Lethal Injection: Recent developments

A number of developments have occurred in the last week, following the Sept. 26 decision of the Supreme Court to hear a challenge to lethal injection sometime this winter. Below, starting with the most recent, is a review of the big decisions and stays-of-execution:

Oct. 4: Oklahoma’s attorney general asked the state’s Court of Criminal Appeals not to set any execution dates until the United States Supreme Court ruled on a challenge to the lethal injection method.

Oct. 2: The Texas Court of Appeals stayed the execution of Heliberto Chi, pending the decision by the US Supreme Court on lethal injection. Some legal experts in Texas view the decision by Texas' highest appeals court and the issues it raised as an indefinite halting of all executions in the state, though Texas officials claim they plan to proceed. See the New York Times for more.

Sept. 28: The US Supreme Court granted a rare stay of execution to a Texas inmate, Carlton Turner, Jr., who had appealed to the Court due to the pending lethal injection hearing. According to the New York Times, "The decision suggests that until it issues a ruling on lethal injection, the court may be receptive to requests to delay such executions, at least for defendants whose cases raise no procedural issues."

Sept. 28: Another rare stay of an execution by Alabama Gov. Bob Riley, who said the state would not execute inmate Tommy Arthur, while it came up with a new formula for lethal injection. State officials said they wanted to make sure prisoners were completely unconscious before they were killed--an issue that has been problematic in recent months and has temporarily halted executions in several states, including Florida.

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Judicial Update: Supreme Court to hear lethal injection challenge

On Sept. 26, the US Supreme Court agreed to hear an appeal by two Kentucky death row inmates, who claim that lethal injection constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and is therefore unconstitutional under the 8th amendment.

Current challenges to lethal injection have effectively stopped executions in a growing number of states, including California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee.

37 of the 38 death penalty states all use lethal injection (except Nebraska, which still uses the electric chair).

According to the New York Times, "Lethal injection was adopted in the 1980s as a more palatable alternative to electrocution, but it has proven increasingly troublesome. Leading medical organizations have told their members not to participate, and lawyers for death-row inmates have produced evidence showing that in the absence of expert medical attention, there is a substantial risk of error in administering the combination of anesthesia and paralyzing drugs necessary to bring about a quick and painless death."

The Times also reports, "The Supreme Court case will be argued in January or February and decided by early next summer. While it is pending, judges around the country are certain to be asked to bar executions in those states that are not already under an official or de facto moratorium."

Read the Sept. 26 piece, "Justices to Enter the Debate Over Lethal Injection," for more and continue to check this site for updates.

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ND ASK Organizing Strategy Session: Tuesday, 10/9

On Tuesday, October 9, Ms. Eunice Timoney-Ravenna will conduct an evening strategy session for student activists and organizers seeking to unite the campus and community on their respective social issues.
Ms. Timoney-Ravenna is the Midwest Field Organizer for Equal Justice USA "a grassroots project of the Quixote Center that mobilizes and educates ordinary citizens around issues of crime and punishment in the U.S."
Equal Justice USA kicked off the Moratorium Now! campaign in August 1997, shortly after the American Bar Association passed a resolution calling for a moratorium on all U.S. executions. The campaign seeks to build momentum for a national moratorium by mobilizing local groups to adopt their own resolutions and to recruit others in their area to join the call.
Through the Moratorium Now! campaign, over 4,000 groups, faith communities, and local governments endorse a moratorium on executions.
Further details on the October 9 strategy session will be posted soon.

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Juan Melendez to speak at ND on Wednesday, 10/3

Juan Melendez, an innocent man who spent 18 years on death row in Florida, will speak this Wednesday, October 3 at 5 pm in DeBartolo 102. His lecture is open to the public; his trip to ND is sponsored by the Hispanic Law Student Association and the American Constitution Society of the ND Law School.
Juan Melendez became the 24th person exonerated and released from Florida's death row when he was freed on January 3, 2002 after spending almost 18 years facing execution for a crime he did not commit. The photo above was taken upon his release from prison.
Melendez was convicted in 1984 at the age of 33 with no physical evidence linking him to the crime and testimony from questionable witnesses. In fact, prosecutors concealed evidence from the court in order to protect the guilty man, a police informant. Melendez's conviction fell apart when the police informant's confession came to light in 1999 - a confession that prosecutors knew about before they took Melendez to trial.
Upon his release, the state of Florida gave Melendez what they give to every inmate that leaves prison - $100.
Contact us for more information on Melendez and his lecture, at notredameask@gmail.com.

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"A Capital Question" - ND ASK featured in Scholastic

"A Capital Question," a September 27 piece by Michael O'Connor in ND's Student Magazine, Scholastic, covered the objectives and progress of ND ASK.

"A Capital Question"
ND ASK's anti-death penalty campaign stresses education and advocacy,
by Michael O'Connor:

Last week, Richard Dieter, one of the nation's leading authorities on the death penalty, visited Notre Dame to discuss a national topic that he says "could become a signature issue for this university." Dieter (ND '68), the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, was the first speaker in a series of lectures this fall sponsored by Notre Dame Against State Killing (ND ASK). Aside from Notre Dame, Dieter has shared his expertise with a myriad of media outlets from the New York Times to the BBC.
ND ASK, a campaign initiated in the fall of 2006 and currently sponsored by Campus Ministry, strives to educate and and actively work toward the end of death penalty executions. Although new to the Notre Dame scene, the campaign is up and running. "Over the year we've gained many members and developed four functioning committees: prison ministry, victims' families outreach, advocacy and lobbying, and conference organization," says senior political science and peace studies major, Andrea Laidman, current director and co-founder of ND ASK. The campaign mobilizes largely on the Internet, boasting a listserv of about 200 members and blog readership of up to 300 hits a day last semester on the campaign's Web site, ndask.org.
ND ASK distinguishes itself from other student groups in its singular mission. "It is a campaign focused on one issue with a specific objective of educating the campus and working toward a moratorium on executions," Laidman says. A death penalty moratorium is a suspension of executions enacted by a state governor or legislature for a designated period of time (approximately 2-5 years) during which a commission is created to examine the death penalty cases and issues in their specific state. "One of the things we believe at ND ASK is that if you look at the facts of the issue, they only lean to one side, that being a moratorium," Laidman says.
In order to bolster the educational goals of their mission, Laidman and the students of ND ASK organized a lecture series including Dieter and national anti-death penalty spokesman Bud Welch, the father of a victim of the Oklahoma City bombing. Welch primarily discusses reconciliation and restorative justice in death penalty cases.
Dieter was impressed with the campaign. "[Anti-death penalty focus groups] are rare at the university level. They are much more common at the state level," he says. Although turnout was not overwhelming for Dieter's talk, he believes there is great potential in ND ASK. "This is a small group, but there's a lot more that could be done for this Notre Dame community. This campaign has a unique fit here and could become part of a great tradition," Dieter says.
Dieter's attendence marks the start of a building year for ND ASK. "We're hoping to engage students who approach the issue from a variety of perspectives by bringing to campus experts on the death penalty from so many disciplines," Laidman says.
Dieter says, "Everyone who participates in this discussion contributes to the national consensus of standards of decency. Voices of people can change the law."

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Op-ed piece: The State of State Killing

An op-ed piece I wrote, published in The Observer on September 17, focuses on death penalty trends in Texas and nationally. Read it below, or see The Observer website.

The State of State Killing
About every six days in Texas, a man is killed by lethal injection. This is the pace set by the current calendar of executions, where a total of 10 men were scheduled to die in August and September. Two men have recently had their death sentences thrown out - taming the frequency of executions slightly - in rare instances for Texas: A commutation by Governor Rick Perry and a stayed execution by a Dallas county judge.
Thirty-nine executions have occurred so far in 2007 across the U.S. Twenty-four of those have been in Texas. No other state has executed more than three inmates this year.
The death by lethal injection of Johnny Conner on Aug. 22 marked the state's 400th execution since the reinstatement of the death penalty there in 1982. That's an average of 16 executions per year over a quarter of a century.
Sixteen deaths per year is a shocking statistic, but it fails to capture the reality of the death penalty in Texas. Calculating the average number of executions doesn't reveal that 315 of the 400 executions in Texas have occurred in the past 13 years under the tenure of only two governors.
From 1994 to 2000, 152 inmates were killed under then-Gov. George W. Bush. From 2000 to today, 164 have been executed with Gov. Perry in charge.
These two governors have achieved the highest numbers in American history for a state in killing its own citizens. And to what end? The murder rate in Texas remains more than double that of any state without the death penalty in the nation.
While executions continue to climb in Texas, they're declining nationally, returning to levels of the early 1990s when the American public found the death penalty far less appealing than it has in the last decade. Overall support for the death penalty is down, and a 2006 Gallup poll reported that for the first time, more Americans expressed support for life without parole as a sentencing option than for the death penalty.
A more recent poll by the Death Penalty Information Center (DPIC) in Washington, D.C., found that 58 percent of Americans want a moratorium on executions. A poll commissioned by the American Bar Association in Indiana reported that 61 percent of Hoosiers agree.
In an interview with Newsweek, Richard Dieter, executive director of the DPIC, said Americans are not expressing total opposition or moral objection to the death penalty, but rather concerns about how the state's ultimate punishment is used and implemented. The big issues are protecting the innocent, unfairness and disbelief in the death penalty as a deterrent.
According to Dieter, who comes to campus this week to deliver the opening lecture of a five-part series on the death penalty, "[T]here's common agreement about who's on death row: People who can't afford their own lawyers, and a high percentage of minorities. The end result is dissatisfaction."
Dissatisfaction, skepticism, and waning support for the idea that minor reforms can bring fairness.
Even Perry expressed concerns about fairness, with his commutation of Kenneth Foster on Aug. 30. Foster was sentenced to death even though he did not pull the trigger in the 1996 murder he was convicted of, under a Texas law that makes an accomplice to murder subject to the death penalty.
Foster was driving with a group of friends late into the night on Aug. 15, 1996. They were heavily under the influence of drugs and were committing armed robberies. One confrontation between Foster's friend, who had exited the car, and a man on the street ended in murder. Foster was sentenced to death in the case, though he sat eighty feet away in the car when his friend's gun went off.
The approach of the scheduled execution of Foster for Aug. 30 (the date of his commutation) received international attention and petitions for his execution to be called off.
The idea of executing the man who didn't pull the trigger was just too much, even for Perry.
"After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster's sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment," Perry said in a statement. "I am concerned about Texas law that allows capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously, and it is an issue I think the legislature should examine."
As a nation, America is losing confidence in the death penalty. That's the verdict of polls, interviews, nationwide trends, events like Foster's commutation and the stance of experts like Mr. Dieter, who believe that a moratorium on executions is the solution Americans want.

Andrea Laidman is a senior political science and peace studies major, and the Director of Notre Dame Against State Killing (ND ASK), a campaign for a moratorium in Indiana.

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Executing Reason: Expert Perspectives on the Death Penalty and an Indiana Moratorium

ND ASK is proud to announce its second annual fall lecture series, Executing Reason: Expert Perspectives on the Death Penalty and an Indiana Moratorium.
The series gathers some of the nation's foremost capital punishment scholars and activists:

September 20-
Mr. Richard Dieter, Esq., Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center.
October 9-
Ms. Eunice Timoney-Ravenna, Midwest Field Organizer, Equal Justice USA.
November 5-
Mr. Bruce Dold, Editorial Page Editor, Chicago Tribune.
November 19-
Dr. Michael Radelet, Sociology Dept Chair and Professor, University of Colorado.
Date TBD-
Mr. Bud Welch, National leader in reconciliation/restorative justice whose daughter was killed in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Watch for more details as the opening lecture approaches.

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Show your Support -- Buy an ND ASK T-Shirt

You've already bought "the shirt" for this season, and if you're a freshman, you've got a Frosh-O t-shirt...Why not add to your ND collection--and show your support for a moratorium in Indiana--by purchasing an ND ASK t-shirt?

Click on the design above for a closer look. The t-shirts are black, with the ND ASK logo across the front and a quote on the back, "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind. -M. Gandhi".

The price is $10--just send an e-mail to notredameask@gmail.com with the size (S-XL) and quantity and we can deliver your order to your dorm room or mail it to your home if you're off-campus or not a local supporter, and arrange payment however you prefer.

Proceeds will help fund our second annual fall lecture series, "Executing Reason: Expert Perspectives on the Death Penalty and an Indiana Moratorium." Thank you for your support.

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Richard Dieter to speak September 20

Mr. Richard C. Dieter, Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center, in Washington DC, will speak at Notre Dame on Septmeber 20. His lecture, The Death Penalty in America--Present and Future, will be at 7pm in the Hesburgh Center Auditorium on Notre Dame's campus.

Mr. Dieter, himself a graduate of ND, is an attorney and an Adjunct Professor at Catholic University's School of Law. He has been the Executive Director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, DC since 1992. The Center is a non-profit organization serving the public and the media with analysis and information on issues concerning capital punishment. The Center prepares in-depth reports, issues press releases, and conducts briefings for journalists and others working on this issue.

Mr. Dieter has worked for many years on issues related to human rights and the death penalty, including work as the director of the Community for Creative Non-violence’s pre-trial release program, the founder of the Alderson Hospitality House for visitors to the women’s federal prison in Alderson, West Virginia, and the founder of the Quixote Center’s death penalty project. He has given numerous speeches at universities and is frequently quoted in the major newspapers around the country. He has appeared on NBC Nightly News, ABC World News, CBS Evening News, The Today Show, PBS News Hour, Fox News, CNN, C-Span, Court-TV, and many other programs.

He has testified about the death penalty before numerous state legislatures and has prepared reports for the U. S. House Judiciary Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. He has authored articles on the death penalty for both magazines and scholarly journals. His most recent publications are: A Crisis of Confidence: Americans' Doubts About the Death Penalty; Innocence and the Crisis in the American Death Penalty; and The Death Penalty in Black and White: Who Lives, Who Dies, Who Decides. He has been an invited speaker at international events in Taiwan, Tokyo, Paris, and London, and recently testified before the European Parliament in Brussels.

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Secrecy Upheld in the Execution Process, Despite Mistakes

In a July 30 article, "After Flawed Executions, States Resort to Secrecy,"* New York Times legal columnist Adam Liptak examines the shift toward protecting the identity of those involved in the execution process in several states. Ironically, this comes at a time when botched executions are increasingly reported. Amidst growing awareness of the incompetence of those performing lethal injection procedures, citizens are left with no one to hold accountable when the identity of involved officials is withheld.

Liptak writes:
"In the wake of several botched executions around the nation, often performed by poorly trained workers, you might think that we would want to know more, not less, about the government employees charged with delivering death on behalf of the state.

But corrections officials say that executioners will face harassment or worse if their identities are revealed, and that it is getting hard to attract medically trained people to administer lethal injections, in part because codes of medical ethics prohibit participation in executions."

In Missouri, for example, a doctor who "had supervised more than 50 executions by lethal injection testified last year that he sometimes gave condemned inmates smaller doses of a sedative than the state’s protocol called for, explaining that he is dyslexic."

The doctor had his right to practice revoked by two hospitals following numerous malpractice suits. In September of last year, a federal judge barred him from participating “in any manner, at any level, in the State of Missouri’s lethal injection process.”

However, the Louisiana state legislature has acted to nullify this ruling. Liptak explains:
"A new law, signed this month by Gov. Matt Blunt, makes it unlawful to reveal 'the identity of a current or former member of an execution team,' and it allows executioners to sue anyone who names them.
The governor explained that the law 'will protect those Missourians who assist in fulfilling the state’s execution process.' "

The new Missouri law even bars medical licensing boards from taking disciplinary actions against doctors or nurses who participate in executions (contrary to the stance of prominent medical organizations, including the American Medical Association).

Liptak also points to recent developments regarding flawed lethal injections procedures in Florida, where a judge ruled a week ago that procedures issued by Florida’s corrections department in May (that there is only one job requirement to be an executioner: you must be “a person 18 years or older who is selected by the warden to initiate the flow of lethal chemicals into the inmate") is inacceptable. The judge halted a pending execution, declaring that the system must include experienced and competent people before it can be allowed to carry out death sentences.

Liptak asserts:
"It would be good to know more about who is performing executions in Florida. But that state’s law, like Missouri’s, forbids the disclosure of 'information which identifies an executioner.' Quite a few states have similar laws, and a new Virginia law shielding executioners came into effect this month.

This is a serious issue to examine and monitor as lethal injection procedures continue to be analyzed across the country. Does the public have right to know who is carrying out executions and if these officials have the medical competence to do so? Or does the protection of the executioner outweigh concerns about cruel and unusual punishment, and the effective torture that can be the result of a botched dosage or otherwise flawed injection.
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*Article accessible to Times Select members only.

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