May 3
OKLAHOMA:
What it was like watching the botched Oklahoma execution
A dozen people filed into a small room on Tuesday evening to watch Clayton
Lockett die. They were media witnesses selected from a lottery, a dozen people
chosen to observe the moment because there were only a dozen spots available
and more than 12 reporters wanted to see this execution.
They arrived at a media center on the grounds of the Oklahoma State
Penitentiary in McAlester and climbed into the white prison vans that carried
them into the prison itself. They were intensely searched before being handed
spiral stenographer's notebooks and small, white Bic pens with blue caps. "You
can't bring anything with you, not even a watch," Ziva Branstetter, one of the
witnesses, said in an interview the following day. Afterward, when the
execution was over and Lockett was dead, the witnesses would be told to tear
out their notes and return the notebooks and the small, white pens with the
blue caps.
Before Tuesday night, there had been 1,378 executions in the United States
since 1976, almost all of them carried out using lethal injection. Lockett was
set to become the 111th person killed in Oklahoma by lethal injection and the
20th person executed in the country so far this year. He was sentenced to die
because in 2000, he was convicted of murder and a host of other charges after
he and some accomplices attacked and sexually assaulted 2 teenage women, 1 of
whom Lockett shot twice before she was buried alive, the other victims said.
On Tuesday, the witnesses were brought into a law library to wait, and while
they were waiting they heard inmates banging on doors. Prison officials
explained that this "is a sign of respect for the inmate to be executed,"
Branstetter wrote later. "Not all inmates receive such a sendoff; it just
depends on whether other inmates liked the condemned inmate." After that, the
witnesses were brought into a room with 2 rows of metal folding chairs. This
room was actually the middle of the 3 rooms related to the execution. To one
side, there was the execution chamber itself, which contained a gurney and the
inmate; on the other side, there was a separate viewing room for the victim's
families. The victim's families sat behind 1-way glass behind the media
representatives, who were in the middle of the tableau, so that the families
could see over their shoulders and into the room where the inmate was supposed
to die.
* * *
The death penalty is favored by a majority of Americans, a number that has
dropped significantly. But the actual act of executing people occurs far away
from the population and the public eye, in small rooms and guarded facilities
and witnessed by only a handful of souls.
Attending an execution is an extraordinarily unusual event. Relatives of
victims may attend. These relatives have different reasons for attending and
they have different experiences, as described by Post reporter David Montgomery
in a November 2009 report:
The same note of ambivalence is what you tend to hear from other victims'
relatives who've been there - watching with tragic eyes from behind the glass
in the lonely little witness room, where all is not resolved. They feel better.
A little. Not much. It's not the better they thought they would feel. They can
hardly explain why. They exit the room with most of the ache they carried
in....
"It's not like, 'Whoopee!'" says Dale Alexander. "It's not like a ballgame, we
won, home run." Her daughter, Lisa Alexander Crider, 23, the mother of a
5-year-old boy, was raped and shot in the face with a shotgun on the banks of
the James River on Mother's Day 1997. The killer, Brandon W. Hedrick,
reportedly an acquaintance, was executed in the electric chair in 2006.
"It helped to see the completion," Alexander says. "It helped to a degree."
There is a concern that the ability to view the execution may "revictimize
those families." But there are also other people who attend, ordinary citizens
who are willing to witness executions.
In Virginia, hundreds of people have volunteered to watch executions, as this
Post report from December 2006 shows:
They come from every corner and every quarter: A Richmond school bus driver, a
South Hill bookkeeper, a Prince William County police officer, an Ashburn
computer specialist, a Lynchburg brass works fabricator. All have visited the
Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt....
For nearly 100 years, broad public support for capital punishment has helped
the Virginia Department of Corrections maintain a rotating list of about 20 to
30 volunteers, although only 6 are required to witness each execution. Some
come only once. Others repeatedly return. One man, a paint store salesman from
Emporia, has seen 15 men executed.
And there are the reporters. These media witnesses share the stories about
executions with the public, documenting how this nation decides to put someone
to death. These people attend largely for the same reason reporters go to war
zones, as former Post reporter (now editor) Josh White explains :
As a reporter, I believed - and continue to believe ??? that it is important
for the public to bear witness to executions, as they are part of the justice
system that we all, as members of this society, support. That's not to say that
everyone "supports" the death penalty, because certainly not everyone believes
that we as a nation should kill as punishment. But it is the law of the land in
many states, and many people believe it is a just punishment in extreme
cases....
Being the eyes and ears for the public in such situations is what we do as
journalists, trying to explain the world around us to those who can't be there
for themselves, whether it be the death chamber, the battlefield, in a foreign
land, or in a sports arena.
* * *
On Tuesday, once the witnesses were brought in and seated, they waited. "You
just sort of sit there, maybe talking very quietly to the person next to you,
until the blinds rise," Branstetter told The Post the day after the execution.
Branstetter, the enterprise editor at the Tulsa World, spends part of her time
reporting and part of her time managing a team. She has witnessed 3 executions
in the past, most recently the January execution of Michael Wilson.
Her experience attending other executions is part of the reason she went to
this one; Oklahoma was using a new lethal injection drug for the 1st time, and
the secrecy surrounding the drugs had caused a protracted argument that
extended to the state's courts and lawmakers. Branstetter had been there in
January when Michael Wilson was killed with a 3-drug mix that had been obtained
from a compounding pharmacy. Wilson's final words, spoken after the injections:
"I feel my whole body burning." So she wanted to go to see what was different
this time.
At the beginning, the only thing that was different was that the execution was
late. At 6:23 p.m., 23 minutes after the execution had been scheduled to begin,
the beige blinds lifted up and the witnesses in the next 2 rooms could see
Lockett on the gurney. They didn't know - because they couldn't know - that the
execution was delayed because a technician couldn't find a place to insert the
IV, according to Robert Patton, director of the Department of Corrections. That
technician looked at Lockett's arms, legs, feet and neck before ultimately
placing the IV in Lockett's groin area 5 minutes before the blinds were lifted,
Patton wrote in a timeline sent to the governor. The area with the IV was
covered by a sheet so that witnesses couldn't see his groin, blocking their
view of the vein where the needle was inserted.
After Lockett said he had no last words, the execution began. They administered
the drug midazolam, which is meant to induce unconsciousness. 10 minutes later,
they announced that he was unconscious. "This is the first execution I've
covered that they've made a point of pronouncing someone unconscious before
they pronounce him dead," Branstetter said.
3 minutes later, "the violent reaction" began, she said. First, she saw his
foot kick. Then his body bucked, he clenched his jaw and he began rolling his
head from side to side, trying to lift his head up, grimacing and clenching his
teeth. "He mumbled some things we didn't understand," Branstetter said. "The
only thing I could make out was when he said 'man.'"
It looked like he was trying to get up, she said.
"He looked like he was in pain to me," Branstetter said. "How much pain, nobody
knows but him."
A prison official looked under the sheet and announced that they were going to
close the blinds temporarily. The beige blinds went back down and never went
back up. "Reporters exchange shocked glances," Branstetter wrote in her
account. "Nothing like this has happened at an execution any of us has
witnessed since 1990, when the state resumed executions using lethal
injection."
Dean Sanderford, one of Lockett's attorneys, called the execution "the most
awful thing I've ever seen."
Some of the younger reporters in attendance, who had not witnessed executions
before, "were quite shaken, to say the least," Branstetter said the following
day.
"Nobody was crying, but...afterwards, there were some reporters whose hands
were shaking, who were quite disturbed by what they had seen," she said.
The reporters sat in silence for several minutes - the exact time wasn't clear
because the clock on the wall in the execution chamber was now hidden behind
the blinds - before Patton announced to them that he has halted the execution.
"We've had a vein failure in which the chemicals did not make it into the
offender," he said.
In his timeline sent to the governor, Patton wrote that an examination of the
IV found that "the blood vein had collapsed, and the drugs had either absorbed
into tissue, leaked out or both." Patton was told that there were no other
veins available and that there hadn???t been enough drugs administered to kill
Lockett, so the execution was called off at 6:56 p.m., he wrote.
Patton also issued a stay of execution for Charles Warner, who was set to be
executed later that night. Warner was supposed to become the 112th person
executed in Oklahoma using lethal injection and the 21st person executed in the
country this year. He was convicted of raping and murdering an 11-month-old,
the daughter of his girlfriend at the time. His execution has been delayed
indefinitely, with Gov. Mary Fallin (R) saying that his execution would be on
hold until after a review into Lockett's execution was completed.
The reporters were told not long after the execution was called off that they
had to leave. They walked back to the white vans, reporters comparing notes and
tearing out their notes, before returning to the media center on the
penitentiary's grounds.
"That's when they came in and told us he had been pronounced dead of a heart
attack at 7:06 p.m.," Branstetter said.
Patton took no questions. News about the botched execution quickly got out as
some reporters began tweeting details from the scene. The story drew worldwide
attention to the death penalty, drawing a response from the White House and
criticism from opponents of capital punishment. Branstetter and the other
reporters who had witnessed the scene stayed in the media center to finish
their stories and recount what they had watched.
(source: Washington Post)
************************
You said it: Readers comment on the death penalty
We asked on our Facebook pages whether the recent botched execution in Oklahoma
had changed any minds about the death penalty. Here is what some of you had to
say:
Troy Ohmer: I don't believe in lethal injection. Fry them all. Let them feel
the pain.
Ed Guidry: If he's dead, it wasn't botched.
Debbie Babin LaJaunie: Nope.
Glenn Pitre Jr.: If he raped and killed an innocent woman, horribly, who cares
how messed up his punishment was? Whoever feels sorry for these criminals
should be locked in with them. Inhumane? I guess raping, torturing and burying
a woman alive isn't. Our country is so screwed up with its beliefs.
Jacob Fonseca: Bullets are cheaper.
Jake Blades: Some if not all deserve no mercy. Once proven guilty beyond a
reasonable doubt, let the victims family deal with it as they feel.
Jolisa Gilchrist Sampey: The person he killed is still dead, right? While I am
sure his mother and family didn't want him to suffer, he didn't get death row
for singing Christmas carols. He's not the victim.
Jeremiah and Lauren Verrett: If humans could just use logic to solve problems
instead of emotion, we would be so much better off. Emotionally it is tough to
take the life of another human being. Logically, we cannot sustain having to
pay for their shelter, food, health for the rest of their lives just so that
they can sit in a cell and stare at a wall. So it is either free them - which
logically causes harm to more people in society so that doesn't make sense - or
kill them, which logically solves any and all problems in the situation. I do
not like the idea of my money that I earn myself paying for some sick person
who raped and killed to eat and watch TV and live better than most people in
other parts of the world.
Jeremiah and Lauren Verrett: Or gather up all the people who want to "save"
these people and give them their own facility to house these people and let
them pay for it.
Lynda Darden: I wish the media would stop saying the execution was "botched."
It was not. The ultimate goal was the death of the man in question. He died.
Job done. Line up the rest of them.
Michael Hearn: Not at all. The government is always complaining about prisons
being overcrowded; yet you have sick, twisted people, male and female, who get
food and housing we honest people pay for, and these people are kept alive. The
scum that was put to death was not a one- or 2-time offender. He was a 4-time
convicted felon. When hurting people becomes a game, you need to be punished. I
wish people would stop feeling sorry for these dirtbags.
Michael Jordan: Bring back the donkey splitter from the Spanish Inquisition.
Jennifer Anne LaRousse: I believe they should go back to electrocution. They
have been toying with the idea because they're running low on the injections.
Why should the killer get to drift off to la-la land while the victims were
tortured? I know someone out there will shout it's cruel and unusual
punishment. My thing is they had their fair trial, were sentenced to death in a
court of law. How they die is not my problem.
Carrie Luke Levron: No, this does not change the way I feel. Why do they
deserve to go peacefully in their sleep? They are not victims. Bring back:
firing squad, hanging, electric chair or the guillotine. End result is the
same. They are on death row for a reason.
Tim Klutch: Can't get right drugs for a lethal injection? Just hang them. Why
should they have rights? Did their victims? No.
(source: Houma (La.) Today)
*********************
Oklahoma Governor Mary Fallin boasts far-right record
An execution this week that went terribly wrong has catapulted Oklahoma
Governor Mary Fallin, a Republican, to the national stage. But there's more to
Fallin than her zeal for capital punishment. The first female governor of
Oklahoma has also quashed broader criminal justice reform, refused Medicaid
expansion that would cover 150,000 Oklahoma residents, signed 10 new
restrictions on abortion and contraception, blocked local minimum wage
increases, and slashed education funding.
Before she was anointed a "Mama Grizzly" by former Vice Presidential candidate
Sarah Palin in 2010, Fallin served 2 terms in the Oklahoma House, 3 as
lieutenant governor, and 2 in the U.S. House of Representatives. Her mother and
father both served as (Democratic) mayors of Tecumseh, where Fallin was raised.
Fallin, now head of the National Governors' Association, is up for re-election
this fall and is expected to sail to victory. Last year, she denied having
national aspirations: "Maybe someday we'll have a woman president," she said.
"Not me, though." If she did end up on a national ticket, Fallin would likely
tout what she sees as an exemplary record. "We can teach Washington a lesson or
2 about what it takes to be a successful state and a model government," she
said once. Here is what that means in practice.
Death Penalty. According to the Death Penalty Information Center, Oklahoma has
the highest number of executions per capita in the country. Fallin laid the
groundwork for this week's debacle in 2011 by signing into legislation that
enabled Oklahoma to experiment with the drugs used in lethal injection and to
keep the details secret.
In April, when the State Supreme Court issued a temporary stay on the execution
of Clayton Lockett, citing concerns about the constitutionality of that law,
Fallin decided to ignore it. The Supreme Court's "attempted stay of execution
is outside the constitutional authority of that body," she declared. "I cannot
give effect to the order by that honorable court." (The Court eventually
reached a different conclusion on its own, it said.)
"You have a political figure who unnecessarily rushed forward an execution,
under the veil of secrecy, that led to the torture of an individual at the
hands of the state of Oklahoma," Ryan Kiesel, executive director of the
Oklahoma ACLU, told msnbc. The ACLU is calling for an independent investigation
into Lockett's execution. An investigation ordered by Fallin will be under her
control.
(source: MSNBC)
COLORADO:
Judge upholds death penalty constitutionality in theater shooting case
The judge in the Aurora movie theater murder trial denied several more death
penalty-related motions from the defense on Friday.
In 6 orders, Arapahoe County District Court judge Carlos Samour upheld the
constitutionality of Colorado's death penalty scheme and labeled more of the
defense's motions as "meritless." Defense attorneys had argued the death
penalty should be tossed out as an option in the case because the criteria for
facing the death penalty in Colorado are too vague.
In another order, Samour allowed expert testimony on forensic computer analysis
to be heard at trial.
The orders came after Samour concluded that hearings would not be necessary on
any of the defense's death penalty-related motions. And they are unlikely to
ease the tension between the judge and the defense, who previously asked Samour
to rescind his rulings that some of their motions were frivolous.
Jury selection for the trial is scheduled to start in October.
(source: The Denver Post)
CALIFORNIA:
California man pleads guilty to killing ex-wife, 7 others in 2011 hair salon
shooting; Former tugboat operator Scott Dekraai pleaded guilty to killing 8
people during a 2011 shooting rampage at a Seal Beach beauty salon. One of the
victims was his ex-wife. Prosecutors will seek the death penalty.
A man pleaded guilty Friday to killing his ex-wife and 7 others in a shooting
rampage at a California hair salon in 2011.
Scott Dekraai, 44, a former tugboat operator, entered his pleas to 8 counts of
murder and 1 count of attempted murder with special circumstances and
enhancements in Orange County Superior Court.
Prosecutors have said they will seek the death penalty.
At the time of the shooting, Dekraai was in a bitter custody battle over his
8-year-old son, police say.
Dekraai's lawyer says his client entered the pleas to spare victims' relatives
from sitting through a trial. However, he said Dekraai will fight to keep from
being sentenced to death.
Dekraai donned a bulletproof vest before heading to the Seal Beach salon where
his ex-wife worked as a stylist in October 2011. Authorities said he shot and
killed Michelle Fournier before turning his gun on the salon's owner and
spraying Salon Meritage with bullets.
The salon reopened about a year after the shooting, and 6 of the original
employees returned to work.
After leaving the building, Dekraai shot and killed a man who was sitting in
his car in a parking lot, authorities said.
Police arrested Dekraai, who had been locked in a bitter custody dispute with
Fournier over their 8-year-old son, within minutes.
"'I know what I did,'" he told an arresting officer, according to a police
affidavit.
Since the shootings, victims' relatives have pleaded with the judge at numerous
hearings to hasten the case to trial. In March, Judge Thomas M. Goethals
severed the guilt and penalty phases to prevent additional delays as Dekraai's
lawyer Scott Sanders argues motions related to prosecutors' efforts to seek the
death penalty.
Sanders wants the district attorney's office recused from Dekraai's case and
the death penalty taken off the table over allegations that authorities misused
jailhouse informants and didn't turn over evidence to defense attorneys.
Prosecutors have denied the claims.
(source: New York Daily News)
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