution. The court's chief judge, Alex
Kozinski, one of the most famous and outspoken conservative judges in the
country, dissented. What he wrote is deeply ironic, almost prophetic, given
what ultimately happened to Wood:
"Whatever happens to Wood, the attacks [on the process of lethal injections]
will not stop and for a simple reason: The enterprise is flawed. Using drugs
meant for individuals with medical needs to carry out executions is a misguided
effort to mask the brutality of executions by making them look serene and
peaceful - like something any one of us might experience in our final
moments.... But executions are, in fact, nothing like that. They are brutal,
savage events, and nothing the state tries to do can mask that reality. Nor
should it. If we as a society want to carry out executions, we should be
willing to face the fact that the state is committing a horrendous brutality on
our behalf."
These are powerful words, especially coming from a federal judge. What Kozinski
wrote next has been widely mocked:
"If some states and the federal government wish to continue carrying out the
death penalty, they must turn away from this misguided path and return to more
primitive - and foolproof - methods of execution. The guillotine is probably
best but seems inconsistent with our national ethos. And the electric chair,
hanging and the gas chamber are each subject to occasional mishaps. The firing
squad strikes me as the most promising. 8 or 10 large-caliber rifle bullets
fired at close range can inflict massive damage, causing instant death every
time."
Kozinski is mischievous. But he is right that the attempt to sanitize
executions has made them less efficient and swift.
But a far more serious court ruling came out of a federal court in California
last week. U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, appointed by President George W.
Bush, ruled that California's use of the death penalty is an unconstitutional
cruel and unusual punishment because of its long delays and uncertainty.
This argument has been made before, but never accepted by a federal judge in
such sweeping form.
Carney's opinion noted that more than 900 people have been sentenced to death
in California since 1978, but only 13 have been executed. The review and
appeals process takes an average of 25 years.
No one has been executed in California since 2006 when courts ruled its
administration of the lethal injection amounted to cruel and unusual punishment
and violated the 8th Amendment.
There are 748 inmates on death row in California now. Only 17 of them have
completed the automatic post-conviction review process and are waiting for
execution. The delays are almost entirely the fault of the state and not the
appeals of prisoners as many assume.
"For all practical purposes then, a sentence of death in California is a
sentence of life imprisonment with the remote possibility of death - a sentence
no rational legislature or jury could ever impose," Judge Carney wrote. This
"dysfunctional" system has no deterrent effect, he wrote. Nor does it convey
retribution in any coherent way, what the Supreme Court called "an expression
of society's outrage at some particularly offensive conduct."
The decision will of course be appealed and has a good chance of going to the
Supreme Court.
California may be an extreme case, but not that extreme. The average time
between sentencing and execution is 16 years on average across the country.
Society wants to sanitize executions and make them humane - something Judge
Kozinski says is impossible and absurd.
Society also wants a fair judicial process, but is unwilling to finance and
administer it.
That is immoral, no matter where you stand on the larger question of the death
penalty.
(source: WPTV news)
********************************
Hanging Delayed is Hanging Denied: Abolish the Dysfunctional Death
Penalty----Long delays and legal maladministration are further reason to dump
capital punishment.
The July 16 decision by U.S. District Judge Cormac J. Carney declaring
California's death penalty unconstitutional offered a stark assessment of the
Golden State's dysfunctional capital punishment system. Judge Carney noted only
13 of the more than 900 people sentenced to death since 1978 have actually been
executed - primarily because the average appeals process in a capital case
takes "25 years or more" to complete. For example, Ernest Jones, the death row
inmate whose lawsuit prompted Judge Carney's decision, waited nearly 8 years
for the California Supreme Court to hear his initial appeal. It took 4 years
just for the state to provide him with an attorney to handle the appeal.
Judge Carney acknowledged "courts had thus far generally not accepted the
theory that extraordinary delay between sentencing and execution violates the
Eighth Amendment," which prohibits "cruel and unusual" punishment. But in
accepting that theory now, Judge Carney joined a substantial body of death
penalty jurisprudence from the British Commonwealth. While the United Kingdom,
like all European Union members, forbids the death penalty within its borders,
a group of British judges continue to oversee death penalty cases from the
English-speaking Caribbean, where execution by hanging remains the statutory
penalty for murder.
The 5-Year Rule
In 2008, a jury in the island nation of Trinidad and Tobago convicted Julia
Ramdeen of the 2003 murder of Carlos Phillip. Phillip hired Ramdeen, a call
girl, to organize a threesome with another woman. According to Ramdeen, Phillip
arrived at her apartment for their rendezvous in a drunken and aggressive
state. He grabbed her by the throat. She responded by hitting him in the head
with a brick. A fight ensued. Ramdeen admitted to police she then repeatedly
stabbed Phillip until he was dead.
Prosecutors presented an alternate theory, relying on a witness testifying
under immunity. This witness claimed he, Ramdeen and another man lured Phillip
to the apartment in order to rob him. The three ended up killing Phillip
together and disposing of his body. The jury believed the witness, and Ramdeen
and the other alleged conspirator received death sentences.
Ramdeen's appeal focused on whether the trial judge properly instructed the
jury as to the law. In 2010, the Court of Appeal of Trinidad and Tobago
dismissed the appeal and said Ramdeen's execution could proceed. Ramdeen made
her final appeal in 2012 to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC),
the London-based court which retains jurisdiction over criminal appeals from
Trinidad and Tobago and 8 other former British colonies in the Caribbean.
On March 27 of this year, a 5-judge Board of the JCPC unanimously rejected
Ramdeen's appeal of her conviction. Like the Court of Appeal, the Board found
no legal error in the trial judge's jury instructions, concluding they "were
clear, fair and appropriate." Nevertheless, the Board, by a vote of 3-2,
commuted Ramdeen's death sentence to life imprisonment. Why? Because in the
course of litigating the JCPC appeal, more than 5 years elapsed since the trial
court imposed its death sentence. And under a 1993 JCPC decision, executing a
person after that long a delay amounts to "inhuman" punishment, which is barred
under Eighth Amendment-like provisions of the constitutions of Trinidad and
Tobago and the other Caribbean nations where the Privy Council retains
jurisdiction.
This 5-year rule comes from a Jamaican case. Earl Pratt and Ivan Morgan were
sentenced to death in 1979 for a murder committed 2 years earlier. After a
number of delays - and 3 stays of execution - the JCPC heard Pratt and Morgan's
appeal in 1993. By that point, the men had been in prison for 16 years.
A 7-judge Board of the JCPC commuted the death sentences. Lord Hugh Griffiths,
writing for the Board, said any execution carried out more than 5 years after
sentence was presumably "inhuman or degrading," and therefore unconstitutional:
There is an instinctive revulsion against the prospect of hanging a man after
he has been held under sentence of death for many years. What gives rise to
this instinctive revulsion? The answer can only be our humanity; we regard it
as an inhuman act to keep a man facing the agony of execution over a long
extended period of time.
The Pratt and Morgan decision immediately commuted more than 200 death
sentences imposed by courts in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, and Barbados.
(Pratt was actually released from prison in 2007, after serving more than 30
years.) In the 2 decades since then, the Privy Council's 5-year rule has
effectively ground the death penalty to a halt in the English-speaking
Caribbean. For instance, Trinidad and Tobago held its last execution in 1999,
despite currently having approximately 3 dozen death row inmates. According to
a 2012 Amnesty International report, only the Bahamas and St. Kitts and Nevis
have managed to carry out any death sentences since 2000.
Is Abolition Preferable?
Ultimately, the death penalty has no place in a modern judicial system.
Executions were meant to exact swift, brutal punishment against heinous
criminals. But while hanging may continue to enjoy support among Caribbean
governments, the American public has clearly lost its appetite for such
brutality. Ninth Circuit Chief Judge Alex Kozinski recently observed
California's use of lethal injection "is a misguided effort to mask the
brutality of executions by making them look serene and peaceful." He said if
states insisted on continuing capital punishment, they should stop sugarcoating
it and employ "more primitive - and foolproof - methods of execution." He
suggested, one hopes facetiously, a return to the firing squad.
As for swiftness, there was a time when a delay of a year or 2 would have been
considered egregious in a death penalty case. Lord Griffiths noted in the Pratt
and Morgan decision English law once required execution the day after
conviction. Even as late as 1950, British executions took place within 3 to 6
weeks of sentence. That is no longer practical for any court system, much less
one as backlogged as California's. While some reactionaries may continue to
argue this is the fault of defendants and their lawyers seeking to delay
justice, the truth, as both Judge Carney and the Privy Council know, is the
courts are too overwhelmed to deal with death penalty appeals in an expeditious
manner.
The Privy Council, in what might charitably be deemed an act of judicial
desperation, simply made up the 5-year rule out of thin air. The Pratt and
Morgan decision offered no explanation for stopping the clock at 5 years rather
than 4, 6, 10 or any other number. Furthermore, the Pratt and Morgan Board
severely criticized Jamaica's court system for exhibiting a level of
dysfunction that mirrors California's today.
By contrast, the Ramdeen case involved no unusual delay or judicial
maladministration. The 5-year deadline only expired because the Privy Council
chose to grant a discretionary appeal, which it then turned around and
dismissed as baseless. The fact 2 judges dissented from the commutation of
Ramdeen's death sentence - and dissents of any sort are unusual in Privy
Council cases - suggests the majority may have engaged in anti-death penalty
activism for its own sake.
Judge Carney's approach is much cleaner. He simply declared the death penalty
unconstitutional without attempting to fashion an arbitrary time frame for
completing the appeals process. His arguments may not survive appeal to the
Ninth Circuit or the Supreme Court, but his detailed condemnation of
California's death row dysfunction should not be ignored. Judicial abolition is
the only practical solution to the interminable death row appeals process.
Merely putting a clock on the death penalty, as the Privy Council has done, is
not a satisfactory alternative. Adopting such an approach in the U.S. would
only encourage prosecutors (and pro-death penalty judges) to take shortcuts
with a defendant's constitutional rights to ensure any deadline is met.
(source: S.M. Oliva is a writer and paralegal living in Charlottesville,
Virginia----reason.com)
*********************
Death penalty slowly losing public support----Gallup shows peak came in the
1990s
The perpetual debate over the death penalty is bound to be reheated after the
mangled, 2-hour long execution in Arizona and the federal court ruling that
declared California???s death penalty unconstitutional.
It will come as public opinion about the death penalty is slowly evolving.
Gallup has been polling about the death penalty since the 1930s. Support for it
has been steadily waning since it peaked in the 1990s.
The reasons why some people oppose the death penalty seem to be changing. The
Pew Research Center found purely moral reasons have become less important than
objections to how the death penalty is administered:
A recent ABC News/Washington Post poll found that Americans increasingly prefer
life imprisonment to the death penalty. "Given a choice between the 2 options,
52 % pick life in prison as the preferred punishment, while 42 % favor the
death penalty - the fewest in polls dating back 15 years," the June 5, 2014,
poll report said. "Without an alternative offered, 61 % continue to support the
death penalty, matching 2007 as the fewest in polls back to the early 1980s.
That's down sharply from 80 % in 1994."
This might imply that the polling is missing something. Support for the death
penalty declines when you give an alternative response, in this case life
imprisonment. Similarly, you would expect support to go down if the questions
were paired with other information about the death penalty such as the average
time between sentencing and execution (16 years) or the number of people on
death row cleared by new DNA evidence.
This is the idea behind an experimental approach to public opinion research
called deliberative polling. The idea is that you ask a question, then present
factual information, and then ask the original question again.
It would be interesting to see what this shows with the death penalty. While 60
% support seems strong, it may be not be a solid as it first appears.
(source: WPTV news)
**********************
Death Penalty No Easy Argument
I will readily admit that I have been all over the map when it comes to the
death penalty.
As a young lawyer and law professor, I was opposed to it. Actually, it was easy
to be against it. The evidence that it was being administered arbitrarily and
unfairly was so overwhelming that the Supreme Court had effectively placed a
moratorium on it.
When it came back, in the late '70s, I was there, literally.
The 1st man to be executed after the moratorium was Gary Gilmore, who wanted to
die.
The 2nd was a murderer named John Spenkelink, who didn't. His last appeal, the
night before his death, was to the United States Supreme Court. He needed one
justice to sign a stay before midnight to keep him alive. He needed 4 justices
the next morning to agree that the case was worthy of the court's review and to
keep the stay in force.
All the clerks were warned.
It automatically went to the circuit justice, who was expected to deny it. Then
they could go to 1 of the 2 justices, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall,
who were absolute opponents, but whose votes wouldn't get him past morning.
Or, they could go to one of the votes he would need in the morning, probably
Potter Stewart. We all figured he'd go to Brennan or Marshall, and we could go
home. He came to us - us being the court's junior member.
I drove an old yellow Maverick, and the overhead light was broken, so my
co-clerk, who went on to become a leading death penalty defense lawyer and
scholar, read out loud with the flashlight as we drove over to the justice's
apartment.
When we got there, we read it again with him, issue by issue: Was there any
basis for concluding that a mistake was made?
We didn't come up with much, and then he called the other justice in the middle
and went over it with him, and then we drove back with the unsigned papers and
the windows down in case we threw up.
What if we had missed something?
What if his lawyers had? We hadn't read a transcript; we just read the papers.
Was he the white guy picked to go first and head off a parade of minorities?
Why him?
We got back to the court at 11:45 p.m. and found Marshall, then in his later
years, waiting with his pen out.
The execution took place the next day.
By the time he retired, Justice John Paul Stevens was among the most outspoken
critics of the way the death penalty is administered. We reminisced, decades
later, about the care we had taken to review that application. It doesn't work
that way anymore.
Even so, I came to view that, as a matter of principle, a society has every
right to punish the worst of the worst. It was the murder of a pregnant woman
at an ATM that did it for me - stabbed her in the stomach for some cash. It was
a month after my son was born.
Get the right guy, and you won't find me fighting to save him, I heard myself
say.
And it was true.
The "get the right guy" problem is not insignificant. Most of those on death
row are brutal murderers. But no system is perfect, and ours doesn't aspire to
be.
So what percentage of error is tolerable when death is the penalty?
And just how much are we willing to pay to achieve a tolerable error rate?
The work of The Innocence Project, and other organizations, seems to show
pretty clearly that it isn't enough.
Now there is the newest problem. Killing people isn't so easy. Or rather, as
anyone who has lost a loved one to cancer could probably tell you, dying can be
very hard. The drug companies don't want to be a part of the debate by way of
making these drugs, states are afraid to disclose what they use, and the last
execution took so long that the lawyers filed for a stay.
Did the dying man suffer?
They're not sure.
It's a public embarrassment, or so death penalty opponents are treating it. Is
that an argument that we shouldn't be in the business of killing people? Maybe.
I just can't help but think about how most people suffer in death, and none
more than those who are viciously murdered.
(source: Susan Estrich is a best-selling author whose writings have appeared in
newspapers such as The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington
Post----newsmax.com)
*******************
Botching the death penalty
Another state, another botched execution carried out with secret new drugs.
This time: Arizona, where convicted murderer Joseph Randolph Wood gasped and
snorted for more than 90 minutes after his execution began. What should have
been a 10- to 15- minute ordeal took 117 minutes for Wood.
According to witnesses, Wood "gulped like a fish on land" and made movements
"like a piston: the mouth opened, the chest rose, the stomach convulsed." He
gasped for air roughly 660 times over the course of the 117-minute execution -
which had been carried out using a controversial 2-drug cocktail the state had
never used before.
One of the drugs, midazolam, has been used in flawed executions carried out in
other states this year, including the horrific botched execution of Clayton
Lockett in Oklahoma, who died of a heart attack more than 40 minutes after the
procedure started. It was also used in Ohio on Dennis McGuire, who gasped and
snorted on the gurney before being pronounced dead 25 minutes after the
execution began.
Yes, it's true that Wood's victims suffered. And yes, the families of the
victims have suffered as well, probably much more than Wood did last night. But
there are limits to the type of punishment the state can impose on prisoners in
America - the punishment they receive for their crimes isn't supposed to match
the level of pain and suffering they impose on their victims or victims'
families. Vengeance isn't the job of the state.
Wood certainly won't be the last inmate to have his execution botched. As long
as states continue to experiment on inmates with secret lethal injection drugs
from presumably dubious sources without providing an ounce of transparency into
the process, these grisly results are going to continue to repeat themselves
again and again.
(source: Laurne Galik, Reason)
***********************
The Beginning of the End of America's Death-Penalty Experiment
Beginnings and endings are not always apparent when they occur. The modern
death-penalty era began on July 2, 1976, when the Supreme Court decided the
case of Gregg v. Georgia. But we did not actually know it had begun until Jan.
17, 1977, which was the date the State of Utah executed Gary Gilmore by firing
squad.
The thing about the firing squad, though, and most all other methods of
execution the states adopted - including hanging, the electric chair and the
gas chamber - is that they are not the least bit subtle. When you shoot
somebody, or hang him, you know you are killing him. The death penalty,
however, is the sausage factory of America's legal system: Nobody wants to know
what is actually going on.
So the states eventually embraced lethal injection as the preferred method of
killing condemned murderers. Now, we could all pretend that the process was
nothing more than a sterile implementation of proportional punishment. Sure, we
were still killing somebody, but the actual act of killing the condemned looked
like something you might see on the medical channel. People sometimes ask me
what it is like to witness an execution, and I tell them the most powerful
thing about it is walking outside the prison after it is over, into the bright
light of day, and seeing that the state has just killed someone, and the
citizens don't have a clue.
We do know, however, when the end of the modern death-penalty era began: April
29, 2014. That was the day we could no longer remain willfully naive. It was
the date Oklahoma executed Clayton Lockett.
Lockett had murdered a young woman named Stephanie Neiman. He shot her and
buried her alive, an unusually grisly crime. He was not exactly the sort of
murderer abolitionists would choose as a poster boy. But he became one anyway.
As the execution was proceeding, he woke up and began straining against the
leather straps that held him to the gurney. So gruesome was the scene that
prison officials pulled the curtain, preventing the witnesses from seeing him
writhe and gasp for air any further. 43 minutes later, he died.
43 minutes. Nearly 3/4 of an hour. Compared with the 10 or 12 minutes it had
typically taken to execute an inmate with drugs, it seemed like an eternity.
And to Clayton Lockett, it probably was. But after a day or 2 in the news,
Lockett was forgotten, America having once again convinced itself that
executions are ordinarily routine, that what happened to this man, this
murderer, was aberrational, that it certainly could not happen again.
Until it did, in spades. The 43 minutes Lockett struggled against death were
nothing compared to the nearly 2 hours - 117 minutes, to be precise - that it
took the state of Arizona to kill Joseph Wood on Wednesday. Wood's execution
went on for so long that his lawyers actually had enough time to file 3 appeals
- each to the federal district court, the Arizona Supreme Court, and the U.S.
Supreme Court - while Wood either snored or gasped for air (the appropriate
verb depending on whether one believes the journalists who witnessed the event
or a prison spokesman who did not).
Let's pause for a moment to consider the mid-execution appeals. Several days
before the fiasco unfolded, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals had ruled that
Arizona could not proceed with the execution without providing information to
Wood's lawyers concerning the source and identity of the drugs the state
intended to use. The Supreme Court, however, with no recorded dissenting
opinions, reversed that stay. Then, after the execution had already lasted for
an hour as Wood struggled to breathe, Wood's lawyers contacted Supreme Court
Justice Anthony Kennedy and again requested he intervene and halt the
procedure.
(source: David Dow, who represents death-row inmates, is the Cullen professor
at the University of Houston Law Center and the Rorschach visiting professor of
history at Rice University----politico.com)
***********************
Readers React----How 'humane' can the death penalty be?
To the editor: Philosophers and medical professionals can debate whether it is
more humane for the state to kill the condemned via firing squad, as U.S. 9th
Circuit Court Chief Judge Alex Kozinski suggested, rather than by using lethal
injection. ("Federal appeals court refuses rehearing on Arizona execution
case," July 21).
Either way, as long as killing murderers remains public policy, the state
should not attempt to conceal the brutality of an execution from the public.
Killing behind a curtain only serves to stoke ambiguity, such as in the
recently botched Arizona execution in which 2 observers saw the same thing
differently.
To ensure that the public is fully informed of how capital punishment is meted
out, executions should be recorded and made available for public viewing.
Whether or not we like what we see, at least we will know.
Mark Shoup, Apple Valley
..
Federal appeals court refuses rehearing on Arizona execution case
To the editor: Just who are those complaining about murderer Joseph Rudolph
Wood III's nearly two-hour execution representing? That criminal was, according
to some witnesses, feeling no pain, even though he was snoring loudly. My late
husband used to snore.
Why should we worry about a criminal whose execution takes longer than
expected? There was apparently no suffering, and he was sedated while waiting.
To him, it was a restful sleep.
I can't believe some people are getting all worked up about the length of time
a murderer rests, snoring, before he finally goes permanently to sleep.
Instead, let's use our energies for something that really helps us.
Catherine Titus, Glendale
..
To the editor: Execution by beheading: uncivilized. Execution by stoning:
barbaric.
Execution by lethal injection....?
Marshall Barth, Encino
(source: Letters to the Editor, Los Angeles Times)
***************************************************
Chemical mix and human error lead to controversial executions
Arizona spent 2 hours killing death row inmate Joseph Wood this week, an
unusually long time for an execution. Wood's death has reopened the debate
about capital punishment and lethal injection. Lethal injection is used in all
32 states that have the death penalty.
Some witnesses said Wood was gasping for breath and seemed to be in pain.
Others said he was simply snoring. The state of Arizona said Wood didn't
suffer. Either way, there are renewed concerns that executions, which are
supposed to be quick and painless, are neither.
Typically executions are performed using 3 drugs in stages. The 1st drug is an
anesthetic. The 2nd drug is called a paralytic and the 3rd drug is supposed to
stop the heart.
For years, executioners used a drug called sodium thiopental as the 1st drug,
the anesthetic, until the only U.S. producer of the drug stopped making it.
Then the United States turned to European manufacturers, but they refused to
sell the drug for use in executions.
Since sodium thiopental was taken off the market for executions, states have
turned to a drug called midazolam for the anesthetic. But experts believe there
have been problems with the drug in at least three executions. The problems
described by witnesses included gasping, snorting or choking sounds and, in one
execution, the inmate was described as speaking.
Wood was injected with midazolam on Wednesday, as well as hydromorphone, a
narcotic painkiller that, with an overdose, halts breathing and stops the heart
from beating. It is one of the new combinations that states have tried, with
some controversial results.
What would qualify as a botched execution? Michael Radelet, a professor of
sociology and law, said an execution is botched when it looks like the inmate
endured "prolonged suffering" for 20 minutes or more.
Whether they're "botched" or not, plenty of executions don't go by the book.
Most of the executions listed here were compiled by Human Rights Watch.
Dennis McGuire, executed January 16, 2014, in Ohio. Columbus Dispatch reporter
Alan Johnson said the execution process took 24 minutes, and that McGuire
appeared to be gasping for air for 10 to 13 minutes. He had been injected with
midazolam and hydromorphone, a 2-drug combination that hadn't been used before
in the United States. McGuire, 53, was convicted in 1994 in the rape and murder
of a 22-year-old pregnant woman.
Clayton Lockett, executed April 29, 2014, in Oklahoma. Lockett was injected
with midazolam, but instead of becoming unconscious, he twitched, convulsed and
spoke. The execution was halted, but Lockett died after 43 minutes. A team that
prepared Lockett for execution failed to set a properly functioning IV in his
leg, according to preliminary findings of an independent autopsy. Lockett was
convicted in the 1999 death of an Oklahoma woman who was buried alive after she
was raped and shot.
Jose High, executed November 7, 2001, in Georgia. This execution illustrates a
common problem. The execution team had trouble finding a usable vein and spent
39 minutes looking before finally sticking a needle into High's hand. A 2nd
needle was inserted between his neck and shoulder by a physician. 69 minutes
after the execution began, he was pronounced dead. High was convicted in a 1976
store robbery and the kidnapping and murder of an 11-year-old boy.
Claude Jones, executed December 7, 2000, in Texas. The execution team spent 30
minutes looking for a suitable vein, a difficult task because of Jones' history
of drug abuse. He was convicted in the 1990 murder of a liquor store owner.
Joseph Cannon, executed April 23, 1998, in Texas. The needle popped out and
Cannon said to witnesses, "It's come undone." The needle was reinserted and 15
minutes later a weeping Cannon made his second final statement. He was
convicted of murder.
John Wayne Gacy, executed May 10, 1994, in Illinois. Lethal chemicals
solidified and clogged in the IV tube leading to Gacy's arm. A new tube was
installed and the execution proceeded. Gacy, one of America's most notorious
killers, was convicted in 1980 of raping and killing 33 boys and young men he
lured into his home.
Charles Walker, executed September 12, 1990, in Illinois. The execution was
prolonged because a kink in the plastic tubing stopped the flow of chemicals
into Walker's body and an intravenous needle pointed at Walker's fingers,
instead of his heart, said a Missouri State Prison engineer hired to assist in
the execution. Walker was convicted of 2 counts of murder.
Raymond Landry, executed December 13, 1988, in Texas. The catheter dislodged
and flew through the air 1 minutes after injection of drugs into Landry's body.
The execution team spent 14 minutes inserting it again and Landry was
pronounced dead 40 minutes after being strapped to the gurney. He had been
convicted of murder.
(source: CNN)
*****************
Execution nothing to lose sleep over
So bleeding heart liberals are in a tizzy over the fact that it took almost two
hours for Joseph Rudolph Wood to die after his lethal injection in Arizona on
Wednesday. His attorneys claim their client was "gasping and snorting" for an
hour, and death penalty opponents will certainly use this incident to complain
of cruel and unusual punishment.
You know what I think is cruel and unusual? What Wood did to land on death row
in the first place, that's what.
According to the Arizona Department of Corrections website, Wood "had been
involved in a turbulent relationship for 5 years," including "numerous breakups
and several domestic violence incidents" with his ex-girlfriend, 29-year-old
Debbie Dietz.
29 years old. Her whole life still ahead of her. Now here's the rest of the
story...
"Debbie was working at a local body shop owned by her family. On August 7,
1989, Wood walked into the shop and shot Gene Dietz, age 55, in the chest with
a .38 caliber revolver, killing him.
"Gene Dietz's 70-year-old brother was present and tried to stop Wood, but Wood
pushed him away and proceeded into another section of the body shop.
"Wood went up to Debbie, placed her in some type of hold, and shot her once in
the abdomen and once in the chest, killing her. Wood then fled the building.
"2 police officers approached Wood and ordered him to drop his weapon. After
Wood placed the weapon on the ground, he reached down and picked it up, and
pointed it at the officers. The officers fired, striking Wood several times.
Wood was transported to a local hospital where he underwent extensive surgery."
So this guy beats up his girlfriend multiple times. She breaks up with him. He
shows up at her place of business without warning. Kills her father for no
reason. Kills his ex for breaking up with him. Then tries to kill 2 police
officers.
And I'm supposed to feel bad this murderous piece of human garbage didn't die a
quick and totally painless death? Wood got to live almost 25 years longer than
the 2 people whose lives he snuffed out. How are their murders not cruel and
unusual punishment for both the victims and their families?
As for death penalty opponents who claim the death penalty is not a deterrent,
let me assure you thanks to the death penalty Joseph Rudolph Wood absolutely,
positively, without a doubt, will never, ever murder an innocent person again.
He has been permanently deterred.
As for the afterlife, I can only hope when Wood reaches the Gates of Hades,
Saddam Hussein is the greeter, takes a fancy to him, and makes him his boy-toy
for eternity. Rest in pain, Mr. Wood. Rest in pain.
(source: Chuk Muth is president of Citizen Outreach, a conservative grassroots
advocacy organization. He can be reached at www.MuthsTruths.com----Nevada
Appeal)
*******************************
Troubled U.S. executions raise questions about doctors in death chamber
Troubled lethal injections in Oklahoma and Arizona have raised questions
whether medical personnel are skilled enough to humanely put an inmate to
death, and if things go wrong, expert enough to revive one if an order is
given.
Almost all of the 32 states that use the death penalty either require or permit
a physician to attend executions, which often are carried out by lesser-trained
medical personnel, but doctors who participate risk losing their license to
practice medicine if they are discovered to have helped.
Among the reasons for the recent problems include that medical personnel in the
death chamber may not be familiar with mixing or administering new lethal
cocktails being used after traditional supplies of execution drugs dried up,
nor treating any side effects.
"If the only thing you know how to do is insert into a vein, then what happens
if that person stays conscious? You are not the expert who is needed at that
time," said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information
Center.
Corrections officials say their protocols are designed to conduct executions as
humanely as possible with personnel being thoroughly trained for the roles they
perform.
The U.S. lethal injection process underwent a fundamental change in 2011, when
drug company Hospira stopped making short-acting barbiturate and general
anesthetic sodium thiopental, due to concerns about its widespread use in
executions. It was the lone U.S. manufacturer of the drug.
Since then, states have developed new drug combinations and turned to new
suppliers, usually in secret. A number of death row inmates have sued, arguing
that untested drugs of questionable quality could cause undo harm and suffering
in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
There was a doctor present at the execution in Oklahoma in April, where an IV
popped out when rapist and murderer Clayton Lockett was being executed. Prison
officials halted the execution, but Lockett died of a heart attack about 40
minutes after the procedure started.
Similarly in Arizona, a doctor was present on Wednesday when it took at least 2
doses of a lethal drug cocktail to execute double murderer Joseph Wood. The
Arizona Department of Corrections said the IVs were properly placed, and that
Wood was fully sedated throughout the procedure.
PROLONGED DEATH
Arizona has promised an internal review but disputes that the execution was
botched even as lawyers for the inmate said he gasped and struggled for breath
for more than 90 minutes before dying.
The 2 hours it took between when the injection started and when the inmate was
declared dead was far longer than the three to 15 minutes it has typically
taken inmates to die in other executions in recent years.
The typical protocol for states requires that a medically trained person - such
as a paramedic, military corpsman or certified medical assistant - administer
the IV. Names are kept secret, including of any doctor who may assist.
Under guidelines set by the American Medical Association, a physician can
confirm the death of an executed inmate. But a physician cannot declare death,
administer drugs, monitor vital signs, select injection sites, start an IV,
supervise drug injections or consult with a person carrying out the injection.
"A physician, as a member of a profession dedicated to preserving life when
there is hope of doing so, should not be a participant in a legally authorized
execution," the AMA said.
A separate paper from its journal said those who violate the code of ethics on
executions risk having their licenses revoked by state medical boards.
The few physicians who take the risk usually do it out of circumstance and not
necessarily because they have expertise in the drug protocol, according to a
2006 paper from the New England Journal of Medicine.
It said one doctor, board certified in internal medicine and critical care,
told the Journal he was asked to help by a local warden and did so because the
sentence was society's order and because the punishment did not seem wrong.
Another doctor, a prison physician, said he participated to make sure the
execution was done correctly.
"I think that if I had to face someone I loved being put to death, I would want
that done by lethal injection, and I would want to know that it is done
competently," the doctor said.
(source: Reporting by Jon Herskovitz; Additional reporting by Heide Brandes in
Oklahoma City and Kevin Murphy in Kansas City; Editing by Cynthia Johnston and
Eric Beech----Reuters)
***************************
Experts decry 'failed experiment' with new death penalty drug combinations
Leading experts on the use of medical drugs in capital punishment have accused
death penalty states of conducting a "failed experiment" with new drug
combinations following a recent run of drawn-out executions in which prisoners
have shown signs of distress on the gurney.
Some of the country's most prominent authorities on the science of lethal
injections have begun publicly to question the use of the sedative midazolam.
In particular, doubts are growing about its use in combination with the
painkiller hydromorphone.
A concoction of the two drugs was used in this week's execution in Arizona of a
convicted double-murderer, Joseph Wood, which took nearly 2 hours to complete.
It was also used in the earlier judicial killing in Ohio of Dennis McGuire,
convicted of rape and murder, who gasped for air over the course of 26 minutes.
"There have been two executions using midazolam and hydromorphone, and both
have led to problems. That indicates that it's possible that the combination
doesn't work. These are failed experiments with this drug combination," said
David Waisel, associate professor of anaesthesia at Harvard medical school who
has acted as an expert defence witness in many capital cases. "Given the 2
recent events it seems irresponsible to continue trying this combination."
Mark Heath, a Columbia University anaesthesiologist in New York, and also a
lethal injection expert, pointed out that of the 12 executions in which
midazolam has been deployed, "4 did not really go as you'd expect or want". He
said: "The common theme is that in all of them the prisoner seems to go to
sleep but keeps moving or breathing for long after you'd expect that to
happen." He added that the use of midazolam was "at this point clearly a failed
experiment".
The experts' warnings add to pressure on the death penalty states that are
wrestling with the fallout of recent botched or prolonged executions, most
recently that of Wood on Wednesday. Eyewitnesses reported that the prisoner
gasped for more than an hour, like "a fish on shore gulping for air". John
McCain, the Arizona senator, said the procedure had been "bollocks-upped" and
said it was tantamount to torture - a charge all the more potent because McCain
was a victim of torture in Vietnam.
The department of justice is investigating the way executions are carried out.
President Obama ordered the review in the wake of the lethal injection of
Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma in April, which also involved midazolam, in which
he writhed and groaned on the gurney for 43 minutes.
It took so long for Wood to die on Wednesday that his lawyers even tried, 1
hour into the procedure, to persuade a judge to order it be stopped and Wood
resuscitated. The transcript of the phone conversation between Wood's lawyer, a
federal judge and Arizona state officials revealed both the primitive medical
set-up inside the death chamber and the ignorance of officials about basic
medical matters.
Jeffrey Zick, a lawyer with the Arizona attorney general's office, told Judge
Neil Wake that "Mr Wood is effectively brain dead." Asked by the judge whether
the prisoner had probes attached to his head to prove that he was brain dead,
Zick said no, but insisted that a medically trained individual had observed
Wood to be in that condition.
But Waisel, the Harvard professor, told the Guardian that someone who is brain
dead will stop breathing unless kept alive on a ventilator. "There is no way
anyone could ever look at someone and make that kind of diagnosis. He was still
breathing, so he was not brain dead. This is an example where they threw out a
term that has a precise medical definition, but they didn't know what it
means."
Other independent experts agreed. "If you are taking breaths, you are not brain
dead. Period," said Dr Chitra Venkat, clinical associate professor of neurology
and neurological sciences at Stanford University. "That is not compatible with
brain death, at all. In fact, it is not compatible with any form of death."
Vikrat said that lethal injection is not compatible with declaring someone
brain dead because the drug cocktail used in the process is not meant to cause
brain death. The drugs used in Arizona are intended to stop someone from
breathing, while drugs used in other states are directed at ending cardiac
functions.
"To declare somebody brain dead really, you have to go through all these steps
and all these checklists to say: 'yes this person has some irreversible,
catastrophic structural damage to the brain,' which this person didn't have,"
she said. "So you have to have that. You should not be under any influence of
heavy sedative drugs, as this person was."
Brain stem activity and brain death are mutually exclusive, said Dr Robert D
Stevens, associate professor at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
"Gasping is really just a variance of breathing, and breathing is mediated
specifically via the brain stem," Stevens said. "Any type of breathing,
gasping, whatever it is, immediately indicates that the patient is not brain
dead."
Underlining much of the controversy that has engulfed the death penalty in
recent months is the shroud of secrecy that many states have thrown around the
drugs they use in lethal injections. States, including Arizona, are refusing to
divulge who manufactured the drugs in the hope of keeping supply lines open
amid a worldwide blockade of the chemicals being sold to corrections
departments.
In the case of Arizona, it indicated that its supplies of midazolam and
hydromorphone were approved by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) but it
produced no evidence to that effect. The state also refused to disclose the
medical or other qualifications of its execution team.
Lawyers acting on behalf of condemned prisoners have protested that the secrecy
exposes the men to potential cruel and unusual punishment - a violation of the
eighth amendment of the US constitution. The courts, including the US supreme
court, have dismissed the argument so far, but now medical experts are also
warning about potentially dire consequences.
"We don't know where the drugs came from, their quality, or whether they were
produced in an FDA-approved manufacturing site. That means we don't know the
quality or concentration of the drugs, and that could cause the problems we saw
in Arizona," Waisel said.
Waisel expresses no view on whether or not America should practise the death
penalty. But he told the Guardian: "If we are going to have the death penalty -
one of the most solemn things the state can do - then it has to be done
perfectly. If states cannot do it perfectly, then they should not do it."
(source: The Guardian)
_______________________________________________
DeathPenalty mailing list
DeathPenalty@lists.washlaw.edu
http://lists.washlaw.edu/mailman/listinfo/deathpenalty
Search the Archives: http://www.mail-archive.com/deathpenalty@lists.washlaw.edu/
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A free service of WashLaw
http://washlaw.edu
(785)670.1088
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
