Month: August 2015

Not a killing state: Is Colorado prepared for the death penalty?

The majority of Coloradans want their state to kill James Holmes. But if he receives the death penalty, the Department of Corrections may not be ready.
Convicted murderer James Holmes is now awaiting his sentence.
He faces the death penalty for his crimes, a punishment 2/3 of Coloradans believe he deserves.
But lethal injection drugs are increasingly hard to obtain. If the jury sentences Holmes to death, is Colorado actually capable of carrying it out?
Like all 31 states that still allow capital punishment, Colorado uses lethal injection as its primary means of execution. But it almost never happens: The 1997 death of Gary Lee Davis remains the state’s only execution in almost 50 years, and the only time Colorado has ever performed a lethal injection. We are, in the words of death penalty activist Sister Helen Prejean, “not a killing state.”
The Colorado Department of Corrections, tasked with performing executions, doesn’t even keep drugs for the procedure on hand. Their shelf life is less than the average 10 years it takes for a death penalty appeals process.
In March of 2013, 5 months before death row inmate Nathan Dunlap was scheduled for execution, The Denver Post reported that CDOC was still struggling to acquire a crucial drug.
Tom Clements, CDOC’s then-director, wrote a letter to 97 compounding pharmacies across the state in an attempt to acquire sodium thiopental, a rapid-onset anesthetic critical to the state’s lethal 3-drug cocktail.
Clements sought the pharmacies’ help because the drug is now nearly impossible to find ready-made. Hospira Inc, the only producer in the nation, stopped making it in 2011. The E.U. has blocked its export for use in executions. But compounding pharmacies are less than eager. In March this year, the American Pharmacists Association called upon its members to stop providing any drugs for use in executions.
In light of Clements’ letter, the ACLU in 2013 submitted an open records request to CDOC asking for a copy of its execution protocol. (The agency initially didn’t comply, forcing the ACLU to file a lawsuit.)
What they found was troubling. Colorado law demands lethal injection be administered with “a lethal quantity of sodium thiopental or other equally or more effective substance sufficient to cause death.”
The protocol from 2011 calls for Sodium Pentothal, the name brand of sodium thiopental. But the 2013 protocol, with no change in state law, calls for “Sodium Pentothal/Pentobarbital,” implying that the 2 are interchangeable despite being 2 different drugs. (When pentobarbital was used in the 2014 Oklahoma execution of Michael Wilson, he reportedly said he felt his “whole body burning.”)
Colorado is not the only state scrambling for alternatives. Oklahoma, Tennessee and Utah have authorized the use of the gas chamber, electrocution and the firing squad, respectively, if lethal injection drugs become unavailable. And the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that midazolam, the controversial drug linked to multiple botched or prolonged executions across the country, is constitutional for use in lethal injections.
Ultimately, the ACLU’s investigation came to a halt when Gov. John Hickenlooper granted Dunlap an indefinite stay of execution. But the discrepancy between protocol and state law raises concerns about the secrecy that goes along with lethal injection.
How can the public stay informed about the death penalty when no organization will publicly admit to selling the drugs? How do we determine what drugs count as an “equally or more effective substance to cause death” without being able to properly test them?
Gov. Hickenlooper’s stay of execution for Dunlap means the state, at least for now, isn’t actively seeking out lethal injection drugs. His office didn’t return requests for comment, but the governor has said publicly that he will not allow an execution during his term. The other 2 men on death row will not exhaust their appeals for years.
If sentenced to death, James Holmes can expect the appeals process to take 10 years or more.
By that time, Colorado’s lethal injection protocol – and indeed, its stance on the death penalty – could look quite different.
Source: The Colorado Independent, July 30, 2015

North Carolina wants easier, more secretive executions

The national debate over capital punishment has proceeded in a variety of disparate directions, with some states deciding to end the practice altogether. But in North Carolina, the Republican-led legislature has apparently concluded that the status quo on executions needs to be tweaked in a more alarming way – making it easier for the state to kill people with greater secrecy.
With little debate, the North Carolina Senate voted along party lines 33-16 Monday night to approve a bill aimed at restarting executions in the state.
The legislation, House Bill 774, would repeal the current law requiring that a physician be present to monitor all executions …. The bill would also remove from public record the names of companies that make, supply or deliver the drugs used in lethal injection, and it would exempt the execution protocol itself from the oversight of the state’s Rules Review Commission.
There would be no public oversight of the protocol, nor would that information – from the types of drugs to the doses to the sequence – be required to be made public.
According to local reports, North Carolina hasn’t been able to kill any of its prisoners since 2006, in large part because doctors in the state balked, creating a de facto moratorium.
So, GOP state lawmakers determined that if state law requires doctors to oversee executions, and doctors won’t go along, it’s time to change the law so that doctors need only sign the death certificate after the execution takes place. Instead, the new state law would allow physician assistants, nurse practitioners, or EMTs to monitor the executions.
As for the secrecy, North Carolina has a Public Records Act, but this new push would create an exception to the state law – when North Carolina kills prisoners with a chemical cocktail, the contents can be kept secret. The names of the pharmaceutical companies that supply the drugs will also be hidden from public scrutiny.
The name of the legislation is the “Restoring Proper Justice Act,” apparently because its sponsors’ sense of humor leans towards the macabre.
A report from the News & Observer added that the state House, which also has a Republican majority, has already approved a similar measure, but the 2 versions will have to be reconciled and passed in each chamber.
Gov. Pat McCrory (R) has not yet said whether he intends to sign the bill. The state currently has 148 people who’ve been sentenced to death.
Source: MSNBC news, July 30, 2015

BREAKING

BREAKING:
Jurors have reached a decision in the second phase of sentencing for convicted mass murderer James Holmes.

Under Colorado law, the jury can move death penalty proceedings forward to a third phase, or sentence the Aurora theater shooter to life in prison without parole.

The verdict will be read at 12:30 p.m. MT (2:30 p.m. ET).

LIFE AFTER DEATH ROW The resurrection of Damon Thibodeaux

The executioner haunts Damon Thibodeaux.

Nightmares yank him back to the 8-by-10-foot cell that confines him to solitary 23 hours a day. Loneliness overwhelms him; despair crushes his spirit. He wants to scream: “I’m innocent.” He knows it won’t matter.

The guards come for him, strap him to the table and push a needle into his arm. A lethal serum flows into his veins. Soon it will be over.

He jolts awake, his heart pounding.

The prison chains are gone and he’s lying in his one-room Minneapolis apartment, 1,200 miles from the Louisiana penitentiary where he waited to die for a murder he didn’t commit.Video (02:15): Thibodeaux begins again and finds freedom on the road.

Thibodeaux is free from death row. Now, after more than 15 years in prison, will he be able to find his place in a world that raced ahead without him? Can he break free of a past that for so long kept him in chains?

A girl goes missing

It was a hot Louisiana summer day on Thursday, July 18, 1996, and Thibodeaux was a 22-year-old deckhand on a Mississippi River barge. After work that day, he went to visit relatives — Dawn and C.J. Champagne. He had come to New Orleans three weeks earlier for a wedding, then stayed to be closer to his mother and his sister and to work on the river.

After drinking late into the night, Thibodeaux slept at the Champagnes’ apartment. He was still there at 5:15 Friday afternoon when their 14-year-old daughter, Crystal Champagne, left to walk to a nearby Winn-Dixie supermarket.

She never returned.

Fourteen-year-old Crystal Champagne’s body was found along the Mississippi River beneath the Huey P. Long Bridge in Jefferson Parish, La., in July 1996.

Thibodeaux and the family scoured the neighborhood through that night and into the next day while the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office launched an investigation. Thibodeaux had returned to his mother’s home to sleep when sheriff’s deputies knocked on his door, searching for answers.

Thibodeaux wanted to find Crystal, his step-cousin, as much as anyone and agreed to go with them and answer questions.

Minutes later, the missing-person case became a murder investigation. A former neighbor of the Champagnes found the girl’s body in a wooded area along the Mississippi River beneath the Huey P. Long Bridge, about 5 miles from the family’s home in Westwego.

Thibodeaux, whose only previous run-ins with the law were for two misdemeanor marijuana possession convictions, waived his right to an attorney and spent the next 2½ hours sitting alone in a room, anxious and exhausted. He hadn’t eaten or slept much over the past 30 hours.

Court records and interviews reveal what happened next. The investigators hammered him about the girl’s death. When he said he knew nothing about it, they accused him of lying. They told him that Crystal’s family didn’t corroborate his whereabouts or his story. They said the evidence showed he raped and murdered the girl. They suggested he might not remember, that sometimes people black out and kill their victims without even knowing it.

And the polygraph test that he took at 1 a.m.? They told him he failed it.

Thibodeaux fell to the floor, spent and afraid.

Investigators told him he would be labeled a child rapist and murderer in prison. They graphically described a three-drug execution cocktail that would drip into his veins and burn. Confess, they said, and he might get leniency.

“They were never going to let me out until I gave them what they wanted,” Thibodeaux said. “It’s not about what you believe you did, it’s about trying to get away.”

No evidence, but a confession

At 4:40 a.m. Sunday, after nine hours of interrogation, Thibodeaux confessed, stitching together a story with details he gleaned from his interrogators.

“I didn’t — I didn’t know that I had done it,” he told investigators. “I would say that I got scared, so I killed her.”

He passed out on the way to jail. “When I woke up, I knew the damage was done,” he said. “You can scream as loud as you want, but no one is hearing.”

Within 36 hours, new facts about the crime emerged — details that didn’t match Thibodeaux’s confession.

He confessed to rape; the autopsy showed no sexual contact. He said he used his hands to choke her; the autopsy showed she wasn’t choked by hand. He said he hit her with his hand; the autopsy showed she was bludgeoned with a heavy object, her skull fractured. He said he left her lying face down; she was left face up.

Six weeks later, forensic results on 86 pieces of physical evidence confirmed there was no rape, no sexual contact and nothing that connected Thibodeaux to the girl, her body, clothing or crime scene.

But prosecutors had his confession to rape and murder.

“A confession is the most powerful, incriminating evidence law enforcement can obtain,” said Steve Kaplan, a Minneapolis lawyer who later became one of Thibodeaux’s lead post-conviction attorneys. “Once the jury hears that confession, you’re 95 percent on your way to conviction. The average juror can’t believe anyone would give a false confession, especially to a heinous crime.”

But since 1989, the Innocence Project has found that 31 percent of 330 DNA exonerees were convicted based on false confessions, admissions or guilty pleas.

Many who falsely confess said they did so thinking it would put a stop to a grueling interrogation. They believed the truth would come out later.

Thibodeaux’s trial began on a Monday — Sept. 29, 1997, a little more than a year after his arrest. That Friday, the jury deliberated an hour and returned with its verdict: guilty of first degree murder.

The words numbed Thibodeaux.

The next day, the jury found him guilty of aggravated rape while murdering the 14-year-old. He was sentenced to die.

Shackled and riding in the back of a squad car to Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola., he kept his eyes on the night sky. He never expected to see stars again.

Making peace with death

Amid the monotony and isolation of death row, Thibodeaux spiraled into a void he couldn’t escape. Like a zoo animal, he paced. Five steps each way around the cell — one, two, three, four, five, turn. When the sweltering summer heat pushed the temperature past 100, he sat motionless for hours.

“It’s about as lonely as it gets. You miss the sense of touch,” he said. “The walls start to close in on you. You watch friends walk away to be executed. One day they would come for me.”

Not wanting to prolong the misery, Thibodeaux decided against launching a string of appeals that likely would keep him languishing on death row for decades.

“The grave is the only way out,” he said.

Then Denise LeBoeuf, an attorney working for the Capital Post-Conviction Project of Louisiana, walked into his life.

She sat in the prison visiting room, looking at a man who seemed more like a boy behind large wire-rimmed glasses. He was thin, depressed, fragile-looking, she said. She was convinced Thibodeaux was innocent and wanted a chance to prove it.

He decided to let her try.

Even after Thibodeaux’s routine appeals were denied, LeBoeuf refused to give up. Others joined forces with her and colleague Caroline Tillman. The Minneapolis law firm Fredrikson & Byron, having recently lost a death-row case in Louisiana, dedicated its resources to the fight on a pro bono basis. The Innocence Project and its co-founder, New York lawyer Barry Scheck, also signed on.

For the first time in Thibodeaux’s life there were people who believed in him, and were ready to fight to save him.

Louisiana State Penitentiary’s death row is housed in a new, modern facility.

Thibodeaux got up one morning and sat on the edge of his prison cot, staring at the cigarette in one hand, the lighter in the other.

“Man, I’m tired of this,” he thought, and tossed the cigarettes. He began exercising.

He counted out push-ups, jumping jacks, squats and situps. He threw his trial transcript and some magazines in a laundry bag and lifted the weight. During the three hours a week he was allowed in the yard, he ran within the confines of the fence.

Read the Bible. Make coffee using a handkerchief for a filter. Clean the cell. Brush teeth. Wash face. Exercise. Read. Do puzzles. Exercise. Shower. Clean the cell again. Listen to the radio. Read.

Routine gave him focus; religion and faith in his legal team gave him the will to survive another day. “We all have to have something to believe in,” he said.

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Group Optimistic Death Penalty Petition Effort Will Succeed

August 2.  2015

Organizers of a campaign to reinstate Nebraska’s death penalty say they’re cautiously optimistic they’ll gather enough signatures to place the issue on the 2016 ballot.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty has less than a month remaining to gather about 58,000 signatures before the August 27th deadline. The group was launched on June 1st with heavy financial backing from Gov. Pete Ricketts and his father, billionaire TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts.

A monthly financial statement released Friday by Nebraskans for the Death Penalty shows Gov. Ricketts donated $100,000 in July, matching his $100,000 June donation for a total of $200,000.

In all, the group raised nearly $400,000 in cash in July. The largest donation came from the conservative, Washington-based Judicial Crisis Network, which gave $200,000.

Nebraskans for the Death Penalty spokesman Chris Peterson says the group has collected signatures from all counties except for Sioux County, but declined to release how many have been gathered so far.

The effort began after Nebraska lawmakers abolished the death penalty last spring despite the governor’s veto.

Danielle Conrad, who is leading the Nebraskans for Public Safety campaign against the referendum, says her group will prepare a “strong and competitive” campaign if the issue makes it to the ballot.