Day: August 30, 2015

Virginia relaxes restrictions on death row inmates

Virginia prison officials have relaxed the restrictive conditions under which death row inmates live and are in talks to settle a lawsuit over those prisoners’ near constant placement in solitary confinement — a signal that state authorities are willing to at least modify the incarceration practice that is facing increasing criticism across the country.
State officials revealed in a recent court filing that Virginia’s eight death row inmates are allowed weekly contact visits with family members and more opportunity for showers and recreation — including daily sessions in which they are allowed to mingle in person with up to three others slated to die.
Victor M. Glasberg, an attorney for four inmates in Virginia who are suing over their placement in solitary confinement, said the contact visits with family members, in particular, are “decidedly huge” for the inmates. But he said he is working to understand how the other changes have been implemented and whether the inmates are still forced to spend nearly 23 hours a day alone.
“The issue of the hours spent in solitary is a huge, outstanding issue,” Glasberg said. “They’ve said they want to negotiate in good faith, and I’m going to accept that.”
The four death row inmates represented by Glasberg alleged in a lawsuit late last year that being forced to spend so much time in solitary confinement constituted cruel and unusual punishment, causing them severe mental distress while they waited to be executed. The issue is one that is being examined across the country; Supreme Court Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, for example, mused in June that it might be time for the high court to take a look at the use of solitary confinement.
Virginia Department of Corrections Director Harold W. Clarke said in an affidavit submitted in the case that, as part of a review of its policies and procedures for those slated to die, the department decided to provide more privileges to death row inmates who follow the rules.
Clarke said in his affidavit that death row inmates would be given an hour and a half of outdoor recreation time five days a week, an opportunity for “in-pod” recreation with three of their peers for an hour every day and the opportunity for daily showers. (Inmates had alleged that they were allowed just an hour of outdoor recreation time five times a week and thrice-weekly showers.)
Clarke also said death row inmates could have weekly contact visits with family members, and prison officials were working to construct facilities for them — including a covered recreation yard with a basketball court and stationary exercise equipment, and a multipurpose day room where they could purchase books and movies, make calls and send e-mails, play cards, and watch TV. Both areas, Clarke said, were expected to be finished by October.
Source: The Washington Post, Matt Zapotosky, August 29, 2015

BOOKS – NEW 2015 “An Evil Day in Georgia”

Through the lens of a 1927 murder and the ensuing trials of three suspects, An Evil Day in Georgia examines the death penalty system in Prohibition-era Georgia. James Hugh Moss, a black man, and Clifford Thompson, a white man, both from Tennessee, were accused of the murder of store owner Coleman Osborn in rural north Georgia. Thought to be involved in the illegal interstate trade of alcohol, they were tried, convicted, and sentenced to death on circumstantial evidence within a month of the murder. Thompson’s wife, Eula Mae Elrod, was tried, convicted, and sentenced to death the following year, but was released in 1936 after her case gained notoriety in the press. “Moss, Thompson, and Elrod…were almost classic examples of perceived social outsiders or rebels who ran afoul of a judicial system not designed to protect them but to weed them out and discourage others who might think about challenging the system,” author Robert N. Smith says. “Moreover, all three trials were held in circumstances where local tensions ran so high that conviction was virtually assured.” John Bessler, author of Cruel and Unusual: The American Death Penalty and the Founders’ Eighth Amendment, said, “In An Evil Day in Georgia, author Robert Smith raises lingering questions about the guilt of two men—one white and one black—executed for a murder in the Deep South in the 1920s. . . . The telling of this story, one that played out in the Jim Crow era and the days of bootlegging and the Ku Klux Klan, exposes the death penalty’s imperfections even as it calls into question the veracity of a woman’s confession, later recanted, that once brought her within a stone’s throw of the state’s electric chair.”

(R. Smith, “An Evil Day In Georgia,” The University of Tennessee Press, 2015.)

EXECUTIONS CARRIED OUT 2016

Execution List 2016

Date Number
Since 1976		 State Name Age Race Victim Race Method Drug Protocol Years From
Sentence To
Execution
1/7/16 1423 FL Oscar Ray Bolin Jr. 53 White 1 White Lethal Injection 3-drug (midazolam) 23
1/20/16 1424 TX Richard Masterson 43 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 13
1/21/16 1425 AL Christopher Brooks 43 White 1 White Lethal Injection 3-drug (midazolam) 22
1/27/16 1426 TX James Freeman 35 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 7
2/3/16 1427 GA Brandon Jones 72 Black 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 36
2/16/16 1428 TX Gustavo Garcia 43 Latino 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 24
2/17/16 1429 GA Travis Hittson 45 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 22
3/9/16 1430 TX Coy Wesbrook 58 White 1 White, 1 Latino Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 17
3/22/16 1431 TX Adam Ward 33 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 8
3/31/16 1432 GA Joshua Bishop 41 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 20
4/6/16 1433 TX Pablo Vasquez 38 Latino 1 Latino Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 17
4/12/16 1434 GA Kenneth Fults 47 Black 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 18
4/27/16 1435 GA Daniel Lucas 37 White 3 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 16
5/11/16 1436 MO Earl Forrest 66 White 3 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 11
7/15/16 1437 GA John Conner 60 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 34
10/5/16 1438 TX Barney Ronald Fuller Jr.* 53 White 2 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 12
10/19/16 1439 GA Gregory Paul Lawler 63 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 16
11/16/16 1440 GA Steven Frederick Spears* 50 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 9
12/6/16 1441 GA William Sallie 50 White 1 White Lethal Injection 1-drug (Pentobarbital) 25
12/8/16 1442 AL Ronald Bert Smith Jr. 45 White 1 White Lethal Injection 3-drug (midazolam) 21

The three-drug protocol typically begins with an anesthetic or sedative, followed by pancuronium bromide to paralyze the inmate and potassium chloride to stop the inmate’s heart. The first drug used varies by state and is listed above for each execution.

ƒ female
* volunteer – an inmate who waived ordinary appeals that remained at the time of his or her execution
~ foreign national
¥ white defendant executed for murder of black victim

Return to Executions in the United States

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Disease, suicide killing Ala inmates faster than execution

August 29, 2015

IRMINGHAM, Ala. (AP) — Disease and suicide are claiming inmates on Alabama’s death row faster than the executioner.

With Alabama’s capital punishment mechanism on hold for more than two years because of legal challenges and a shortage of drugs for lethal injections, five of the state’s death row inmates have died without ever seeing the inside of the execution chamber.

John Milton Hardy, convicted of killing Clarence Nugene Terry during a robbery at a convenience store in Decatur in 1993, was the most recent death row inmate to die. Prison officials say he died of unspecified natural causes on June 15.

Convicted killer Benito Albarran, 41, hanged himself in the infirmary at Donaldson prison about two months earlier. A decade earlier, he was convicted of fatally shooting Huntsville police officer Daniel Golden outside a Mexican restaurant where he worked.

Golden’s brother, David Golden, said family members wanted to witness Albarran’s execution and felt cheated by his death.

“He took the coward’s way out,” Golden told reporters in Huntsville after Albarran killed himself.

Attorney Joseph Flood, who represented Albarran as he challenged his conviction in state court, said the inmate’s mother died a week or two before he took his own life.

“He fell into a deep depression after that,” said Flood.

In March, David Eugene Davis, 56, died of natural causes at Holman prison near Atmore after suffering from liver failure. He was convicted of killing Kenneth Douglas and John Fikes in St. Clair County in 1996.

Two more death row inmates died last year, Ricky Dale Adkins of cancer and Justin T. Hosch, who hanged himself at Holman prison. Hosch was convicted in Autauga County in the 2008 shooting death of Joey Willmore, and Adkins was condemned for killing real estate agent Billie Dean Hamilton in St. Clair County in 1988.

The last inmate put to death in Alabama was Andrew Reid Lackey, who died by lethal injection on July 25, 2013, for killingCharles Newman during a robbery in Limestone County in 2005. At the time, he was the first inmate put to death in the state since October 2011.

With 189 people currently on death row, the state is trying to resume executions, but legal challenges could be a roadblock.

The state is asking a federal judge to dismiss a lawsuit filed by death row inmate Tommy Arthur, who challenged the use of the sedative midazolam as inhumane during lethal injections. The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld the use of the drug in an Oklahoma case, but Arthur contends Alabama’s execution protocol is different from the one used there.

The state switched to midazolam after it had to halt executions because it was out of other drugs needed for lethal injections.

California Death Penalty, Struck Down Over Delays, Faces Next Test

August 29,2015 (NYT)

Whether California’s application of the death penalty is so drawn out and arbitrary that it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment will be argued on Monday before a federal appeals court in Pasadena.

If the lawyers for a condemned man are victorious, the case could bring a reprieve to more than 740 prisoners now on death row at San Quentin State Prison and send legal ripples across the country. Either way, legal experts say, it raises issues about the administration of capital punishment that are likely to reach the Supreme Court over time.

In Monday’s hearing before a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, California officials will seek to overturn a surprise ruling last year by a lower federal court, which declared the state’s “death penalty system” to be unconstitutional

Hailed by death penalty opponents as a breakthrough and attacked by others as unwise and legally out of line, the decision was issued on July 16, 2014, by Judge Cormac J. Carney of Federal District Court in Santa Ana. It focused not on disparities in the meting out of death sentences in the first place — the more familiar charge — but on the decades of tangled and prolonged reviews that follow and the rarity of actual executions.

In a scathing account of what he called a dysfunctional system, Judge Carney noted that of the more than 900 people who had been sentenced to death in California since 1978, when the current legal structure was established, only 13 had been executed.

Citing growing delays in a judicial review process that can take 25 years or more, far above the national norm, Judge Carney said death sentences had been transformed, in effect, into “life in prison, with the remote possibility of death.”

The “random few” who are put to death, he said, “will have languished for so long on death row that their execution will serve no retributive or deterrent purpose and will be arbitrary.”

Judge Carney ruled on the appeal of Ernest Dewayne Jones, who was condemned to die in 1995 for a murder and rape and made a last-ditch plea to a federal court after his appeals to the California Supreme Court had been denied. The judge vacated Mr. Jones’s death sentence as he declared California’s capital-punishment process to be generally unconstitutional.

The decision was a stunning one, and California officials have sharply challenged it on both procedure and substance. They say it was illegitimate because Mr. Jones’s arguments about the arbitrariness of the review system — issues going beyond the long delays alone — had not first been considered in the California courts, as required.

Beyond that, according to the brief from the state’s attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, a Democrat, the delays and rarity of executions do not reflect random quirks. Rather, it says, they are a product of California’s effort to be scrupulously fair, ensuring that condemned prisoners have high-quality lawyers and every opportunity to question the legality of their sentences.

California legislators have required such exhaustive reviews and procedures as “an important safeguard against arbitrariness and caprice,” the state holds, quoting from a 1976 Supreme Court decision.

In a plebiscite in 2012, California voters affirmed the death penalty by a narrow margin, with 52 percent voting to keep it and 48 percent voting to replace it with life in prison without parole.

California inmates normally wait three to five years just for the appointment of a qualified defense lawyer, a delay that may be repeated as convicts pursue two successive state appeals and then a federal one. Beyond the prolonged process of reviewing death sentences, California has had a de facto moratorium on executions since 2006 because of disputes over the method of lethal injection.

The questions of arbitrariness and extreme delay that are raised by the Jones case are important and may well gain purchase in the courts, said Eric M. Freedman, a professor of constitutional law and death penalty expert at Hofstra University.

“But that does not necessarily mean that this particular litigation will be the vehicle by which the courts resolve these issues,” he added, noting that procedural or other questions could lead the appeals panel to overrule the Jones decision.

The arguments made by Mr. Jones’s lawyers — and echoed by Judge Carney — are similar in part to those made in June by Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court. In a sweeping dissent, joined by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Justice Breyer went beyond the lethal-injection issue at hand to ask whether the death penalty was so marred by unreliable decisions, arbitrary application and delays that it should be abolished.

But conservative justices responded that death penalty opponents, in their zeal to erect obstacles to executions, were responsible for inordinate delays and unpredictability.

If the Ninth Circuit and even the Supreme Court should uphold Judge Carney’s ruling, this would not necessarily cause the death penalty to unravel nationwide, said Douglas A. Berman, an expert on criminal law at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law.

Judge Carney’s decision turned on details specific to California, and with its high number of condemned prisoners and very low pace of executions, the state is in a class by itself, Mr. Berman said. Still, he added, a similar critique might succeed in a few other states, including Pennsylvania and Florida.

Given the deep divisions within California over the death penalty, Mr. Berman added, the state may, in an odd way that has nothing to do with constitutional principles, be well served by the status quo.

“Voters, and perhaps the executive branch, too, are not that troubled with a system that has lots of death sentences and few executions,” Mr. Berman said.