USA NEWS

FLORIDA – Death Row inmate demands Irish government help on appeal – Michael Fitzpatrick

February 2, 2014

Reprieve, a UK-based legal charity, has censured the Irish government for failing to provide adequate support to Michael Fitzpatrick, an Irish citizen who spent over a decade on death row in Florida and is now up for a retrial. The Irish government has denied the allegation.

Fitzpatrick, who was born in the US, was granted dual Irish citizenship in September 2013. He was eligible to apply through one of his grandmothers, who was born in Tipperary and immigrated to America.

According to a statement released by Reprieve, which aids in cases around the world where it feels human rights are most at risk, the Irish government refused to send a representative to a key hearing in Fitzpatrick’s case on January 10.

“It is standard practice for government officials to provide extensive consular assistance to nationals imprisoned abroad, including attending hearings and trials to ensure that minimum standards are upheld,” the release said.

Capital punishment was abolished in Ireland in 1964.

Fitzpatrick, 51, was convicted in 2001 for the 1996 rape and first-degree murder of Laura Romines, 28, who was found in the early hours of August 18 wandering a rural road in Land O’Lakes, Florida, naked and with her throat slit. She was hospitalized and died three weeks later.

Romines told first responders at the scene that she had been attacked by a man named “Steve,” who investigators first presumed to be Stephen Kirk, a motel security guard. Romines had been staying with Kirk and his wife. Kirk was exculpated by a “significant amount” of evidence, including numerous witnesses who had seen him at work at the time of the attack.

Romines’ boyfriend, Joe Galbert, who had recently kicked her out of the Motel 6 room where they had been living, was eliminated as a suspect because he was in jail at the time.

Police zeroed in on Fitzpatrick, who had been working as a pizza delivery man, because witnesses reported seeing him with Romines at various points the day before, and because the semen found by a SAVE (sexual assault victim examination) performed on Romines at the hospital was identified as his. After first denying that he had any sexual encounter with Romines, Fitzpatrick claimed that it was consensual and had taken place on the morning of the 17th.

Fingernail scrapings taken from Romines during the SAVE test indicated the potential involvement of another, unidentified male.

In 2001, Fitzpatrick was sentenced with 30 years in prison and the death penalty, to be served concurrently. His direct appeal was affirmed.

His post-conviction appeal began in 2005, and on June 27 of last year the Florida Supreme Court unanimously upheld the circuit court’s decision that Fitzpatrick should be granted a retrial due to overwhelming evidence that his first attorney, Bill Ebel, failed to defend him adequately.

Mark Gruber, one of the attorneys from Capital Collateral Regional Counsel who handled Fitzpatrick’s post-conviction appeal, told IrishCentral that Ebel “had the case for four years and never obtained the assistance of anyone. Not a co-counsel, not an expert witness, not a private investigator. The prosecution brought in expert witnesses, a medical examiner, and there just wasn’t any rebuttal. . . . The prosecutor made that exact argument during closing arguments to the jury: ‘Here’s all this scientific evidence that we brought in and there hasn’t been any challenge to it.’ So that’s what we did in post-conviction.”

The medical experts consulted for the post-conviction proceedings stated that many of the conclusions drawn by the state in Fitzpatrick’s first trial were inaccurate or unfounded, and that some of the experts it brought to the stand were not qualified to testify in that capacity.

After Fitzpatrick’s citizenship was confirmed in September, Reprieve asked the Irish government to become involved in his case. Soon after, the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) issued a release stating that they were “providing consular assistance to Mr. Fitzpatrick and [would] notify the relevant US authorities of our interest in the case.”

At the January 10 hearing, the state was attempting to link Fitzpatrick to the unsolved 1992 murder of a woman in Tampa, FL. According to Fitzpatrick’s current attorney, Phil Hindahl, the hearing has been extended and will continue on February 27.

In Reprieve’s most recent release, Maya Foa, Director of the death penalty team at Reprieve, said: “Michael has already spent more than ten years on death row because of a horrifically unfair first trial. The Irish government could step in to ensure that history does not repeat itself and yet they are refusing to do even the bare minimum.”

In response to inquiries made to the Consulate General of Ireland in Atlanta, under whose jurisdiction Florida falls, the DFA Press Office stated via email that the department is “offering full consular assistance to Mr. Michael Fitzpatrick and will continue to do so as required. . . . We have notified the relevant US authorities of our interest in the case, which is going through normal judicial procedure in the United States.

“Departmental representatives would not routinely attend such hearings, particularly when we are satisfied that the Irish citizen involved has full access to legal counsel. We do maintain contact with the citizen’s lawyers to ensure that we are informed about proceedings, and we are also in contact with the NGO Reprieve on this case.”

The email also noted that, although the Irish government is not automatically entitled to consular prison visits with American citizens being tried in a US court, they had “sought and were granted one, which was undertaken by the Consul General Paul Gleason based in Atlanta in October 2013.”

Fitzpatrick’s attorney confirmed this. “I’ve had contact with the Consulate General of Ireland [in Atlanta] and I think that they intend on appearing in future hearings. As far as the hearing on January 10, for some reason they weren’t able to attend. I do know that [Atlanta Consul General] Paul Gleason, has been to the local jail and has met with Mr. Fitzpatrick. It was several months ago, but he has offered and is providing consular services, whatever that entails. . . so that’s their role right now as far as their input and their participation in the trial.”

The communications officers at Reprieve declined to provide further information as to what steps they would like to see the Irish government take on Fitzpatrick’s behalf.

Fitzpatrick’s retrial will begin on June 16.

KENTUCKY – Lone woman on Ky death row loses appeal – Virginia Susan Caudill

february 3, 2014 (wowktv,com)

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) – A federal judge has rejected an appeal from the lone woman awaiting execution in Kentucky after concluding her attorney wasn’t deficient at trial.

U.S. District Judge Danny C. Reeves turned away claims by 53-year-old Virginia Susan Caudill that her lawyer committed numerous errors during her joint trial with a co-defendant, 53-year-old Johnathan Wayne Goforth.

Caudill and Goforth were convicted in 2000 in Lexington of robbing and killing 73-year-old Lonetta White by bludgeoning her to death with a hammer on March 15, 1998. White’s body was then put in the trunk of her own car, which was set ablaze.

Prosecutors say the pair fled to Florida and Mississippi in the months after the slaying. Police arrested Caudill in New Orleans about eight months after the killing.

Pampa : DNA hearing set in case of Texas death row inmate – Hank Skinner

february 3, 2014 (AP)

PAMPA, TX — A hearing is set regarding recent DNA testing in the case of a Texas death row inmate convicted of a triple slaying in the Panhandle.

Attorneys for the state and Hank Skinner’s attorneys will present testimony during the two-day hearing set to begin Monday in Pampa.

Skinner’s attorneys hope to show he didn’t kill a woman and her two sons in 1993. The 52-year-old was convicted of capital murder in 1995.

Court documents filed by the state say results of DNA testing done at a law enforcement lab “further confirm” Skinner’s guilt. Skinner’s attorneys say more sophisticated test results from an independent lab make doubts about his guilt “too weighty” to allow his execution.

Each side will submit written arguments after the hearing. The judge will later release his findings.

FLORIDA – When parents kill children, death penalty is rare, experts say …

february 2, 2014 (orlondosentinel)

After a kick to the head, 15-pound infant Ayden Perry had no chance for survival, police said.

 

Ayden was 2 months, 23 days old when he was pronounced dead last February, and St. Cloud police say his sleep-deprived father, Larry Perry, delivered the fatal blow.

 

That beating on Feb. 13, 2013, put Perry on the short list of Central Florida parents deemed among the worst — suspects who could face capital punishment if convicted of killing their own children.

Six Central Florida children died in 2013 as a result of abuse or neglect from parents or guardians, the Florida Department of Children and Families said.

 

Of those cases, Ayden’s and Ke’Andre Coleman’s fatal beatings were the only ones to become death-penalty cases in Central Florida.

Ke’Andre’s mother, Mikkia Lewis, and her boyfriend, Joe McCaskell, are accused of beating and torturing the 4-year-old boy to death in April in South Daytona, an arrest report said.

 

A medical examiner said Ke’Andre was severely beaten with two shoes and forced to exercise to exhaustion. His shoulders were dislocated and his thighs were hemorrhaging.

 

McCaskell, 32, admitted to beating the child and told investigators he saw Lewis, 22, beat Ke’Andre while screaming that she didn’t want him anymore, the report states.

 

A grand jury indicted the couple on first-degree murder charges in August and Volusia County prosecutors filed a notice of intent to seek the death penalty in October.

 

For Perry, prosecutors initially decided not to pursue death but then switched gears and filed a notice of intent in December, nearly a year after his young son’s killing.

 

Experts say unless parents have a history of violent behavior, it’s rare for parents accused of killing their own children to become candidates for the death penalty — which is usually set aside for the most egregious acts of premeditated murder.

 

And it’s even more rare for a jury to actually recommend death for these parents after a guilty verdict.

 

That’s because, although they won’t excuse the crime, jurors can sympathize with crimes of passion provoked by complex and deep-seated mental health or family issues, according to Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C.-based research nonprofit.

 

“There are understandable difference between that and a serial killer,” Dieter said. “The family dynamics that lead to that kind of murder, it’s something juries can relate to — even if they would never do it.”

In the last child-abuse death-penalty case resolved in Central Florida, Orange County father Keith Skinner pleaded guilty to the lesser charge of aggravated child abuse to avoid a possible death sentence.

 

Skinner was released from prison in 2008 after serving four years on a separate child-abuse conviction, Department of Corrections records show.

 

After his release, Skinner had another child and in 2010, he beat that child — 8-month-old Triumph Skinner — to death.

 

Ayden’s mom couldn’t pay bail

 

Perry had no criminal history before his arrest in Ayden’s death.

 

He had been caring for Ayden alone for about two weeks after the boy’s mother, Kathy Barnes, was arrested on charges of trafficking oxycodone. Bail for Barnes had been set at $50,000 and she was forced to stay in the Osceola County Jail because she couldn’t pay.

On Feb. 13, Perry told police that no matter what he did, he couldn’t get Ayden to stop crying.

In the autopsy report, a medical examiner noted that before the beating, Ayden had likely been well taken care of. He was developing normally and growing at a healthy rate. The nearly 3-month-old weighed 15 pounds and was 23 inches long the evening of his death.

That night, Perry said he tried to quiet Ayden by first turning on the vacuum cleaner, hoping the drone would soothe him. When that didn’t work, Perry put the boy in a rocking swing then tried to feed him.

 

Perry said he didn’t have enough help with the child and hadn’t been getting enough sleep so when Ayden refused to stop crying, Perry snapped.

“I pretty much went crazy. I can’t do this [expletive] by myself,” 29-year-old Larry Perry told an operator when he called 911 about 10:40 p.m. “I called the police because I know what I did and I deserve whatever.”

 

911 call captured last breaths

 

Police say Perry slammed the infant into a bedroom wall.

 

The little boy’s blood had soaked through red sheets on Perry’s queen-sized bed and a blanket on the living-room couch. Two trails of blood were also streaked across the living-room carpet, a police report said.

 

According to police, Perry also kicked the child in the torso and stomped on his head so hard that he left behind a shoe-print bruise that spanned from just above the infant’s hairline to his mouth.

 

Perry told 911 dispatchers that his son didn’t stop crying until Perry “twisted his neck.” Ayden could be heard gasping for breath in the background of the 911 call, the report said.

 

Ayden was pronounced dead within two hours at Arnold Palmer Hospital for Children. His cause of death was listed as blunt-force head trauma.

 

Now, Perry’s life is in the hands of the Public Defender’s Office, which may need to regroup and change its strategy to argue the case now that death is being considered if he is convicted.

 

Dieter, with the Death Penalty Information Center, said it will be up to Perry’s attorney to make a jury believe Perry acted in the heat of the moment and though he may have been a threat to his son, that does not mean he is a threat to society in general.

 

“(The jury) will need to hear things they can relate to,” Dieter said. “The defense will need to tell the story of the family and put it in an understandable way. Put it in context and sometimes jurors will at least lessen the punishment.”

If he avoids death, Perry will be sentenced to life in prison if he is found guilty of first-degree murder at trial

Atlanta – Prosecutor John Tanner’s religious remarks get killer new death penalty hearing – Anthony Farina

january, 31, 2014

DAYTONA BEACH — A federal appeals court in Atlanta, citing former state attorney John Tanner’s biblical references during sentencing, has thrown out the death sentence against a man convicted in the killing of a teenage worker during a robbery at a Taco Bell in Daytona Beach in 1992.

Anthony Farina

The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta has ordered a new sentencing for Anthony Farina, 40, who was convicted in the slaying of 17-year-old Michelle Van Ness during the robbery on May 9, 1992, at the Taco Bell on Beville Road. Also convicted in the killing was Farina’s brother Jeffrey Farina, the triggerman.

The brothers forced four workers into a freezer and then Jeffrey Farina shot three of them before the gun misfired. That’s when Anthony Farina handed his brother a knife and Jeffrey Farina stabbed a fourth employee. All survived except for Van Ness.

Tanner, who lost his bid for re-election in 2008 against R.J. Larizza, could not be reached Thursday.

The state plans to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Both brothers received the death sentence but the Florida Supreme Court reduced Jeffrey Farina’s to life because he as 16 at the time he killed Van Ness.

The appeals court said Tanner went too far when questioning the Rev. James Davis, a prison pastor who had been called by defense attorney William Hathaway to testify about counseling Anthony Farina at prison.

Tanner drew heavily from the Bible during his questioning of Davis, “urging the implementation of God’s law,” the 11th Circuit ruling states.

“While elevating his own station as divinely-ordained authority, the prosecutor made clear that the death penalty was the sole acceptable punishment under divine law, noting how Christ himself refused to grant a felon forgiveness from the death penalty.”

full article : click here

USA: The death penalty has become a game of chess

Americans have developed a nearly insatiable appetite for morbid details about crime, as any number of docudramas, Netflix series and Hollywood movies attest.

There is 1 notable exception: executions. Here, we’d just rather not know too much about current practices. Better to just think of prisoners quietly going to sleep, permanently.

The blind eye we turn to techniques of execution is giving cover to disturbing changes with lethal injection. The drugs that have traditionally been used to create the deadly “cocktail” administered to the condemned are becoming harder to get. Major manufacturers are declining to supply them for executions, and that has led states to seek other options.

That raises questions about how effective the lethal drugs will be. At least 1 execution appears to have been botched. In January, an inmate in Ohio was seen gasping for more than 10 minutes during his execution. He took 25 minutes to die. The state had infused him with a new cocktail of drugs not previously used in executions.

States have been forced to turn to relatively lightly regulated “compounding pharmacies,” companies that manufacture drugs usually for specific patient uses. And they’d rather you not ask for details. Death row inmates and their attorneys, on the other hand, are keenly interested in how an approaching execution is going to be carried out. Will it be humane and painless or cruel and unusual?

Lawyers for Herbert Smulls, a convicted murderer in Missouri, challenged the compound drug he was due to be given, but the Supreme Court overturned his stay of execution. A district court had ruled that Missouri had made it “impossible” for Smulls “to discover the information necessary to meet his burden.” In other words, he was condemned to die and there was nothing that attorneys could do because of the secrecy.

Smulls was executed Wednesday.

Missouri, which has put 3 men to death in 3 months, continues shrouding significant details about where the drugs are manufactured and tested. In December, a judge at the 8th U.S. Circuit of Appeals wrote a scathing ruling terming Missouri’s actions as “using shadow pharmacies hidden behind the hangman’s hood.”

States have long taken measures to protect the identities of guards and medical personnel directly involved with carrying out death penalty convictions. That is a sensible protection. But Missouri claims the pharmacy and the testing lab providing the drugs are also part of the unnamed “execution team.”

That’s a stretch. And the reasoning is less about protecting the firm and more about protecting the state’s death penalty from scrutiny.

The states really are in a bind. European manufacturers no longer want to be involved in the U.S. market for killing people. So they have cut off exports of their products to U.S. prisons.

First, sodium thiopental, a key to a long-used lethal injection cocktail became unavailable. Next, the anesthetic propofol was no longer available. At one point, Missouri was in a rush to use up its supply before the supply reached its expiration date.

Next, the state decided to switch to pentobarbital. So, along with many of the more than 30 states that have the death penalty, Missouri is jumping to find new drugs, chasing down new ways to manufacture them.

Information emerged that at least some of Missouri’s lethal drug supply was tested by an Oklahoma analytical lab that had approved medicine from a Massachusetts pharmacy responsible for a meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people.

For those who glibly see no problem here, remember that the U.S. Constitution protects its citizens from “cruel and unusual punishment.” But attorneys for death row inmates are finding they can’t legally test whether a new compounded drug meets that standard because key information is being withheld. Besides, we citizens have a right to know how the death penalty is carried out.

All of this adds to the growing case against the death penalty, showing it as a costly and irrational part of the criminal justice system. We know the threat of it is not a deterrent. We know it is far more costly to litigate than seeking sentences for life with no parole. We know extensive appeals are excruciating for the families of murder victims. And we know that some of society’s most unrepentant, violent killers somehow escape it.

And now we’ve got states going to extremes to find the drugs – and hide information about how they got then – just to continue the killing.

ABOUT THE WRITER Mary Sanchez is an opinion-page columnist for The Kansas City Star

(source: Fresno Bee) 

 

Supply of lethal injection drugs expires, Virginia electrocutions could return

feb.01.2014 (nbc12)

RICHMOND, VA (WWBT) 

While states across the country are running low on lethal injection drugs, Virginia’s stockpile has expired, and electrocutions could return.

 

A proposal is now headed to the Virginia Senate, a bill that would make electrocutions the default method of capital punishment if lethal injections are not available.

 

The Commonwealth’s supply of lethal injection drugs expired Nov. 30, 2013, and eight people are currently on Virginia’s death row. There are no executions scheduled, largely because of the lengthy appeal process.

 

But in an interview Friday, Virginia ACLU Executive Director Claire Guthrie Gastañaga said the debate now unfolding in Richmond could worsen problems already inherent with capital punishment.

 

“We have people in Virginia still in jeopardy of being executed for being innocent,” Gastañaga said. “And they’re up there debating how we should kill people, not whether we should kill people.”

 

A companion bill has already passed the Virginia House of Delegates in a 64-32 vote, with more than half of delegates from the Richmond area supporting the proposal.

 

In an email from the Virginia Department of Corrections, Director of Communications Lisa E. Kinney said the Department is now exploring options to purchase new lethal injection drugs. Other parts of the country are currently facing a shortage, partly because European companies hesitant to have their drugs used for executions.

 

“[Virginia’] drugs have come from a domestic company,” Kinney said. “The Department has no position on the pending bills.”

 

Questions on whether forced electrocutions are humane will continue take center stage if the proposed legislation heads to Governor Terry McAuliffe’s desk. But in a phone interview Friday, the patron of the Senate bill, Sen. Bill Carrico (R-Grayson) said gruesome tales of electrocution are often exaggerated.

 

“We see nothing to the extent of the horror stories of the Green Mile, the movies people watch,” Carrico said.

 

Proponents of the electric chair also point to the 25 minutes an Ohio man took to die, with a new combination of lethal injection drugs.

 

“When people start seeing that these drugs are not becoming exactly effective, it is a more inhumane way to do it than electrocution,” Carrico said. “And what about the victims’ families? Many of them could never see their loved ones again because of these heinous crimes. We need to think about them.”

Carrico’s proposal, Senate Bill 607, is expected to receive a full Senate vote next week

Defense lawyers: Skinner won’t appear in Pampa

31.01.2014

Hank Skinner, the Texas death-row inmate convicted of murdering his live-in girlfriend, Twila Busby, and her sons, Randy and Elwin “Scooter” Caler, will not be attending an evidentiary hearing scheduled in Pampa Monday and Tuesday.

An employee who works for Skinner’s defense attorneys, Douglas Robinson and Robert Owen, told The Pampa News that both the state and defense attorneys will offer witnesses and other evidence, such as laboratory reports, to show what results were produced by the DNA testing that has been performed in Skinner’s case over the past 18 months. The attorneys will try to argue about what inferences can be drawn from those test results, she said.

A series of tests on DNA taken from the crime scene have been performed since June 2012, two by a Texas Department of Safety crime lab in Lubbock and one by an independent laboratory in Virginia.

The Texas Attorney General’s Office, who is presenting the state’s case to the court, claims the DNA tests overwhelmingly show that evidence collected at the crime scene consistently shows that Skinner is guilty of strangling and bludgeoning Busby in the living room of her home on New Year’s Eve 1993.

The defense attorneys claim the DNA tests performed at the Virginia lab point to Robert Donnell, Twila Busby’s deceased uncle, as the real killer in the triple homicide. The attorneys say it is well known that Donnell was making unwelcome advances to Busby on the night she was killed.

Judge Steven R. Emmert of the 31st District will not issue a definitive ruling at the conclusion of the hearing, the employee said.

Instead, the parties will have an opportunity to submit written arguments in late February, and the judge will issue a definitive ruling after considering those arguments.

A ruling in Skinner’s favor in this proceeding would not automatically reverse his conviction.

(Source: The Pampa News) #deathpenalty #hankskinner

The Youngest Person In U.S. To Receive The Death Penalty May Get A New Trial

George Stinney may receive new trial 70 years after his execution in South Carolina
By Ja’Neal Johnson

70 years ago, a 14 year old black teenager named George Stinney, would become the youngest to be executed in the history of the United States and of that century for the murder of two young white girls, Betty June Binnicker and Mary Emma Thames in the small town Alcolu, South Carolina in 1944.

It would take the all-white jury only 10 minutes to decide whether the young quiet Stinney was guilty. His defense lawyer made no effort to prove if George Stinney was innocent. No witnesses were called for his defense or no cross examination. George Stinney’s family would have to flee their home before the trial.His lawyer at the time would not file an appeal on behalf of Stinney. George Stinney would be executed by electrocution just 84 days after the two white girls were found. Today is a different story. The family of George Stinny hired lawyers to ask for a new trial. The presiding Judge Carmen T. Mullen will make a decision based on both sides. One side that was never heard during the trial in 1944.

Dr. Amanda Salas, a forensic psychiatrist testified that George Stinny’s confession does not match the evidence. Dr. Salas stated, “It is my professional opinion to a reasonable degree of medical certainty that the confession given by George Stinney on March 24, 1944 is best characterized by a coerced compliant, false confession. It is not reliable.” Seven-member board of Parole and Pardons spokesman Peter O’Boyle said Stinney’s application is pending and its investigation should conclude next week. Depending on Mullen’s ruling, the board could hear the case within a few months.

Ernest “Chip” Finney, third circuit solicitor urged Judge Carmen T. Mullen to leave the case alone, despite its flaws. “This would not happen today,” Finney said. “While we along with others have questions about the 1944 trial and its outcome..the evidence here is too speculative and the record is too uncertain for the motion to succeed.”

One of the lawyers working on the case Clarendon County attorney Steve McKenzie, said, “I think we got George Stinney’s story out there,” he said. “I think we got some of the family’s story out there that back in 1944 no one was able to get out there.”

There are no official records of the original trial.

related article

 

Secrecy Behind Executions

jan, 29, 2014 (Nytimes)

It is bad enough that the death penalty is barbaric, racist and arbitrary in its application, but it is also becoming less transparent as the dwindling number of death-penalty states work to hide the means by which they kill people.

The increased secrecy around lethal-injection drug protocols is only the latest tactic of pro-death-penalty legislators and corrections officials around the country. In Missouri, this secrecy was upheld last week by a federal appeals court, which denied a condemned inmate’s constitutional claim that he is entitled to basic information about the drugs that would be used to put him to death.

Herbert Smulls was executed late Wednesday for the 1991 murder of a jewelry-store owner. Missouri refused to name the pharmacy or pharmacies involved in producing the execution drugs.

Missouri’s secrecy, along with new legislation in states such as Georgia and Tennessee, is a response to a mounting “crisis” in death-penalty states: Because many drug manufacturers now refuse to supply drugs for use in executions, states are scrambling to replenish their stocks. This often means turning to compounding pharmacies, which exist in a largely unregulated world.

In 2011, the Drug Enforcement Administration seized Georgia’s supply of one lethal-injection drug after concerns that it had been illegally imported from Britain. And last fall, Louisiana officials sought to buy drugs from an Oklahoma pharmacy, the Apothecary Shoppe, which was not licensed to provide drugs in Louisiana.

There have been multiple reports of previously untested drug combinations leading to botched executions, which is a polite way of saying the condemned person suffered greatly while being put to death. (On Jan. 16, an Ohio man, Dennis McGuire, appeared to gasp and choke after being administered a new combination of lethal-injection drugs.) States should simply admit that they don’t really know how these drug protocols will work, but instead they have tried to hide almost all information about the drugs and who makes them — increasingly through legislation.

Some courts have had little patience for this behavior. In July, a Georgia judge issued a last-minute stay of execution to one inmate, reasoning that the state’s secrecy law “makes it impossible” to show that the drug protocol violates the Eighth Amendment.

But, on Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that Mr. Smulls had no constitutional claim against Missouri’s practice because he had not demonstrated that the “risk of severe pain” from the state’s intended drug protocol would be substantially greater than a readily available alternative. As the dissent argued, this “places an absurd burden on death row inmates,” who must identify “a readily available alternative method for their own executions,” even though the state won’t let them see the method it plans to use.

Meanwhile, Missouri and other states race to execute inmates using new and untested drug protocols developed on the fly and under a cowardly shroud of secrecy. Mr. Smulls was the third inmate executed in Missouri since November. In some states, lawmakers have even proposed reintroducing older execution methods, such as the firing squad and electrocution, so as to avoid the escalating legal battles over lethal injection.

In the end, the argument over what is the most “humane” way to kill someone only obscures the larger point, which is that, in the 21st century, the United States has no business putting people to death by any means. Public support for capital punishment has reached a 40-year low, and virtually all other Western societies have rejected it. It will end here, too, but not until this despicable practice is dragged out into the open for all to see.