United States

US – Lethal Injection As the Death Penalty’s Last Stand

april 16,2012 source :http://www.huffingtonpost.com David A. Love *Witness to innocence*

Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the death penalty in America? All of it might come down to a basic issue of supply.

So, what do you do if you are a hangman who runs out of rope? To put it in more conventional terms, suppose you are a state that executes people by lethal injection, but you’re running out of the lethal chemicals used to put people down like animals.

Perhaps you’d do what some states have done and buy your chemicals on the black market, so to speak.

In March, Judge Richard J. Leon, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., issued an order andopinion banning the importation of sodium thiopental, an anesthetic and the first of a three-chemical cocktail administered to a condemned inmate. Once the inmate is unconscious, he or she is injected with pancuronium bromide, which paralyzes the person, and potassium chloride, which causes death through cardiac arrest.

According to the judge, it was disappointing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) broke the law by allowing shipments of the drug from foreign countries, unapproved for the purpose of executions. Without FDA approval, according to the judge, the sodium thiopental would fail to put the inmate to sleep, causing “conscious suffocation, pain, and cardiac arrest.”

Judge Leon ordered the FDA to notify state corrections departments that they must surrender the drug to the FDA.

The drug is only available overseas, as the only U.S. manufacturer recently ceased production last year amid controversy over its use. Moreover, the European Union recently announcedrestrictions on export of the drug. But with sodium thiopental unavailable, the most logical replacement is pentobarbital. This replacement drug, which is a more expensive alternative, has been used by 12 states to put 47 people to death since 2010, according to the Death Penalty information Center, and is widely used to put down animals. In addition, the chemical is used to treat insomnia and as a seizure treatment for epilepsy.

Manufacturers of pentobarbital, including Danish manufacturer Lundbeck, Inc., have made it known to various states that they do not want the drug used for executions. States such as Arizona, Georgia and Texas apparently have stockpiled pentobarbital and say they have enough supply for this year’s executions.

Texas apparently bought $50,000 worth last year and wants to block information on its stockpile, and the state has accused the anti-death penalty group Reprieve of “‘intimidation and commercial harassment’ of manufacturers of medical drugs used in lethal injections.” Arizonahas had its lethal injection protocols challenged, as inmates have sued the state for giving the state’s corrections director too much discretion. Meanwhile, Ohio just resumed executions after a federally-imposed six-month moratorium because prison officials were not following proper procedures. And Alabama stayed an execution in March after the condemned inmate argued that Pentobarbital does not completely sedate and amounts to cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth Amendment.

With both domestic and international public pressure on the purveyors of death, it seems they’re feeling the heat, as well they should. Willing executioners are in short supply, and former executioners have seen enough to know they want no part of it. Further, they have likely killed innocent people. Many doctors are unwilling to break their Hippocratic oath to do no harm, or are forbidden to do so.

Used to extinguish 1,100 lives in 35 states — some of them most certainly innocent — lethal injection is the prominent form of capital punishment in the U.S. Marketed as the clean, humane form of capital punishment, lethal injection was billed as the friendly, painless type of execution. But we should ask, how harmless can you really make a lynching?

If lethal injection falls out of favor, either through a dwindling supply of the poisonous cocktail of death, lack of public support or a court ruling, what do the states do after that? Do they return to the hangman’s noose? That seems unlikely, reminds us too much of the strange fruit hanging from the trees that Billie Holiday used to sing about.

What about the electric chair, which has been known to cook people alive? Or the gas chamber, like the Nazis used to do?

Then there’s the firing squad. Better yet, how about stoning, or drawing and quartering, which is really old school?

Here’s a better idea. Just get rid of the death penalty for good. America is the only Western nation that executed people last year. And the U.S. is in the top five of nations that execute, putting us in league with China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen. We’ll never get it right with the death penalty because executions are so wrong.

No matter how the state kills a person, you can’t wipe the blood from your hands.

David A. Love is the Executive Director of Witness to Innocence, a national nonprofit organization that empowers exonerated death row prisoners and their family members to become effective leaders in the movement to abolish the death penalty.

US – Estimates of Time Spent in Capital and Non-Capital Murder Cases

A Statistical Analysis of Survey Data from Clark County Defense Attorneys
Terance D. Miethe, PhD.
Department of Criminal Justice
University of Nevada, Las Vegas
February 21, 2012

I. Introduction
A survey was designed to provide average estimates of the time spent at various stages of criminal processing for the defense of capital and non-capital murder cases. Defense attorneys were asked to use their personal experiences over the past three years to estimate the number of hours they spent in pretrial, trial, penalty, and post-conviction activities in a “typical” capital and non-capital murder case. Separate questions were asked about their experiences as “lead attorney” and “second chair” in these typical cases. A total of 22 defense attorneys completed the survey. The largest group of survey respondents were attorneys within the Public Defender’s office (n=10), followed by the Special Public Defender’s office (n=9) and the Office of Assigned Counsel (n=3). To provide some context for the time estimates provided by these defense attorneys, this survey data was also supplemented with general case processing information on a sample of 138 murder cases sentenced in District Court between 2009 and 2011. The Clark County Court’s electronic record system was used to identify these murder cases and to construct summary statistics on case processing (e.g., average time between court filing and sentencing; number of total meetings with parties present, number of orders and motions filed). These court statistics were analyzed separately for each major type of sentence (i.e., yearly maximum sentences, life with possibility of parole, life without possibility of parole, and death sentences). For the survey data included in this report, the median score (i.e., the middle score of a distribution) is used as the average estimate of time spent at each stage of criminal processing. The median is the most appropriate measure for these analyses because (1) it minimizes the impact of extreme ratings and (2) the distribution of time estimates across respondents is not normally distributed. Under these conditions, the median, rather than the mean, is the appropriate summary measure of central tendency.

read the full report : click here

More Evidence Against the Death Penalty

april 12, 2012 source : http://www.nytimes.com

Connecticut is poised to become the 17th state without the death penalty and the fifth in five years to abolish it. Gov. Dannel Malloy is expected to sign the repeal bill approved by the Legislature in recent days.

Connecticut is part of a growing movement against capital punishment, with repeal measures now proposed in California, Florida, Georgia, Kansas, Kentucky and Washington. Other states like Ohio, Oregon and Pennsylvania are reviewing their death penalty laws.

This shift comes at a time when new analyses of capital punishment show gross injustice in its application and enormous costs in continuing to impose it. In Connecticut, a powerful, comprehensive study provided evidence that state death sentences are haphazardly meted out, with virtually no connection to the heinousness of the crime.

In California, two former death penalty proponents — a prosecutor who drafted the 1978 ballot initiative that expanded the state’s death penalty and a leading supporter of the 1978 law — are now championing a new ballot measure to repeal the penalty. They point to a study showing that, since 1978, California has spent roughly $4 billion on the death penalty to carry out 13 executions. “The cost of our system of capital punishment is so enormous that any benefit that could be obtained from it — and I now think there’s very little or zero benefit — is so dollar-wasteful that it serves no effective purpose,” Donald Heller, the drafter of the 1978 measure, said recently.

Decades of research show that racial bias pervades death penalty cases. Minority defendants with white victims are much more likely to be sentenced to death than others;35 percent of those executed nationally since 1976 were black, though blacks currently make up 12.6 percent of the population. The problem of inadequate counsel permeates the system, with many indigent defendants sentenced to death after major blunders by court-assigned lawyers. And a horrific number of innocent people have ended up on death row: 17 convicts with death sentences have been exonerated with DNA evidence since 1993, 123 with other evidence since 1973.

Any careful evaluation leads to what the American Law Institute concluded after a reviewof decades of executions: the system cannot be fixed. It is practically impossible to rid the legal process of biases driven by race, class and politics. The growing number of states reconsidering this barbaric system is a welcome sign. Capital punishment, by overwhelming evidence, should be abolished throughout the United States.

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Conn. Ends Death Penalty, But Not For 11 Men On Death Row

april 7 , source : http://www.thedailybeast.com

Can you call it abolition if you’re still executing people? David R. Dow considers Connecticut’s hair-splitting new law, and wonders whether our focus on innocence is to blame.

On the website of The New York Times, there’s an old photo of a man named William Petit standing next to his wife, Jennifer, and their two daughters, Hayley and Michaela, 17 and 11. They look peaceful and content, a portrait of happiness

Dr. Petit is the only one of the four still alive. On Aug. 6, 2007, his wife and daughters were brutally murdered in their Cheshire, Connecticut home. The manner of their shocking deaths helps explain an otherwise bizarre development: The Connecticut legislature is going to abolish the death penalty, but not until the Petit killers are put to death.

In a crime so chilling that even some death-penalty opponents I know reconsidered their opposition, Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevsky entered the Petit house at three in the morning. They beat Dr. Petit unconscious with a baseball bat, tied him up in the basement, and went upstairs. There, Hayes raped Jennifer while Komisarjevsky attacked Michaela. The men strangled Jennifer to death and tied the girls to their beds. Then they set the house on fire.

With his legs still bound, Dr. Petit broke out of the basement and stumbled across the yard.  He screamed to his neighbor for help. Twelve hours later, Hayes and Komisarjevsky were under arrest. Connecticut juries sentenced both men to death.

And now they are the last two men to be sentenced to death in the state, because last week, by a vote of 20 to 16, the Connecticut Senate voted to abolish the death penalty. The bill will now move to the House, where it is certain to pass, before being signed by Gov. Daniel Malloy.

Yet Hayes and Komisarjevsky, along with nine other inmates, remain on Connecticut’s death row, their sentences unaffected by the new law. How can that be? How is it possible for a legislature to decide that the death penalty should be eliminated, but only after we first execute 11 more men?

The morality of the death penalty has nothing to do with error. It is not even about deterrence; and for most people, it is not about cost. It is about belief.

Home Invasion

I believe the answer to that question has to do with two troubling features of the modern anti-death-penalty movement. The first is the excessive reliance on the concept of innocence. The second is the often tepid, tone-deaf response from the abolitionist community to unspeakable crimes like the one that destroyed the Petit family.

The innocence revolution—driven largely by advances in DNA analysis—has been undeniably dramatic. Forty-four states now have innocence projectsdevoted to identifying and helping gain the release of innocent prisoners. Nationwide, nearly three hundred men have walked out of prison exonerated, after DNA proved beyond question we sent the wrong man to jail.

And as these cases began to permeate the public consciousness, death-penalty opponents seized on them as a tactic: None of those 289 exonerated inmates, they said, would have been released if he had been executed. The possibility of error became the central argument in the abolitionist brief.

Measured along one metric, the tactic has paid off: When the most recent abolition becomes official, Connecticut will be the fifth state in the past five years (along with New York, New Jersey, New Mexico, and Illinois) to have repealed the death penalty.

But that metric does not tell the full story. Connecticut has not actually executed anyone since Michael Ross, who waived his appeals, was put to death almost seven years ago. Before Ross, the state had not executed anyone in more than 30 years.  In Illinois, New York, New Jersey, and New Mexico, there were a combined 26 people on death row when capital punishment was stricken from the books.

In contrast, in the remaining death penalty states, more than three thousand men await execution.

With Connecticut now on the abolition side of the ledger, only 10 of the 33 states with a death penalty have executed someone in the past five years. Meanwhile, Texas alone has executed nearly half the people put to death in America since 2007 (102 out of 232).

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California – Judge rejects Raymond man’s request for new trial

march, 31 source : http://www.unionleader.com

BRENTWOOD — A judge rejected a Raymond man’s argument for a new trial, which was based on claims he was wrongfully convicted of raping a 41-year-old woman in 2009.

Raymond Payette, 55, a former Raymond public works employee, claimed he received ineffective assistance from his defense lawyer and that prosecutors engaged in misconduct.

He alleged prosecutors should have never allowed the victim to testify about DNA found on her underwear.

Chief Justice Tina Nadeau heard testimony from Payette’s former lawyer at a hearing in February before reaching her decision on March 22.

Payette is serving 7 to 15 years in state prison after being convicted by a jury of aggravated felonious sexual assault.

Defense lawyer Tom Gleason argued that Payette’s former attorney, Gerard LaFlamme, should have objected to testimony about DNA samples found on the woman’s underwear. The DNA did not match Payette, according to Gleason.

LaFlamme testified he made a tactical decision to not object to the woman’s testimony about the DNA as a means to question her veracity.

Nadeau agreed LaFlamme’s decision was a sound tactic to use at trial.

“Even objectionable testimony can help a defendant’s case,” Nadeau wrote in a five-page order.

During the trial, Payette even argued the sex he had with the woman was consensual, lessening the importance of the testimony, Nadeau noted.

Nadeau also rejected the contention that Payette was barred from testifying in his own defense. LaFlamme testified in February that after analyzing the evidence against his client before and toward the end the trial, he advised against Payette taking the stand, Nadeau wrote. LaFlamme was concerned that Payette was not hold up under questioning by prosecutors.

But the decision whether to testify was ultimately left up to Payette, Nadeau wrote.

The sexual assault happened on the night of July 16, 2009. Payette made his way into the woman’s home by asking to wash his hands after petting horses that were behind her home, prosecutors said.

Payette was recently completed a 1-to-2 year prison sentence on a witness tampering conviction related to the sexual assault case. He will be eligible for parole in July 2016 on the sexual assault sentence.

Book : In the Timeless Time

march 29, 2012 source : http://www.buffalo.edu

Authors revisit world of death row

Bruce Jackson is known in some circles as the dean of prison culture. Since the early 1960s, the SUNY Distinguished Professor and James Agee Professor of American Culture in the UB Department of English has been studying the little-known lives and culture of inmates in one of America’s oldest penal institutions.

Jackson‘s work has resulted in classics of prison lore and culture, including “A Thief’s Primer” (1969), “In the Life” (1972), “Wake Up Dead Man” (1972) and in 1980, “Death Row” with his wife and collaborator Diane Christian, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor in the UB English department.

The couple’s latest prison book, “In This Timeless Time: Living and Dying on Death Row in America” has just been published by University of North Carolina Press in association with the Center of Documentary Studies at Duke University. It is a volume of photographs and stories illuminating the world of death row inmates in the O.B. Ellis Unit, a Texas Department of Criminal Justice prison in Walker County, Texas. It also explores what happened to those prisoners and what has happened in capital punishment practice, legislation and jurisprudence over the past four decades.

“In This Timeless Time” has been named by Publishers Weekly one of its top 10 social science recommendations in its 2012 spring books issue. The book continues and expands upon stories addressed in “Death Row” and includes a DVD of the authors’ 1979 documentary film of the same name.

Although both books feature the same subject, they take very different approaches to the story. “The first book was essentially a snapshot in time,” Jackson says. “‘In This Timeless Time’ looks back and analyzes what has happened to those inmates and to the death penalty in America since the first book was published.”

The book includes a series of 92, mostly unpublished, photographs of the Ellis unit and its prisoners taken during the authors’ fieldwork for “Death Row.” This section also offers brief notes about what happened to the photo subjects, many of whom were executed, some of whom had their sentences commuted to life, one of whom was paroled, one of whom was exonerated after 22 years on the row and one of whom is still there.

The second section explains events in the world of capital punishment over the past three decades, including changes in law and current arguments over the death penalty.

The final section discusses how the authors completed the book, and looks at the problems they encountered doing the work and their stance on ethical issues related to the death penalty and to prison reform.

“We believe that killing people in cold blood for the crime of killing people in hot or cold blood is not justified. You shouldn’t do the things you say you shouldn’t do,” says Christian, adding that in the new book she and Jackson elaborate on their points of view and consider studies on capital punishment and relevant Supreme Court decisions.

In both books, the couple describes the treatment of the prisoners as “remedial torture” and recounts the conditions the men were forced to endure, such as having the glass windows of their cells replaced with frosted glass, which not only prevented them from seeing the outside world, but caused them to develop chronic optical myopia because they could not exercise their distance vision.

The authors point out that the United States remains the only industrialized nation that still employs the death penalty. While the pace of capital sentences has slowed here, Jackson suggests it’s partly because it costs the system less to imprison a person for life than to sentence him or her to death, which involves the cost of repeated appeals and heightened security.

“In some states, legislatures have been reconsidering the death penalty, not for moral reasons, but because they’re broke,” says Jackson.

Another major change is the introduction of life without parole as a sentencing option.

“As it turns out, the main thing the juries wanted wasn’t to kill the criminals, but to get them off the street and make sure they stayed off the street,” he says.

Jackson explains that while states are becoming less likely to use capital punishment, the federal government has become more punitive and restrictive since the Oklahoma City bombing. The appeals process has become much more difficult and capital punishment is permitted for more crimes.

Prisons also have become more conservative and restrictive to outsiders wanting to come in, which would make it difficult—if not impossible—for anyone today to write a book like “Death Row” or “In This Timeless Time.” Jackson and Christian had access to the prison to photograph, film and speak to inmates three decades ago, but when they tried to go back to revisit death row for their new book, the Texas Department of Criminal Justice refused their calls and ignored their emails. Information on the inmates they interviewed in 1979 had to be culled from the prison system’s online website.

The U.S. Supreme Court: How it works

march 26, 2012, source : http://edition.cnn.com

Washington (CNN) — Few Americans have any real idea how the Supreme Court operates, since cameras are barred, and the case arguments and opinions are often dry and confusing for nonlawyers.

That’s too bad because the high court’s impact on Americans is incalculable. When disputes arise, the nine justices serve as the final word for a nation built on the rule of law. They interpret the Constitution and all that it brings with it: how we conduct ourselves in society, boundaries for individuals and the government, questions literally of life and death.

As the late justice William Brennan once wrote, “The law is not an end in itself, nor does it provide ends. It is preeminently a means to serve what we think is right.” And whether right or wrong, when it came to deciding who won the 2000 presidential election, it was the court’s conclusions that ultimately ended the issue, but not the controversy.

Preview: ‘The implications … are impossible to overstate’

A similarly epic constitutional showdown is now before the court over challenges to the health care reform law promoted by congressional Democrats and President Barack Obama — and opposed by a coalition of 26 states.

Article Three of the Constitution says, “The Judicial power of the United States, shall be vested in one supreme Court … the judges, both of the supreme and inferior courts, shall hold their offices during good behavior.”

Read a transcript of Monday’s court arguments on health care

Here’s a look at the history of the court, how it works and how you, the citizen, can interact with it:

Court goes back the late 1700s

The Supreme Court first met in 1790, as the ultimate part of the judicial branch of government. There are nine justices, led by the Chief Justice of the United States (that’s the official title). All justices — and all federal judges — are first nominated by the president and must be confirmed by the Senate. They serve for as long as they choose. The court has occupied its current building in Washington only since 1935. Previously, it borrowed space in Senate chambers in the Capitol Building.Explaining the health c

The Constitution’s framers envisioned the judiciary as the “weakest,” “least dangerous” branch of government. And while the court has often been accused over the years of being too timid in asserting its power, there is little doubt when the justices choose to flex their judicial muscle, the results can be far-reaching. Just look at how cases such as Brown v. Board of Education (1954 — integrating public schools), Roe v. Wade (1973 — legalizing abortion) and even Bush v. Gore (2000) have affected the lives of Americans.

Blockbuster decisions by the high court over the years

Traditionally, each term begins the first Monday in October, and final opinions are issued usually by late June. Justices divide their time between “sittings,” where they hear cases and issue decisions, and “recesses,” where they meet in private to write their decisions and consider other business before the court.

Court arguments are open to the public in the main courtroom, and visitors have the option of watching all the arguments or only a small portion. Tradition is very important. You will notice the justices wearing black robes, and quill pins still adorn the desks, as they have for more than two centuries.

Where to sit? Seniority counts

The justices are seated by seniority, with the chief justice in the middle. The two junior justices (currently Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan) occupy the opposite ends of the bench. Before public arguments and private conferences, where decisions are discussed, the nine members all shake hands as a show of harmony of purpose. In the past, all lawyers appearing before the court wore formal “morning clothes,” but today only federal government lawyers carry on the tradition. The solicitor general is the federal government’s principal lawyer before the federal bench.

As the gavel sounds and justices are seated, the marshal shouts the traditional welcome, which reads: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! All persons having business before the honorable, the Supreme Court of the United States, are admonished to draw near and give their attention, for the court is now sitting. God save the United States and this Honorable Court.”

Frequently asked questions about the court and the case

Arguments usually begin at 10 a.m. and since most cases involve appellate review of decisions by other courts, there are no juries or witnesses, just lawyers from both sides addressing the bench. The cases usually last about an hour, and lawyers from both sides very often have their prepared oral briefs interrupted by pointed questions from a justice.

This give-and-take, question-and-answer repartee can be entertaining, and it requires lawyers to think concisely and logically on their feet. And by the tone of their questioning, it often gives insight into a justice’s thinking, a barometer of his/her decision-making.

You can listen if you like

No cameras are allowed, but the public sessions are audio recorded, and are available for listening, usually several days later. The health care arguments — for this week — will be available only shortly after each of the four separate arguments end, at the court’s website.

After the arguments, conferences are scheduled, where justices discuss and vote on the cases. In these closed-door sessions, the nine members are alone. No clerks or staff are allowed. No transcripts of their remarks are kept, and it is the role of the junior justice (Elena Kagan for the past two years) to take notes and answer any inquiries from the outside.

Justices spend much of their time reviewing the cases and writing opinions. And they must decide which cases they will actually hear in open court. When asked just before her 2006 retirement what the jurists do most of the time, Sandra Day O’Connor said bluntly, “We read. We read on average 1,500 pages a day. We read. Sometimes we write.” Added Justice Antonin Scalia: “We try to squeeze in a little time for thinking.”

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Freed death row inmate will speak at Penn State Beaver

march, 26, 2012 source :http://www.br.psu.edu

 

the public is invited to attend a free presentation by Juan Melendez at 6 p.m., Wednesday, March 28 in the auditorium of the Penn State Beaver Student Union Building.

Melendez was imprisoned on death row in Florida for almost 18 years until his conviction was overturned and he was released in 2002. Upon his release, Melendez became the United States’ 99th death row inmate to be exonerated and released since 1973. 

In his presentation, Melendez will discuss his story of injustice and wrongful imprisonment on death row as one of many problems pervasive throughout the nation’s legal system and will describe the high rate of wrongful convictions based on poverty, race, and ethnicity.

Melendez will also share how he survived his experiences while imprisoned and how he maintained his spirit while he and others worked to free him.

Since his release, he has spoken here and abroad about the crisis of wrongful imprisonment, especially on death row, and his story has been reported in French, Spanish, Italian, and Arabic.

The administration of justice program and the Beaver campus Student Activity Fee are sponsoring the presentation as part of the Unique Perspectives for Selecting Your Career Path Speaker Series.

For information, contact Larissa Ciuca, student personal and career counselor, at lbm12@psu.edu or 724-773-3961 or LaVarr McBride, instructor in administration of justice at Beaver, Penn State New Kensington, and Penn State Shenango, atlwm13@psu.edu or 724-773-3866.