May 11 USA: Medical examiner who came up with deadly cocktail defends execution by lethal injection 30 years ago, Oklahoma Medical Examiner Dr. A. Jay Chapman marched into the Oklahoma Statehouse and dictated the formula for a cocktail of 3 drugs to a lawmaker looking for a more humane way to execute the condemned. As Chapman spoke, Rep. Bill Wiseman scribbled on a legal yellow pad. That afternoon, Wiseman introduced the bill that made Oklahoma the first state to adopt lethal injection. Chapman's method has since been taken up by 37 states in all, the federal government and the U.S. military and has been used to execute 900 U.S. prisoners. But the formula and the way it is administered are now under broad legal assault around the country as a violation of the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment, with activists arguing that Chapman's protocol was hastily conceived and that some prisoners suffer excruciating pain without being able to cry out. Chapman still sees it as a humane way to kill the worst criminals. "Everything is political correctness and everyone wants to be a victim today," said the cantankerous 68-year-old Chapman, who lives alone in Santa Rosa when he is not teaching medicine in Nepal or trekking in the Himalayas. "All of the sudden, the person on death row is a victim. I reject that thinking, by and large, because these people made choices to do what they did." Next week, California's attorney general is due to submit the state's revised execution plan to a federal judge who ruled in December that officials improperly carried out lethal injections and may have caused inmates to suffer needlessly. Other states are grappling with similar issues: - On Wednesday, Tennessee lifted its brief moratorium on capital punishment and lethally injected a condemned man after prison officials revised execution guidelines that were a jumble of conflicting instructions. - 9 other states, including California, have suspended executions while they evaluate their lethal injection procedures, many of which have not been updated in 2 decades. - And a Florida execution in December required a 2nd dose of drugs after the 1st was mistakenly injected into the prisoner's flesh instead of his veins. A recent study in the online journal PLoS Medicine said some inmates suffer extreme pain during lethal injections because of insufficient and haphazard doses of the chemicals, including the painkiller that is the first drug in the three-part combination. Chapman blames incompetent executioners. "This protocol will work if it's administered as it should be," he said. "If it is competently administered, there will be no question about this business of pain and suffering." Decades after he developed the protocol, defense lawyers, doctors and death penalty foes publicly question the amount of scientific research that went into the creation of lethal injection. Chapman said he consulted a toxicologist and two anesthesiologists. But he said it didn't actually require much research because the three chemicals -- a painkiller, a muscle-paralyzing agent and a heart-stopper -- are well-known to physicians. "It's simply an adaptation of a medical procedure," Chapman said this week. "It is anesthetizing someone for a surgical procedure, but simply carried to an extreme." Chapman began thinking about a more humane way to mete out the ultimate punishment in 1976, after watching the debate in Utah over whether to execute killer Gary Gilmore by firing squad or hanging. That notion brought him to Wiseman's office in the Oklahoma Statehouse in 1977. The former lawmaker remembers the short meeting vividly, down to the corduroy jacket Chapman wore that day. "It was very simple and straightforward," Wiseman said. Wiseman, a death penalty foe, nonetheless voted to reinstate capital punishment "because I didn't want to lose the next election." But he later introduced the bill establishing lethal injection as the method to soothe his guilty conscience. Previously, Oklahoma used the electric chair. Wiseman said he now regrets introducing the world to lethal injection, because it makes capital punishment less gory and thus more acceptable. Chapman, for his part, said he was surprised by how widespread his concoction became, and how quickly. But he said he has no regrets. He moved to Santa Rosa in 1982 to work as a forensic pathologist for the Sonoma County coroner and said that until recently, he had stopped thinking about his role in dramatically changing the way executions are carried out in the United States. "He is a man whose fame has come late and bizarrely," said Jamie Fellner, director of the anti-death penalty U.S. arm of Human Rights Watch. "I think Chapman proceeded in good faith. But the notion that you can have a humane execution is an oxymoron." The American Medical Association and other doctors groups say medical ethics bar physicians from taking part in executions. Chapman is a rarity among physicians in playing such a central role in capital punishment. If states are looking for a way to quickly and painlessly put someone to death, he has a suggestion. "There is absolutely nothing wrong with the guillotine," he said impatiently. "It can be operated by an idiot and it is a very effective instrument." (source: Court TV) WEST VIRGINIA----possible federal death sentence(s) Mingo County pair convicted of murder, could get death penalty 2 people involved in a drug ring in Mingo County could face the death penalty after they were convicted Friday of murdering a drug informant. Federal prosecutors said Carla Collins, 33, was killed because George M. "Porgy" Lecco, 57, of Red Jacket, suspected she was telling the government about a cocaine ring based out of his Pizza Plus restaurant. Valerie Suzette Friend, 44, of North Matewan, committed the murder at Lecco's behest. Lecco and Friend were convicted on charges of using a firearm to commit murder during a federal investigation and killing someone assisting the government in a federal investigation. Those convictions make the pair eligible for the death penalty. Although West Virginia is 1 of 12 states that does not have capital punishment, federal prosecutors can seek the death penalty in cases approved by the U.S. attorney general. Lecco and Friend also were convicted on charges of selling drugs and destroying evidence. Lecco was convicted of additional drug-dealing charges and of being a felon in possession of several firearms. Jurors will return Tuesday to begin the sentencing phase of the trial. (source: Charleston Gazette) ARIZONA: Federal appeals court overturns Arizona death sentence In Phonix, a federal appeals court on Friday overturned the death sentence of a man convicted of raping and killing a hitchhiker he picked up outside Tucson in 1980, saying the man's defense attorney failed to present evidence that might have convinced a judge to choose a lesser sentence. Joe Leonard Lambright's lawyer spent only 5 hours preparing for the penalty phase of his 1982 trial, according to the opinion handed down by a panel of the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Lambright, 59, was convicted of first-degree murder, kidnapping and sexual assault along with his co-defendant, Robert D. Smith, 58, and both were sentenced to death. Despite knowing about his client's long history of mental health problems, 2 prior suicide attempts and a related stay in a psychiatric hospital, attorney Carmine Brogna did not present that evidence in an effort to mitigate the crime, the ruling said. He also did not raise Lambright's possible post-traumatic stress syndrome related to his service in Vietnam, his drug abuse problem or the abuse he suffered as a child at the hands of his mother. Instead, he only called a Pima County jail guard who testified that he had no problems with Lambright during the 6 months he supervised him and that he had "always been respectful, courteous, and cooperative." Brogna did not ask for leniency, but only asked the judge to impose a life prison term. The trial judge in the case found only 1 aggravating circumstance, that the crime was especial cruel or heinous, and said the lack of mitigating factors essentially tied his hands and required the death sentence. Brogna's performance was both "deficient and prejudicial" and the appeals court ordered a new sentencing phase of the trial to be held. Brogna, who recently retired after more than 35 years as an attorney, said in an interview Friday that he disputed the appeals court's characterization that the matters were not raised at trial. Much of the information was contained in a psychiatrist's report and brought up in other parts of the trial, he said. "There was an extensive psychiatric workup done that was presented to the court. There was no basis for a PTSD defense," Brogna said, noting that he traveled to Texas to interview the defendant's family members before the trial. "I do know that during my interviews with witnesses not an awful lot was gathered that would be helpful," Brogna said. "It's just irksome that 28 years later this thing is still knocking around and comes back." Lambright and Smith were traveling across the country with Lambright's girlfriend, Kathy Foreman, when they decided to try to find a woman for Smith to have sex with. They picked up Sandra Owen in Tucson, and Smith raped her in the back seat of their car as they drove into the mountains. Once at the remote site, Smith raped her again and Lambright stabbed her while Smith and Foreman held the woman. Lambright then smashed Owen's head with a rock. Foreman testified against the men at trial. Both Smith and Lambright remain on Arizona's death row. A spokeswoman for the Arizona Attorney General's Office said they had not reviewed the opinion and would refrain from commenting. A decision on whether to seek the death penalty again will be made after that review is complete. (source: Associated Press) OKLAHOMA: 'For 8 minutes we sat there, waiting for him to die'----At 6pm on August 29, murderer Eric Allen Patton was given a lethal injection. Decca Aitkenhead was there to witness it - and to discover why America finally seems to be turning against the death penalty Eric Allen Patton stabbed his victim to death with a set of knives, a barbecue fork and a pair of kitchen scissors. She was Charlene Kauer, a white, middle-aged businesswoman from Oklahoma City who had once hired him as a handyman. He was a black labourer in his 30s, with a long record for violent burglary. In December 1994, he came to Kauer's door demanding money. She offered him $10. He attacked her, ransacked the house, butchered her to death and made off with $24. When her husband came home, he found Charlene lying naked on her back, smothered in blood, the scissors still sticking out of her chest. The crime scene photographs presented in court resembled stills from a low-budget horror movie. It was the kind of monstrous killing that reaffirms in Oklahomans' minds the necessity and justice of capital punishment, and a jury duly sentenced Patton to death for 1st-degree murder. After spending the past decade on death row, exhausting his appeals process, at 6pm on August 29 Patton was scheduled to die. The visitors' centre at Oklahoma State Penitentiary is a squat little building in the shadow of towering white prison walls. On execution days it doubles as the media centre, and peanut cookies and fresh coffee had been laid out on wooden tables alongside neat piles of factsheets detailing Patton's crime. When I arrived shortly after 3.30pm, nobody else was there. In due course, two other journalists showed up. Executions were a fixture of their beat, and while we waited the two men chatted idly about the nuisance of faulty air conditioning and the difficulty of giving up smoking. The key detail of this job, they said, was the prisoner's choice of last meal. Readers enjoyed comparing it with what they would choose for themselves - a culinary variation on Desert Island Discs. A spokesman from the department of corrections arrived with the press release listing Patton's final meal request. A tall, lean southerner with a quietly thorough manner, Jerry Massie took evident pride in the dignity of an execution, and found the fascination with last meals faintly distasteful. After all, he sighed, this isn't a game. "Besides," he said, "you can't get all that much for $15 anyway." Fifteen dollars? The budget for a last meal used to be $50, he explained evenly. But when the public read about men getting steak and lobster, there was such an outcry that the state parliament passed a bill cutting it to $15. Patton chose a large pepperoni pizza with extra mushroom, and a large grape soda. It was served between noon and 1pm - which meant that somewhere now inside that great white fortress, he was sitting alone, waiting, with nothing left but his final statement to make in the death chamber. Executions, like awards ceremonies, prefer to keep the speeches brief though, and his time limit would be two minutes. What would they say to stop him if he kept talking? "Well, nothing," replied Massie, puzzled to have to spell out the obvious. "We'd just start the execution." By 5.30pm nobody else had arrived. The victim's relatives had decided not to attend. Patton's family weren't coming, either, having said their final goodbyes that morning by telephone through a glass partition. All visits on death row are conducted that way, and their last had been no exception. A few years ago, protesters would have been staging a candlelit vigil at the gates, but they no longer turn up in any numbers. Death penalty supporters used to come along and taunt them by celebrating, but they don't show up any more, either. Massie did warn of a possible commotion from prisoners banging their cell doors as the clock ticked towards six. Not any more, the reporters corrected him. They hadn't bothered to do that in ages. In the hot, late Oklahoma sunshine, a van drove us around the perimeter wall to a side entrance at 5.45pm. Guards with bristle moustaches and round mirrored sunglasses didn't say much, just searched us and led the way along a long, grey tunnel of a corridor. Halfway down, they pointed us into a slender room just deep enough to accommodate 2 rows of 12 metal chairs. These were lined up facing a glass wall obscured by white blinds. Patton's legal team of 4 sat in the front row, beside his priest. A few places away sat two officials from the department of corrections. 2 men in navy blazers stood holding phones to their ears, lest a final reprieve were to come through. At the door, a pair of guards leaned against the wall, silently chewing gum. The 2 reporters and I sat in the 2nd row. Nobody breathed a sound. At 6pm the blinds slowly raised. And then there he was - suddenly right before our eyes, so close that, were it not for the glass, I could probably have touched him. Patton lay strapped on his back on a gurney, an IV drip running from each arm to a hole in the wall behind him. He looked composed but intensely alert, like a patient about to go into theatre. His was the first black face I'd seen all day. He turned to look at us and started to speak. Most family pets are put down with greater sense of occasion than the execution of Eric Patton managed to marshal. You would be forgiven, therefore, for thinking American prisons must be killing their inmates every day. Before becoming president, George Bush executed more than any other state governor, and under him the country's moral politics have shifted farther and farther right. One would expect the death penalty to be enjoying an all-time high. In fact, the figures tell a different story. In 1999, America executed 98 people - a record total for a single year. The annual figure had been climbing steadily since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976 - as had the number of death sentences issued every year, which reached a peak in 1996. Public support had grown from an average of around 65% to more than 80%. But in 2000 the numbers changed direction. Executions fell that year, and have continued to fall ever since, so sharply that this year's total may not even pass 50. Death sentences have more than halved, and support for capital punishment has slumped back to around 65%. The US Supreme Court has removed entire categories of criminals from death row. Two states have imposed moratoria while they review their death penalty, and moratoria legislation has been introduced in over 20 more. New York has abolished its death penalty altogether, and New Jersey is expected to follow suit. Even in Oklahoma, one of the more prolific states left, Patton was only the third inmate to be executed this year. Quietly but unmistakably, the anti-death-penalty movement in America has started to win. Less of a movement than a patchwork of pressure groups, its campaigners have no centralised leadership and no recognisable public face. Their offices are staffed largely by interns, in grey buildings housing warrens of lobbyists, some in Washington DC but most scattered across the country. They are chronically underfunded and unfashionable. How can they be winning when America's liberals are losing every other culture war? Certainly not by telling anyone that killing people is wrong. The argument they prefer to employ, activists say, is that America is killing the wrong people. Or it's killing people the wrong way. Or killing them at the wrong price. America just isn't killing people properly. Richard Dieter runs the Death Penalty Information Center in DC. A wry, softly spoken activist in middle age, he has been fighting capital punishment all his life and remembers when they used to talk about its wrongness. "The thought was, well, this argument is so right it'll catch on." He chuckles fondly. "We thought, you know, it's so obvious! And so people would go and hold candles at executions and what not. But it was found that an equal number of people would show up shouting for the execution, and it just got really rowdy. Nobody was moving. It was going nowhere." "In the 80s, we started trying to persuade people about the system's arbitrariness," says Marshall Dayan, head of the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) death penalty project in North Carolina. "The racism, classism, the poor quality of counsel, the prosecutorial misconduct. But none of that had any traction either. People just said, 'Who cares if the system isn't perfect? These people are murderers.'" What changed everything was the emergence of the innocence movement. In 1998, Northwestern University's law school in Chicago hosted a national conference on wrongful capital convictions. It brought together 31 former death row inmates who had been found innocent and released. One by one, each man stepped forward on stage to introduce himself with the words, "If the state of such-and-such had had its way, I would not be here today." "It was just an extraordinary event," Dayan recalls. "People all over America saw this on the evening news. And once exonerations started reaching their consciousness, all of a sudden all the things we'd been talking about for years started to gain traction. When they find out some of the people on death row aren't, in fact, murderers, but innocent people, then they ask how does a wrongful conviction happen? And the answers to that question are: racism, classism, etc - all the things we'd been trying to talk about. Only now, everyone started listening." Soon, students at Northwestern had uncovered 13 wrongful capital convictions in Illinois alone. One man had spent 15 years on death row and come within two days of being executed before the students found evidence that proved his innocence. By 2000, the state of Illinois had exonerated more death row inmates than it had executed, at which point its governor - a Republican and long-time death penalty supporter - declared a moratorium. After conducting a full review, he then commuted the death sentence of every prisoner in the state. "Our capital system is haunted by the demon of error," he said frankly. "Error in determining guilt - and error in determining who among the guilty deserves to die." "To be honest, no one thought of switching the argument to innocence strategically," Dieter admits. "We didn't plan on Illinois happening. It just kind of fell into our lap. But innocence has completely rewritten the political rules of the death penalty. What's an acceptable number of innocent people for a state to kill a year? None is the acceptable number. Politicians just can't say they support the death penalty no matter what any more." He ticks off the victories with a kind of wonderment. Jurors have become reluctant to use the death penalty unless DNA evidence proves guilt beyond all doubt. In every state except one, they now have the option to sentence life without parole, instead of death. For the first time ever, the Supreme Court has overturned a death sentence because of the poor performance of the defendant's counsel. "And his lawyer wasn't even that bad!" Dieter marvels. "He wasn't even one of the ones who've been caught sleeping through a trial or turning up drunk. That's how much the court has changed." In the past three years, the court has made juveniles and the mentally retarded exempt from the death penalty. A new campaign is under way for the court to exempt the mentally ill as well. Many states are beginning to wonder whether the death penalty isn't just costing too much already. A typical capital case costs at least three and a half times as much as lifetime incarceration. New Jersey has passed 60 death sentences, overturned 50 on appeal, and still not executed any of the 10 men left on death row. Having spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars executing nobody, it's expected to abolish its death penalty this year. Other states have had to halt all executions while their method is challenged in the courts. Lethal injection, the method used in 37 of the 38 death penalty states, consists of three different drugs - an anaesthetic, a paralytic and a potassium chloride to stop the heart - and is supposed to be painless. But there is growing evidence that, in fact, it inflicts an excruciatingly painful death. The American Medical Association has condemned the practice, many doctors now won't participate and practically every prisoner on death row is filing a suit. A court in Missouri has already ruled in one's favour, effectively outlawing lethal injection in the state, and a court in California will consider the next major test case next week. California has the largest number of people on death row in America - but, for now, it cannot execute anyone. "If you look at every single indicator," smiles Dave Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition To Abolish The Death Penalty (NCADP), "you see that the death penalty is literally withering on the vine." One by one, he predicts that more states will impose a moratorium while they try to solve all the flaws in the system. In the process, they'll come to see that those problems just can't be fixed. And then, faced with an intractably unworkable policy, they will simply abandon it. "It's not so much a question of whether we will win any more, but when," Elliot claims. "Will it be five years or 15? I'm not sure, but I promise you it will be somewhere between the 2. We are on the eve of abolition." But not everyone in the movement agrees. Some worry that they have been here before. They thought the death penalty was about to be abolished by incremental logic more than 30 years ago. And just look, they say, what happened then. In 1972, the Supreme Court declared every state's death penalty statute void. Death sentences were being imposed so arbitrarily, ruled the judges, that they violated the Eighth Amendment. "These death sentences are cruel and unusual," one justice famously declared, "in the same way that being struck by lightning is cruel and unusual." Jubilant activists assumed it would mean all-out abolition. "What else were we to think?" one recalls. "We thought it was all over. We thought we'd won." But the court had not declared the death penalty per se unconstitutional. It had merely said it wasn't being administered properly. Almost at once, states began drafting new improved statutes, with clearer sentencing guidelines. In 1976, the Supreme Court examined three states' revised protocols and agreed that, yes, all the problems had been fixed. So eager were many other states to start executing again that they recalled their parliaments from summer recess the very next day, just to pass a new death penalty bill. Bill Wiseman was a young representative in Oklahoma, one of the states that rushed its legislature back into emergency session. He didn't believe in the death penalty, but he was afraid of losing his seat if he voted against it. "I was just having such a happy time being a politician," he smiles sadly. "It was the most fun. And here this damned thing comes along and it has the potential to just crap all over this wonderful time in my life. So I was faced with a decision - and I was a wuss about it." He voted yes. "But afterwards I came to the conclusion that if we were going to do the wrong thing, we might as well do it the right way." Wiseman set about inventing an alternative to the gas chamber and the electric chair. "Something," he winces, "that would be more humane." Today, Wiseman is an Anglican priest in a grand old church in downtown Tulsa, Oklahoma. He is more opposed to the death penalty than ever. But he has a wolfish, twinkly smile, and it's easy to picture his ambitious younger self back in 1976, loving the limelight while trying to salve his conscience. He describes how the state's medical examiner heard he was looking for ideas, and offered to help. The pair more or less cobbled together a cocktail of intravenous drugs on the back of an envelope. The examiner had no specialist pharmacological training, Wiseman's medical knowledge was zero. But he wrote down what the examiner proposed, called it lethal injection and put it before the house. "I was going round like I was some angel of mercy, really starting to believe my own bullshit, when I ran into a reporter friend of mine one day. I was like, 'How do you like my bill?' And he just shrugged. It was the very first feeling I had of, 'Uh-oh'. He said, 'Bill, I'm afraid this'll make it too easy for them to pass death sentences.' And on the outside I said, 'Oh no, I'm sure that won't happen.' And on the inside I'm going, 'Oh God, what if he's right?' So what did I do? Nothing. I was enjoying the momentum and fame and the clips on the Today show too much. Everybody liked me. Hey, I was fixing up the death penalty, wasn't I? I was making it humane." More than 30 states soon copied Wiseman's lethal injection bill, many word for word. In 1982 Texas became the first to implement it, with the judge happily predicting that, "1983 will bring some more [executions] ... This humane way will make it more palatable." He was not wrong. Wiseman had certainly fixed up the death penalty; his "more palatable" method has now killed more than 800 prisoners. And, he says quietly, he shares responsibility for every single one. The dilemma for the anti-death-penalty movement today is obvious. By challenging lethal injection in the courts, they have put a lot of executions on hold. They may force some people to think about what it really means for the state to take a life. If they win, they'll give legislators the disagreeable task of finding another way to carry out an inherently ugly act. But to argue that lethal injection is "inhumane" implies the possibility that a humane alternative could exist. For some activists, talk of a humane execution goes hand in hand with demands for a moratorium instead of abolition. It smacks to them of the 1970s all over again, and they don't like it. "The parallels with what happened in 1976 are certainly very strong now," an ACLU activist in San Francisco warns. "We need to be very careful not to let the progress we've made slip through our fingers again." Mona Cadena, of Amnesty International in California, puts it more bluntly. "Moratorium scares the hell out of me. It opens the door for people to think there's a way to fix the death penalty - and that's exactly what happened in 1972. The Supreme Court said it's not working. The states changed it. They said it'll work now - and the court said OK. So we've already tried a moratorium. We should be saying it's not appropriate under any circumstances for the government to choose who is going to live and who is going to die." Cadena is the only activist I meet who volunteers a moral objection to the death penalty unprompted. "But I get called a super-crazy liberal pinko communist for saying it - by people in this movement. It's so bizarre. These days I find myself allied with the Catholics just because they're the only abolitionists who'll talk about right and wrong. I think some people feel the moral argument should be left for the churches, and that a moral discussion is not for us." The debate between pragmatists and absolutists has been raging within the abolition movement for nearly a decade now. What is quite clear is that the pragmatists have won. "The debate is over," the NCADP's Dave Elliot says firmly. "There is no disagreement. The abolition movement has matured." He refers to experiments conducted on pro-death-penalty students, which presented arguments framed around flaws in the system. The approach generated significant movement in the students' minds. Arguments framed in morality did not merely fail to change minds, but reinforced students' original opinions. Elliot drums the table as he spells out the message: "If you address the death penalty as a moral issue, you ... do ... not ... " What is less clear is exactly how far this is a matter of purely strategic discipline. It would never have occurred to me to ask activists whether they believed it was wrong to execute anyone; I took it for granted. But then one happened to mention that he thought, in principle, it could sometimes be right. He could definitely think of extreme circumstances in which certain people deserved to be put to death, he said. The trouble, he quickly added, was that his "deserving" case would be different from mine, and from the next person's and the next. As we'd never all be able to agree whom to kill, there was no point having a death penalty. I put the question to everyone. Could they ever support the death penalty? And with very few exceptions, each answer was essentially the same. Yes - but only for Hitler. Oh yes, if you knew someone was guilty and irredeemably wicked - only, you could just never be 100% sure. Yes, of course, loads of murderers deserve to die - it's just that you can't trust the state to tell which ones. Yes - but it's for God to punish them, not the government. If this is a tactical position, it is certainly very clever. It gets you off the defensive and opens up space to negotiate. But I'm not sure that everyone did say it for purely tactical reasons. Some of them seemed to mean it. "We've brought a lot of people into this movement who seem able to negotiate the thing like that in their own heads. And it's been a huge, huge frustration to me." Lance Lindsay runs Death Penalty Focus in San Francisco, and reflects on the strange, bittersweet price of the movement's success. "It's focused us on saying, 'the system's broken', and thinking, 'If we put in enough reforms, if it ends up just being a few monstrous people who are killed, I can live with that.' To me, that's completely missing the point." In the end, the purest articulation of what it should be about comes from the inventor of lethal injection. "I'm opposed to the death penalty because of what it does to us - not what it does to the person who dies," Wiseman says. "That's what it's all about. How it changes and identifies us as a society when we make a corporate decision to take a life. All that stuff about how it's incompetent or unfair, that's all very interesting, but it's not the point. The point is, we must not do this because it eats away at our soul." I'd wondered a lot about what it might do to the soul to attend an execution. Whenever I'd pictured it, it was the final statement I dreaded most. Patton's execution had been selected at random to witness, so I had no idea what he might want to say. When he opened his mouth to speak, it was obvious he'd thought hard about the words, for he had memorised an entire speech. Mindful of the time limit, he had to rattle through it quickly. And so its impact, in the end, was strangely unaffecting - like hearing someone recite a shopping list. He thanked the prison guards on death row. "They've been like family to me." He thanked his legal team for fighting his cause. He thanked the prison warden - the governor - for taking care of him, and he thanked his parents for bringing him into the world - "And for loving me, especially through this trying situation." His life, Patton said, had been "a blessing and blast", but he was ready to meet Jesus Christ his saviour, "for now and all eternity". At the very end he paused for breath. "That's all," he said. The drugs are administered by three executioners in the room next door, hidden from view. Only the warden knows their identity; they are not employees but volunteers who answered an advert for the position in the local newspaper. They cannot see the person they are killing and nobody can see them. Patton closed his eyes. He let out a deep, noisy breath as the anaesthetic entered his veins. As the second drug followed seconds later, paralysing him, his ribcage slowly stopped rising and falling. The third drug was the one that would kill him - but by then there was nothing to see. If he did suffer pain, nobody would have known. For eight minutes we all sat there in absolute silence, staring at a frozen body, waiting for him to die. Nothing could have looked less like what was actually happening. I kept having to remind myself that I was watching someone being killed - because none of the evidence would agree. There was no violence, no resistance, not even the appearance of an act of will. From the look on everyone's faces you'd think we were witnessing a rather sad but unavoidable law of nature - not a decision deliberately taken, or one that could have been reversed. After a while people's gaze began to wander from the body. Each of us stared into a different private space, as frozen as Patton, like actors arranged on stage into a tableau of human alienation. The old-fashioned black-and-white clock on the wall above Patton's head ticked slowly by, and at 6.11pm a doctor pronounced him dead. The blinds were lowered, everyone got up and we filed out into blazing sunshine. Back at the media centre, Jerry Massie asked how I'd found it. Surreal, I said. That's funny, he said - a lot of people tend to use that word. I wanted to say it was traumatic, or horrific, or revolting. But it wouldn't have been true. Had Patton been electrocuted, that would have been traumatic - to watch him jolt to death, even burst into flames, and have to smell his burning flesh would have been unthinkable. It would have had the merit of seeming real, though, and no one could have walked away lightly. But the American justice system has perfected so brilliant a denial of death that the horror of it is how calmly one can watch. In that sense, you could say it really was a humane execution. But the people for whom it has been made humane are the ones carrying it out. The media centre felt like a TV studio green room after a show is over. Prison staff munched on cookies, the reporters cracked some jokes and somebody gathered up the piles of unused press releases. Massie was disappointed to hear that Patton hadn't apologised for his crime. His expression suggested he found the omission rather rude. (source: The Guardian)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----USA, W. VA., ARIZ., OKLA.
Rick Halperin Fri, 11 May 2007 19:10:06 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
