Arthur

Alabama – High cost of death penalty

april 11, 2012  source : http://www.timesdaily.com

With states like Alabama having to slash services over monetary woes, it’s an appropriate time to reconsider the high costs of the death penalty.

Many TimesDaily readers have expressed the opinion that Sheffield native and death row inmate Tommy Arthur has been in the news much too often in recent months.

They are tired of the seemingly endless appeals process that has allowed a convicted killer to remain on death row for 29 years. Since Arthur was sentenced in 1983, the courts have upheld his conviction in a murder-for-hire plot involving Muscle Shoals resident Troy Wicker. But at the same time, Arthur has avoided execution five times through the appeals process, most recently in late March.

One reader asked how much the efforts to execute Arthur have cost compared to simply sentencing him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. That’s a good question, considering the dire budget situation facing the state.

The answer is not simple, but by comparing Alabama to other states we can get a rough idea of the price.

The annual cost to house one state inmate in 2009 was about $15,118, according to the Alabama Department of Corrections. If 70-year-old Arthur reached the lifespan of the average U.S. male, he would serve a total of 35 years for capital murder at a cost to the state of about $529,130. That does not include the cost of his initial trial.

A report from the Death Penalty Information Center offers what it says is a “very conservative” estimate of $30 million to reach a single execution. This amount factors in the millions wasted on cases where there is never an actual execution.

One specific example is Maryland, where a legislative commission recommended abolishing the death penalty after a study showed the state was paying $37 million per execution.

Much of the costs involved in executing an inmate revolves around exhausting every effort to ensure the person is guilty. As DNA evidence has proved in recent years, the state doesn’t always get it right. The fact that Alabama has no law ensuring access to DNA testing for people convicted of capital crimes and does not require that biological evidence be preserved throughout the capital inmate’s incarceration is among several moral concerns.

But beyond those moral issues remains the nagging thought that revoking the death penalty could make a substantial difference as the state faces a $330 million budget shortfall.

With Arthur and 198 other inmates on death row, the state Legislature should undertake an in-depth study of the cost specific to Alabama’s death penalty.

 

Thomas Arthur – Cruel and unusual?: Death row inmate challenges state execution procedure

april 1, 2012 source : http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com

A death row inmate who had his execution blocked by a federal court that cited Alabama’s “secrecy” concerning its execution procedure says that procedure could leave him conscious while drugs that stop his breathing and his heart flow through his body.

Attorneys for Thomas Arthur, who was convicted in a 1982 murder-for-hire scheme, argue that the use of pentobarbital to anesthetize a prisoner during an execution violates Arthur’s Eighth Amendment protections.

Suhana Han, Arthur’s attorney, claims the drug does not work fast enough to prevent the inmate from feeling the potentially painful effects of the two drugs that follow, and that the state’s secrecy surrounding its execution protocols makes it impossible to determine whether its use constitutes cruel and unusual punishment, or even if the state follows its own procedures during executions.

Documents filed by Arthur’s attorneys cite the execution of inmate Eddie Powell last year, in which officials apparently did not pinch Powell, the final step of a consciousness test before the fatal drugs are administered.

“What we’re asking the court to do is allow us the opportunity to prove our claim,” Han said. “Alabama has never had its lethal injection process challenged at trial on the merits.”

Arthur was scheduled to be executed March 29, but the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals on March 21 overturned a lower court’s dismissal of Arthur’s appeal on the use of pentobarbital, finding there was no evidence that Alabama was conducting executions in a constitutional manner.

The situation, the court wrote, was “exacerbated by Alabama’s policy maintaining secrecy surrounding every aspect of its three-drug execution method.

“It is certainly not speculative and indeed plausible that Alabama will disparately treat Arthur because the protocol is not certain and could be unexpectedly changed for his execution,” the court wrote.

Brian Corbett, a spokesman for the Alabama Department of Corrections, declined comment last week, saying he was not at liberty to discuss the state’s execution procedures. The Alabama Attorney General’s office also declined comment on the case.

Arthur was convicted of murder in the 1982 death of Muscle Shoals businessman Troy Wicker Jr. Wicker’s murder occurred while Arthur was in a work release program after being convicted of murdering the sister of his common-law wife in 1977. Arthur has maintained that he is innocent of Wicker’s murder.

The state Department of Corrections does not release information on its execution procedures, but the protocols have come out in litigation over capital punishment.

The condemned are first administered pentobarbital, rendering the condemned unconscious. After the pentobarbital, the inmate is given pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the inmate’s muscles and stops breathing. Finally, the condemned receives a dosage of potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

Alabama, like other states with the death penalty, had used sodium thiopental until 2011, when Hospira, the manufacturer of the drug, stopped making it in the United States. Pentobarbital, which had been used by veterinarians and in physician-assisted suicide in some countries, was adopted as a replacement by most states.

The Death Penalty Information Center said the drug was used in 35 executions in the United States last year, including five in Alabama.

According to court filings, sodium thiapentol takes about 60 seconds to render an inmate unconscious. But Arthur’s attorneys, citing affidavits from two experts, argue that pentobarbital can take between 15 to 60 minutes to reach “maximum effect, which, in the context of a lethal injection, is an inmate’s anesthetization,” a brief filed by Arthur’s attorneys said.

With executions usually taking place within a half-hour attorneys for Arthur argue, that an inmate could feel the effects of the other two drugs before the pentobarbital takes hold.

“The Supreme Court recognizes that if an inmate is not unconscious, that will cause excruciating pain,” Han said. “If an inmate is not unconscious, (pancuronium bromide) is comparable to feeling like you’re being buried alive. The third drug, we’re told, is comparable to your veins and your heart being on fire.”

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