Rick Halperin
2018-08-12 15:17:42 UTC
August 12
LOUISIANA:
On the death penalty and unanimous juries
Interestingly, a flawed and controversial decision by Pope Francis on capital
punishment also yields some insights into whether Louisiana should require
unanimous jury verdicts for felony cases.
Earlier this month, the pope announced a change in the Roman Catholic Church's
Catechism, the document outlining basic church beliefs.
Francis said henceforth the Catechism would declare capital punishment entirely
"inadmissible." The church had previously supported executions for dire cases
that ensured protection of society. A Vatican official called the change needed
to reflect the present "political and social situation" that made the death
penalty an affront to "dignity of a person." The change is an explicit
rejection of past doctrine that retribution may be just and even redemptive.
As theologically questionable as Francis' action may be, it still can provide a
guidepost to thinking about capital punishment.
The death penalty becomes morally justifiable when it saves lives, largely
through deterrence, as much high-quality, nonpartisan research amply
demonstrates. This squares fully with the Catechism's instructions about
"legitimate defense," affirming the morality of taking a life to preserve
innocent ones.
Yet much of that same research shows the deterrent effect disappears when the
death penalty falls into disuse. Logically, if a potential murderer believes
chances of his execution for that crime approach zero, he doesn't fear capital
punishment as much.
The odds of being executed fall greatly when death sentences get bogged down in
endless appeals, which is the present state of affairs in Louisiana. Dozens of
inmates here have languished on death row for decades.
Actually, few individuals have death sentences thrown out because a jury just
got it wrong. Most reversals involve some other circumstance, such as
prosecutorial misconduct, but in rare instances, post-trial evidence comes to
light to corroborate the innocence of a death row inmate. If there are fewer
close calls among jurors, there's a smaller chance of a mistake.
Convictions by split juries - currently, in Louisiana, for felonies only 10 of
12 jurors need to vote to convict - likely involve more of these close calls,
as the clearer the evidence of guilt, the less likely any juror would dissent.
So requiring jury unanimity bolsters confidence in the system, which should
reduce obstacles to carrying out executions. That would give capital punishment
more teeth, making it more of a deterrent.
This fall, Louisiana residents will vote on a proposal to amend the state
constitution to require unanimous juries for felony convictions. They should.
Requiring unanimous juries for felony cases could help prevent wrongful
convictions. It would also strengthen the death penalty, making it more likely
that potential killers think twice before ending the lives of innocent victims.
Meanwhile, Louisiana Catholics should pray that the Holy Father's rewriting of
the Catechism on the death penalty doesn't undermine the church's claim of
teaching eternal truths.
(source: Jeff Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana
State University-Shreveport, where he teaches Louisiana government----The
Advocate)
TENNESSEE:
As I watched Billy Ray Irick executed, I could feel the heartbeat of another
mom
As I watched Billy Ray Irick die Thursday, I couldn't stop thinking about Paula
Dyer, the sweet little 7-year-old Knoxville girl he savaged and suffocated, and
the mother who never got to kiss her goodbye.
I was supposed to be at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to document
Irick's death - to watch and witness how the state killed him.
A Knox County jury, way back in 1986, sentenced him to die for grabbing little
Paula, forcing her into a bedroom, barricading the door as her siblings
screamed, holding that child down, covering her mouth, raping her over and
over, then casting her aside inside her Exeter Avenue home.
Thirty-three years after his crimes, I sat in a tiny room, a note pad and
pencil in my hand with instructions to watch him die.
But my eyes kept shifting from the gurney where Irick was dying - with his eyes
closed and his body barely moving - to a room just a few feet away from me
where Paula's mother, Kathy Jeffers, sat watching, too.
I couldn't see her. The execution chamber is designed that way - to keep folks
who know nothing of a survivor's pain away from their display of it. But I
could feel her heart beat as a fellow mother.
We mothers do all we can to raise good kids and keep them safe. Kathy Jeffers
certainly did. She was raising 5 children and working as a waitress at a truck
stop to keep them fed. Little Paula was already an honor student and as
friendly as she was adorable.
Irick was the bogeyman we mothers fear - a predator disguised as a friend, the
monster - not in the closet or under bed - but in your neighborhood or even
your home.
Of course, Irick didn't set out to be a monster. He was an innocent boy, too,
before the bogeymen in his life - cruel caretakers and untreated mental illness
- did their damage.
The seats in the witness room reserved for a condemned man's loved ones were
empty. Irick's last kiss came from a lawyer. The mom in me hurt for him, too,
as I watched him staring at the ceiling as his unseen executioners prepared the
drug cocktail intended to kill him.
Whether he suffered as he died, I can't tell you. He didn???t show signs of it.
He closed his eyes. His breathing grew labored and raspy, a bit loud. But he
never moved. His breathing slowed and quieted within minutes - others kept
better notes on the timing of his death - and then he simply stopped breathing.
I didn't get to ask Kathy Jeffers what she felt when she watched a man, largely
unrecognizable from that bogeyman he was 33 years ago, die for killing her
innocent daughter. She's walked these years of grief privately and she did so
again on Thursday - arriving and leaving quietly, avoiding the waiting cameras.
The journalist in me would have been compelled to ask her if justice had been
served in that roughly 20 minutes of scripted death inside the execution
chamber.
But the mom in me already knew that answer. The bogeyman is dead, but Kathy
Jeffers is doing life without her precious Paula. There's no justice in that.
(source: Jamie Satterfield is a legal affairs investigative journalist for
Knoxville News Sentinel, where this column first appeared----brinkwire.com)
*********************************
From gallows to gurney: 6 of East Tennessee's most infamous executions
Billy Ray Irick became the 6th man in Tennessee to die by lethal injection on
Thursday night.
A total of 132 men have died like Irick - either by poison cocktail or
electrocution - since Tennessee began carrying out executions at the main state
prison in Nashville in 1916.
Before that, sheriffs hanged the condemned in the counties of their crimes. An
estimate by the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks capital
punishment in the U.S., places Tennessee's hangings through those years at 210.
Here's a half-dozen of East Tennessee's most infamous executions, from the
gallows to the electric chair to the gurney.
John Bane was convicted in Memphis for the 1988 robbery and strangulation
murder of Royce Frazier. Frazier's body was found in his bathtub.
From hoods to hanging
The spectacle offered everything but a big top on July 7, 1899, when men, women
and children gathered on the courthouse lawn in Sevierville to see Pleas Wynn
and Catlett Tipton hanged side-by-side.
The 2 Sevier County farmers had become the face of the masked vigilantes that
terrorized rural communities for years in a kind of gangland war.
Farmers in the rural Emert's Cove community initially banded together for
masked nighttime raids to drive out local prostitutes. A counter-vigilante
group, the Bluebills, formed, and the rivalry spiraled into a series of fatal
shootouts and ambushes.
The violence climaxed when whitecaps killed a tenant-farming couple, William
and Laura Whaley. Their landlord had hired the men for $200 to force the couple
out.
The killing sparked a crackdown by the state Legislature that led to the
arrests of Wynn and Tipton, identified by Laura Whaley's sister, who'd watched
the murders as she hid under a bed. Her testimony earned them a death sentence.
Wynn was led to the river to be baptized before the noose graced his neck. Each
found the time to address the crowd before the trapdoor swung open.
"Let my evil deeds be forgotten," Tipton begged the spectators. "If I ever did
any good, I hope it will be remembered."
Last man hanging
The crowd that gathered outside the Knox County Courthouse on Main Street went
home disappointed on March 23, 1908, when Sheriff Lum Reeder decided to close
the night's hanging to the public.
John McPherson, 24, became the last man hanged in the county. He fidgeted on
the gallows inside the jail and asked the sheriff to loosen the rope as the
clock ticked to the appointed hour.
McPherson had killed a deputy, William Walker, 2 years earlier as he made his
getaway from killing another man, Grant Smith, in a drunken rage. He'd hidden
in the coal mines of West Virginia for a year before authorities tracked him
down.
"He drew a number of long breaths and inflated his lungs and held his breath
when the trap was dropped," a reporter for the Knoxville Sentinel wrote. "He
was a perfect specimen of humanity, and very strong."
4 in a day
The lights at the Tennessee State Prison dimmed 4 times the morning of March 1,
1922 - once for each of the men strapped into the electric chair inside an
hour.
Tom Christmas, Charles Petree, John McClure and Otto Stephens sat down one
after the other to pay with their lives for the robbery that killed George
Andrew Lewis in Anderson County. It's the only recorded quadruple execution in
Tennessee history.
The 4 kidnapped Lewis and taxi driver Andrew Crumley the night of May 30, 1921,
and left them to die - bound and gagged with their throats slashed - near a
gravel quarry in the Robertsville community. Lewis died. Crumley survived,
worked himself free and found help at a nearby farmhouse.
The 4 used the taxi the next day as a getaway car in a failed robbery of the
Oakdale Bank and Trust in nearby Roane County. They didn't count on being
caught by an armed posse and identified by Crumley.
An Anderson County jury sentenced all 4 to die. Guards at the death house threw
the switch first for Petree at 6:15 a.m. The lights blinked for the last time
just before 6:50.
'Innocent as the sun that shines'
Maurice Mays never gave up proclaiming his innocence - not until the
executioner's current cut his life short.
Mays died at age 35 in the electric chair March 15, 1922 - nominally for
killing Bertie Lindsey, a white woman shot by an intruder in the bedroom of her
North Knoxville home. But supporters suspected Mays' only true crime to be
defiance of a segregated society.
Mays, a black man rumored to be the illegitimate son of Knoxville's white
mayor, paid no mind to the written and unwritten laws of his day. He dated
white women, ran back-alley bootleg and gambling operations, and helped
organize black voters for the city political machine.
The night Lindsey died, police headed straight to Mays' home, led by Andy
White, an officer who'd cursed and threatened Mays for years. The only witness
to the shooting, Lindsey's cousin Ora Smyth, who'd been sharing a bed with her
that night, took just one look at Mays under the dim glow of a streetlamp and
pronounced him "the man."
A white mob blasted into the county jail with dynamite in a vain search for
Mays the next day. He'd been spirited to Chattanooga by the sheriff. He stood
trial less than a month later in front of an all-white jury that took 18
minutes to find him guilty.
A 2nd trial ordered by the state Supreme Court ended with the same verdict and
sentence - death. Despite pleas from prominent Tennesseans white and black,
Gov. Alf Taylor refused to intervene.
Mays, his health ruined by the years of confinement, walked his last steps to
the electric chair on crutches.
"I am as innocent as the sun that shines," he said from the death seat. "I hope
the politicians are satisfied."
He was still speaking when the current silenced him forever. Efforts to clear
his name over the decades, including entreaties to Gov. Bill Haslam, have
failed.
Shootout with the sheriff
Gus McCoig had 2 main skills: he could pick the guitar, and he could point a
gun.
The guitar got him girls. The gun got him a seat in the electric chair.
McCoig made a name for himself as a young man hot-rodding the highways of
Appalachia through the early 1930s with outlaws like Clarence Bunch, East
Tennessee's counterpart to John Dillinger. Their exploits ended in 1934 with
Bunch dead from a hail of bullets and McCoig behind bars in the Tennessee State
Penitentiary. But McCoig wasn't ready to bow out.
He and fellow inmate Pete Dean kidnapped a deputy warden and escaped the
prison, then made their way to New Tazewell, Tenn., where they and a third
bandit, Frank Hopson, robbed the Citizens Bank on Dec. 6, 1935, and headed
south on state Highway 33.
Union County Sheriff L.B. Hutchison was ready. He and a deputy staked out the
highway at the bridge over the Clinch River and gave chase.
The sheriff wasn't ready when the getaway car stopped and McCoig shot him dead
- just as a Greyhound bus full of passengers drove up.
The gang split up, and McCoig stayed on the run until February 1936. Officers
finally caught up with him in a Cumberland County tourist camp, where they
found him strumming his guitar and singing a prison worksong.
"Here I go to ride that long trail, not to come back," he sang as deputies led
him away.
He was right. McCoig died in the chair April 3, 1937.
Last of a generation
William L. "Willie" Tines was less than 2 years from parole when he broke out
of Brushy Mountain Prison. His escape route led him to the electric chair.
Tines was serving a 99-year sentence for killing 2 men in Knoxville when he and
a couple of other inmates split from a wood-chopping detail April 23,1957,
outside the prison near Petros. The next day, a black man wearing striped
convict pants broke into a home on state Highway 61 near Harriman and walked in
on a white housekeeper as she ironed clothes. A struggle knocked the phone off
the hook, and neighbors on the party line heard her scream.
Officers found the woman beaten and bloody, with her eyes swollen shut and her
nose broken. She said she'd been raped. As an armed posse fanned out along the
highway, Tines flagged down a passing state trooper to give himself up.
He admitted he'd broken into the house. But he denied he raped the woman.
He signed a confession to rape. But he couldn't read or write.
The woman testified she couldn't swear what her attacker looked like. A Roane
County jury deliberated 25 minutes before finding Tines guilty.
Three years of appeals and bids for clemency followed. On Nov. 7, 1960, Tines
took his seat where 124 men had sat before.
"Pray for me," he asked as the guards fastened electrodes to his body.
7 minutes later, a doctor pronounced him dead.
"He stood up well at the end," the warden remarked later.
No one knew it then, but Tines's death marked the last inmate executed in
Tennessee for a generation. Forty years would pass before the next inmate,
Robert Glen Coe, died on the lethal-injection gurney on April 19, 2000.
(source: Knoxville News Sentinel)
NEBRASKA----impending execution
2nd drug maker joins lethal injection lawsuit against Nebraska
A 2nd drug-maker has joined the lethal injection fight.
Sandoz Inc. joined the appeal drug maker Fresenius Kabi filed after a judge
denied their claims Friday. Judge Richard Kopf told the company there is no
proof their drugs would be used in the execution of Carey Dean Moore, because
the State of Nebraska has not revealed its suppliers.
Sandoz manufactures the muscle relaxant Cisatracurium. It is the 2nd of 4 drugs
that will be used in the execution.
In the suit, the company said if the drugs did come from them, it wants them
back. The company also requests a temporary restraining order on their use,
which could put a stay on the upcoming execution.
There's still no word on when the appeals hearing will happen.
Moore's execution is still scheduled for Tuesday at 10 a.m.
(source: KETV news)
***************************
History of the death penalty in Nebraska
1903 - Gottlieb Neigenfind is the 1st person to be executed by the state of
Nebraska by hanging. Earlier executions were carried out by individual
counties.
1913 - Nebraska's execution method changes from hanging to electrocution.
1972 - The U.S. Supreme Court struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman
v. Georgia, reducing all death sentences pending at the time to life
imprisonment.
1976 - Nationwide, the death penalty is reinstated.
1979 - Legislature repeals death penalty; vote is vetoed by Gov. Charles Thone.
1982 - Legislature excludes offenders younger than 18 from death penalty.
1994 - Harold Otey, who raped and murdered Omaha student and waitress Jane
McManus in 1977 is the 1st person executed since Charles Starkweather in 1959.
1996 - John Joubert, who confessed to killing Danny Jo Eberle and Christopher
Walden in Sarpy County, is executed.
1997 - Robert Williams is executed for the 1977 murders of Catherine Brook and
Patricia McGarry of Lincoln.
1998 - Legislature excludes developmentally disabled offenders from death
penalty. A year later Jerry Simpson and Clarence Victor are taken off death row
because their IQs are less than 70.
1999 - Nebraska is the 1st state in the nation to pass a moratorium on carrying
out the death penalty while it studies the fairness of its application. The
Legislature unanimously overrides Gov. Mike Johanns' veto.
2000 - Nebraska Supreme Court vacates the death sentence of Randy Reeves
because he was sentenced with improper procedures. Reeves had been sentenced to
death for the drug-induced murders of Janet Mesner and Victoria Lamm in Lincoln
in 1980. Reeves is sentenced to 2 life terms instead.
2001 - Peter Hochstein and Michael Anderson are taken off death row and given
life in prison because their sentencing judicial panels could not reach a
unanimous decision to impose the death sentence. Anderson and Hochstein had
been sentenced to death for the 1975 murder-for-hire of an Omaha businessman.
2007 - Nebraska Legislature comes within 1 vote of passing a repeal bill.
2008 - Nebraska Supreme Court rules the electric chair is cruel and unusual
punishment. Nebraska is the last state with electrocution as its sole means of
execution.
2009 - During a special session, the Legislature makes lethal injection the
state's new method of execution; appeals and lack of the drugs needed to
implement it prevent the state from using it.
2012 - A Swiss pharmaceutical company recalls the lethal injection drug sodium
thiopental held by Nebraska, because it says it was illegally obtained and sold
by a middleman. The drug later expires.
2015 - The Legislature passes a bill abolishing the death penalty, which is
vetoed by Gov. Pete Ricketts. The 49-member legislature overrides the veto,
30-19. It is the 1st time a state with a predominantly Republican legislature
has repealed the death penalty since North Dakota abolished the death penalty
in 1973.
2015 - The Food and Drug Administration halts delivery to Nebraska of execution
drugs from a distributor in India. The state is later unsuccessful in
attempting to be reimbursed for $26,700 it paid.
2016 - Nebraska voters approve a ballot question 61 to 39 % reversing the
Legislature's repeal of the death penalty and restoring capital punishment in
the state.
2018 - The Nebraska Supreme Court sets an execution date of Aug. 14 for
condemned prisoner Carey Dean Moore.
****************************
Sandoz seeks to intervene in drug manufacturer's Nebraska execution lawsuit
Another drug company has jumped into the last-minute flurry of legal protests
of the state's lethal injection drugs.
Sandoz Inc. filed a brief Saturday in federal court asking to intervene in a
lawsuit filed last week by drug manufacturer Fresenius Kabi. U.S. District
Court Judge Richard Kopf ruled on that complaint Friday afternoon, denying a
temporary restraining order and allowing the execution of Carey Dean Moore to
go forward as planned on Tuesday.
Fresenius Kabi has appealed, and Sandoz's motion to intervene will be heard by
Kopf on Monday at 10 a.m.
Sandoz is a manufacturer of cisatracurium, a muscle relaxant, and wants to
force the state to identify the manufacturer of the drug to be used in Moore's
execution.
"The use of cisatracurium in this unauthorized manner will cause substantial
reputational and other harm to Sandoz, and compromise Sandoz's longstanding
efforts to ensure its products are not used for capital punishment," the
complaint said.
The drug has never been used in an execution, nor tested or approved for that
purpose, the company said.
"The proposed misuse of the drug in executions is therefore experimental and
without precedent establishing that it can be administered without causing
unconstitutional suffering," it said.
Sandoz seeks an injunction to require the Nebraska Department of Corrections to
disclose the drug's manufacturer and distributor.
Sandoz has for years been steadfast in disallowing use of its drugs for
off-label use for lethal injection, the company said. In 2011 it took steps to
prevent the sale of sodium thiopental in the U.S., a drug frequently used in
lethal injection cocktails.
In 2013 it put restrictions on rocuronium bromide to prevent its capital
punishment use. In 2017 it put those restrictions on Anectine, a paralytic.
That same year, it began to add distribution restrictions for cisatracurium
when customer agreements came up for renewal.
Sandoz sent a letter to Corrections Director Scott Frakes this year, and a 2nd
one to Frakes, Gov. Pete Ricketts and Attorney General Doug Peterson in August,
objecting and requesting they immediately disclose whether the cisatracurium to
be used in Nebraska's protocol was manufactured by Sandoz.
The drug is made by multiple companies.
In his ruling on the Fresenius Kabi lawsuit, Kopf said he did not believe its
reputation would be irreparably harmed if the execution proceeds using the
drugs cisatracurium and potassium chloride, which the company believes are from
its supplies.
But the state of Nebraska would be "greatly and irreparably harmed," he said,
if he stopped the execution.
*********************************
Untested drug concoction still on track for Nebraska execution
Condemned Nebraska prisoner Carey Dean Moore has made it clear he prefers not
to stay on death row the rest of his life. He's ready to die.
Saying the time had come, after seven prior dates with death imposed but not
carried out by the state, a federal judge on Friday accommodated Moore, ruling
against a drug company that asked for a delay.
It's been 39 years since Moore took his little brother with him to rob a cabbie
and kill his 1st victim, Reuel Van Ness Jr., then kill a 2nd man, Maynard
Helgeland, by himself.
Although the drug company has appealed Friday's court ruling, Moore is not
fighting his execution.
He has named his witnesses: His brother David Moore; a friend, Gary Cross; a
niece, Taylor Brouillette; his spiritual adviser and friend, Bob Bryan. He has
asked for the state to pay for his cremation, according to prison documents,
and would like his ashes given to his brother David.
He is scheduled to die Tuesday morning, and the state appears ready to proceed,
even with an untested combination of 4 drugs, 3 of which - fentanyl, diazepam
and cisatracurium - have not been used in capital punishment. The protocol was
put in place by the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
Outside of a short list of people with the need-to-know, no one else has been
told details of how Director Scott Frakes and prisons staff came up with the
protocol. Frakes said in an affidavit last week he relied upon "expert opinions
of qualified pharmacological and medical anesthesiology experts." He also got
legal advice from Nebraska assistant attorneys general.
The combination is an unusual one, in which there is no experience as to how
the dosages and drugs will work together to cause death. The drugs actually are
meant not to cause death, but to relieve pain, reduce anxiety, facilitate
surgery or treat medical conditions.
* Diazepam, first marketed as Valium, acts as an anti-anxiety medication and
has a sedative effect.
* Fentanyl citrate, a potent narcotic painkiller, is an opioid said to be 30-50
times more potent than heroin and 50-100 times more potent than morphine. It
can cause respiratory depression, stop a person's breathing and render them
unconscious.
* Cisatracurium besylate is a muscle relaxant and in high enough doses can
paralyze the muscles, including those used for breathing.
* Potassium chloride is used to treat or prevent low potassium levels in the
body. Too much can cause heart failure.
* * *
Attorney Eric Berger, associate dean and professor of the Nebraska College of
Law, is concerned about the concoction of drugs. It's not clear, he said, that
the initial drugs in the protocol can sufficiently prevent the pain - he called
it excruciating pain - that the last 2, cisatracurium and potassium chloride,
could cause.
"I'm not saying that the execution will necessarily be painful, but I am saying
that the state has thrown together an especially novel and problematic protocol
that raises serious questions," he said.
The paralytic to be used, Berger said, could conceal the pain an inmate might
feel.
Compounding that, Berger said, it's not certain how competently the protocol
will be carried out. The qualifications, training and procedures of those
administering the drugs are unknown, he said. And prison officials have not
revealed where they got the drugs, how they were manufactured and what testing
assures they are what they purport to be.
Frakes has said only that the drugs were purchased legally from a pharmacy in
the U.S.
Because Moore hasn't allowed his attorneys to challenge the protocol, the state
thus far hasn't had to defend it in court, Berger said.
* * *
Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, the state's highest profile opponent of the death
penalty, has diligently worked behind the scenes to derail the execution,
staying up late at night, getting up early in the morning.
He contacted manufacturers of drugs he thought might be used in Moore's
execution to persuade them to attempt, through the courts, to stop the use of
any of their drugs.
Companies have made successful arguments elsewhere defending their reputations
and missions, and the fact that their medicines are meant to cure or enhance
health and not to kill.
"Anything that can contribute to derailing this execution ought to be done," he
said. "And that's a self-imposed obligation on me."
It's not enough to request any drugs to be used in an execution be returned,
Chambers said. The companies have to go all the way to the mat with the state
if they really mean to defend their reputations, integrity and mission, he
said.
He was pleased Fresenius Kabi stepped in with a lawsuit, even if it was, so
far, unsuccessful.
Fresenius Kabi sought to stop the use of what it believes are 2 of the drugs,
cisatracurium besylate and potassium chloride, it makes and supplies to
wholesalers and distributors.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Kopf denied a temporary restraining order.
The company has appealed.
On Saturday, Sandoz Inc. filed a brief with the federal court to intervene in
the lawsuit, saying a Sandoz product, cisatracurium, could be used by the state
in an unauthorized manner, and seeking an order to immediately force the state
to identify the manufacturer of the drug.
Chambers, too, has been in close contact with Jeff Pickens, chief counsel of
the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, who represents Moore, to the extent
Moore would allow.
And he wrote a letter to Chief Justice Mike Heavican, pointing out what he
believed was the fatal flaw in the request from Attorney General Doug Peterson
to set an execution date for Moore. The court would not read the letter,
considered an ex parte communication, he said, but communication from the court
said it would put it into the record.
"I didn't want to leave any stone unturned," Chambers said. "And if this bad
thing had happened, I wouldn't want to look at it after the fact and say this I
could have done. And if I could have done it, I should have done it. But that
would be too late."
You never know when you might strike the right chord, he said.
* * *
Brent Martin, news director with Nebraska Radio Network, observed 13 lethal
injection executions in Missouri between 1996 and 2005. He was selected by the
Corrections Department to represent radio media for Moore's death.
All of the executions he witnessed were carried out with a 3-drug protocol:
Sodium thiopental, which rendered the inmate unconscious; pancuronium bromide,
which stopped breathing; and potassium chloride, which stopped the heart.
Missouri has since moved to a 1-drug protocol, using pentobarbital.
Martin said every witness he has talked to says the same thing about lethal
injection executions.
"You go into it the 1st time you ever witness one with so much foreboding. It
is such a solemn, sober responsibility. ... It has a certain emotional weight
that just is unlike anything you ever do as a reporter," he said.
But then to actually see it, lethal injection is so almost antiseptic, it
becomes anticlimactic, he said.
In Missouri, condemned inmates could choose to have midazolam, marketed under
the trade name Versed, before the execution as a sedative or to decrease
anxiety. Midazolam has become controversial when used as part of an execution
protocol.
The 1st drug, sodium thiopental, a fast-acting anesthetic, usually elicited the
only response from the inmate, Martin said, a cough or a slight rising up from
the gurney. After that, there was no movement until prison officials announced
the execution was complete.
Normally, it took 5 minutes from the time the 1st drug was administered, Martin
said. Frequently, however, there were delays before the start - sometimes
minutes, sometimes hours.
If witnesses felt anxious about witnessing someone die, he said, they were told
to review the case file of what the inmate did to get there.
"We always believed it was a solemn responsibility, when the state decided to
exact the ultimate punishment, that we be there to view it for the public, and
to ensure it was done correctly, humanely if that's applicable," he said.
* * *
The next condemned killer who has been notified of the drugs the state plans to
use in his execution is Jose Sandoval, convicted of killing 5 people at a bank
branch in Norfolk. But Sandoval, unlike Moore, could present a legal challenge
against the execution protocol and tie the state up in litigation, Berger said.
The state has the upper hand in that kind of lawsuit, because both the U.S.
Supreme Court and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals have shown hostility to
inmates' legal challenges of lethal injection protocols, he said.
But the Nebraska protocol is so unusual, a judge might conduct a trial to get
more information, he said.
"It is becoming increasingly unlikely that states can get their drugs from what
might be called 'big pharma,' from major pharmaceutical companies," Berger
said.
Those companies, like Alvogen, Hikma, Lundbeck, APP Pharmaceutical, Fresenius
Kabi, Sandoz, are more and more unwilling to sell their drugs for a state's use
in executions.
Frakes told the federal court last week in an affidavit that one of the
department's drugs, potassium chloride, is set to expire this month, and the
state doesn't have any way to buy more to comply with state law and protocol.
Some states started using just 1 drug, and Nebraska could try changing its
protocol, which would require a public administrative hearing and approval by
the governor and attorney general.
3 states have made available alternative methods for carrying out the death
penalty. One of those is nitrogen hypoxia, a method available in Missouri,
Oklahoma and Alabama.
Nitrogen hypoxia would cause death by the inmate breathing in pure nitrogen,
which keeps the brain from getting enough oxygen. It would be a new method,
never before used in executions.
If the state would move away from lethal injection as a method of enforcing the
death penalty, it would require the Legislature to write a bill, hold a
hearing, get it out of committee, debate it and pass it with at least 25 votes,
or more than likely 33 to break a filibuster.
(source for all: Lincoln Journal Star)
****************************
Moore's execution must wait for state's answers
Carey Dean Moore deserves to die in prison.
He murdered Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland, 2 Omaha cab drivers, in 1979.
The 1st killing came with his younger brother in tow; the 2nd was committed
alone to callously prove that Moore could take a man's life on his own.
This is a man whose crimes against innocent victims must mandate he remains
incarcerated until his final breath. However, Moore should not die under the
circumstances he presently faces.
Moore is slated to be put to death for his crimes Tuesday morning at the
Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. Questions about the efficacy of
Nebraska's 4-drug lethal injection protocol - never before used in capital
punishment and written in 1 draft without any external input - and the sources
from which the state obtained those drugs remain unknown.
Yes, Moore broke the law in killing 2 men. That cannot be disputed. But the
state has yet to definitely prove it can follow the law while killing him.
An open-records lawsuit filed by the Journal Star and other media outlets
sought to prove if that were indeed the case. A judge ruled that most of the
documents requested in the suit - including many surrounding the sourcing of
the drugs - were in fact public records that should be released.
Quickly, the state appealed the decision. Around that same time, the Attorney
General's Office took what appears to be an unprecedented step by challenging a
subpoena issued by the Nebraska Legislature's Judiciary Committee to
Corrections Director Scott Frakes.
The lengths to which state officials have gone to hide the details of this
process should trouble all Nebraskans. Both of these court actions are
indisputably designed to hide specifics of the state's death penalty protocol
from the public, as if something unsavory lurks beneath the surface.
The open-records case remains on appeal, and the subpoena suit remains under
advisement. It's unclear if either will be decided before Moore's execution -
the 1st in Nebraska since 1997.
That???s assuming everything occurs as scheduled, of course, never a guarantee
with capital punishment.
The latest potential wrench came from a pharmaceutical company, which filed a
lawsuit late Tuesday. The suit aims to prevent what it believes is its
potassium chloride - since, again, the state refuses to identify where it
bought the execution drugs - from being used in next week's lethal injection.
Unwarranted secrecy and unmerited opacity spite the esteemed words above the
State Capitol's north door: "The salvation of the state is watchfulness in the
citizen." The citizens have done everything in their power to be watchful
regarding capital punishment, only to be rebuffed by the state.
Too many grave concerns remain unaddressed for Moore's execution. Until the
state provides the requisite answers and proves it's acting in accordance with
the law, his death is a bridge too far.
(source: Editorial, Sioux City Journal)
***********************************
How Carey Dean Moore's execution, Nebraska's 1st lethal injection, will be
carried out
Nebraska's official death penalty procedure says this week's execution of Carey
Dean Moore will be accomplished by the injection of substances in a quantity
sufficient to cause death without the unnecessary and wanton infliction of
pain.
If a federal appellate court doesn't halt Moore's execution between now and 10
a.m. Tuesday, the prison staff members responsible for what sounds like a
straightforward task will be under a high degree of scrutiny.
Nebraska has carried out 37 state-sanctioned executions, but Moore's will be
the 1st by lethal injection. Bill Clinton occupied the White House the last
time the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services executed an inmate, using
the electric chair.
Moore, 60, has served for 38 years on death row for the 1979 killings of Omaha
cabdrivers Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland. He has recently told friends
and family that he is ready to die and does not want his execution halted.
Another factor at play Tuesday: The state will give Moore a 4-drug combination
never used before in an execution. Death penalty critics have said that raises
the likelihood of a botched execution, meaning it could take longer than normal
or Moore could experience excess pain.
"Nobody is hoping things go wrong," said Robert Dunham, director of the Death
Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. "Everybody is hoping, if it
happens, it happens smoothly."
Corrections Director Scott Frakes declined a request to be interviewed for this
story.
But a former high-ranking member of the department said no one wants the
execution to go smoothly more than staff members who will serve on the
execution team.
"My concern is that it's been so long," said Brian Gage, who spent 34 years
with corrections and served as warden of Tecumseh State Prison. "The majority
of them will be new to an execution."
Based upon the state's protocol document, the execution team conducts training
sessions at least once a month throughout the year. But when an execution date
has been set, the frequency of training increases to at least once per week.
The Nebraska Supreme Court set Moore's execution date on July 5.
Execution team members volunteer for the duty, and most have their identities
shielded under state law.
With the execution just 2 days away, Moore will have been transported from
death row at the Tecumseh prison to a holding cell at the Nebraska State
Penitentiary in Lincoln, Gage said. The penitentiary houses the execution
chamber.
He will be under what's called death watch, which means he will be closely
monitored so he doesn't commit suicide.
At least 48 hours before the execution, the IV team leader will examine Moore
to find appropriate veins to insert the IV needle. The IV team leader must have
completed training as an emergency medical technician and in needle insertion.
As the hour of his execution approaches, Moore will be given expanded visiting
time with his minister, family and friends. He also will be afforded the chance
to eat a "final meal," which Gage said is not an elaborate dinner ordered from
outside the facility. Rather, he can make a choice of whatever happens to be on
the cafeteria's full menu at the time.
When the time arrives, Gage said members of the escort team will accompany
Moore to the execution chamber. When the state last carried out an execution,
the inmate walked from the holding cell down a set of stairs to the execution
chamber.
Moore will then be placed on the padded table, where his arms, legs and torso
will be secured in place by restraints. The escort team will then leave the
room.
The IV team leader will set primary and backup IV lines in two of Moore's
veins. The team leader will test the lines using saline fluid and will attach a
heart monitor to the inmate.
When the corrections director gives the order, the IV team leader will begin
the lethal injection. The sequence of drugs and doses to be injected:
2 milligrams of diazepam (a sedative) per kilogram of body weight followed by
additional doses until the inmate is unconscious. A 50 cc saline flush will
follow the diazepam.
25 micrograms of fentanyl (a powerful opioid painkiller) per kilogram of body
weight, followed by a 50 cc saline flush.
1.6 milligrams of cisatracurium (a paralyzing drug intended to stop the
inmate's breathing) per kilogram of body weight followed by a 50 cc saline
flush.
240 milliequivalents of potassium chloride (a drug that causes heart attack in
high doses) followed by a final saline flush.
After the diazepam is given, the IV team leader must conduct a consciousness
check of Moore. Common methods include pinching an eyelid or cheek and calling
his name. The inmate must be unconscious before the remaining 3 drugs are
injected.
Lethal injections without obvious complications typically take about 10 minutes
to result in death, Dunham said. But some botched executions have taken
significantly longer.
If the staff member who sets the IV misses a vein and the drugs flow into the
inmate???s muscles, death can be prolonged and extremely painful, he said. Or
if the inmate regains consciousness, he can experience an intense, burning pain
from the potassium chloride, the drug that stops the heart.
A coroner or medical professional will check to determine whether Moore is dead
after the 4 drugs are injected. If the coroner determines he is still alive,
the IV team leader must carry out the injection sequence a 2nd time.
In a lawsuit heard Friday in federal court, a lawyer for a Germany-based drug
company said state documents suggest the paralyzing drug has not been stored at
the proper temperature by corrections staff. The lawyer said if the drug has
degraded as a result, it may not work as prison officials hope.
Eric Berger is a professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law who has
studied lethal injection for over a decade. In an opinion piece published by
The World-Herald, Berger wrote that if the inmate is not properly anesthetized
by the 1st 2 drugs, Moore could experience a sensation that???s been described
as "being burned alive from the inside" when the final drug, potassium
chloride, enters his bloodstream.
"Nobody disputes that the injection of potassium chloride alone would violate
the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment," Berger
said.
Frakes, the prisons director, said in a court affidavit filed this week that he
relied on "opinions of qualified pharmacological and medical anesthesiology
experts" to come up with the drugs and dosages. In addition, he said the drugs
underwent lab testing to confirm their composition.
(source: Omaha World-Herald)
CALIFORNIA:
California Has The Largest Death Row Population In The Country
California has the largest death row population in the country, though the
trend showed an opposite effect nationally, according to a study released
Friday.
Pew Research Center analyzed data from the Death Penalty Information Center and
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where it found California's death
row population in 2017 increased by almost 100 inmates since January 2000. The
state currently has 744 inmates on death row.
"The increase reflects the fact that California juries have continued to
sentence convicted defendants to death even as executions themselves have been
on hold in recent years amid legal and political disputes," according to Pew.
California has not executed an individual since 2006, after courts halted a
3-drug execution process between February 1996 to January 2006. The courts
struck it down because of fear defendants could face inhumane suffering if one
of the drugs failed, according to a Los Angeles Times article on Nov. 6, 2015.
The state proposed a single-drug lethal injection on Nov. 6, 2015, though it
has not been carried out, the L.A. Times reported.
Death by capital punishment became the 3rd leading cause of death in
California, behind natural causes and suicide, due to the long-term deferral of
the death penalty.
Federal death sentences have also increased by 37 inmates since 2003.
The number of deaths across the states, however, decreased from 3,682 to 2,792,
or by 24 %, between 2000 to 2017, according to the NAACP.
The overall decrease in the death penalty could be due to the number of people
sentenced to death row have decreased. Other factors include defendants dying
from other causes or they were exonerated, according to Pew.
There were 31 states plus the federal government and military that used the
death penalty, while 18 states and the District of Columbia did not, according
to the study.
The 11 states that have capital punishment have not executed an individual for
at least a decade and the U.S. Military has not done an execution since 1961,
Pew reported.
Death Penalty Information Center is "an information clearinghouse that has been
critical of capital punishment," while the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund follows death row populations for all 50 states, according to Pew.
(source: The Daily Caller)
USA:
Capital punishment stumbles ahead in US
3 news items this week illustrate the patchwork of capital punishment
legislation in the United States.
On Thursday, a 59-year-old man, Billy Irick, was executed in the state of
Tennessee for the rape and murder of a 7-year-old, a crime he had committed in
1985.
Tennessee, whose last execution took place in 2009, uses a cocktail of drugs to
sedate and then kill the prisoner. Lawyers for prisoners on Tennessee's death
row described this as inhumane, but the challenge was dismissed by the State
Supreme Court. A last-minute challenge on grounds of mental incapacity failed
in the US Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a
scathing dissent: "If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of
the horrific final minutes that Irick may well experience, then we have stopped
being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism."
The state of Oklahoma has not executed anyone for more than 3 years, partly
because it cannot obtain the necessary drugs. After a botched execution in
2014, a 3-year moratorium was declared on lethal injections. In 2015 the
legislature made nitrogen asphyxiation the preferred method of dispatching
prisoners. However, this week it was announced that protocols for this new
method had not been finalised; it is unclear when executions will resume. 16
inmates on death row have exhausted their appeals and await the dates of their
execution.
The state of Nebraska is planning its 1st execution in 21 years - a 60-year-old
man, Carey Dean Moore, who killed 2 taxi cab drivers in 1979. But a German
pharmaceutical company has sued to stop the execution because it will suffer
reputational damage if its drug is used. Fresenius Kabi claims that the state
obtained 2 of its drugs through illegal channels.
Adding heat to the debate over capital punishment in the US was a recent move
by Pope Francis condemning it as "inadmissible". He decreed that the Catechism
of the Catholic Church, an authoritative reference for official teaching,
should be amended to read: "the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an
attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person". This came at an awkward
time for Nebraska's governor, Pete Ricketts, a Catholic who is an ardent
supporter of the death penalty.
(source: bioedge.org)
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LOUISIANA:
On the death penalty and unanimous juries
Interestingly, a flawed and controversial decision by Pope Francis on capital
punishment also yields some insights into whether Louisiana should require
unanimous jury verdicts for felony cases.
Earlier this month, the pope announced a change in the Roman Catholic Church's
Catechism, the document outlining basic church beliefs.
Francis said henceforth the Catechism would declare capital punishment entirely
"inadmissible." The church had previously supported executions for dire cases
that ensured protection of society. A Vatican official called the change needed
to reflect the present "political and social situation" that made the death
penalty an affront to "dignity of a person." The change is an explicit
rejection of past doctrine that retribution may be just and even redemptive.
As theologically questionable as Francis' action may be, it still can provide a
guidepost to thinking about capital punishment.
The death penalty becomes morally justifiable when it saves lives, largely
through deterrence, as much high-quality, nonpartisan research amply
demonstrates. This squares fully with the Catechism's instructions about
"legitimate defense," affirming the morality of taking a life to preserve
innocent ones.
Yet much of that same research shows the deterrent effect disappears when the
death penalty falls into disuse. Logically, if a potential murderer believes
chances of his execution for that crime approach zero, he doesn't fear capital
punishment as much.
The odds of being executed fall greatly when death sentences get bogged down in
endless appeals, which is the present state of affairs in Louisiana. Dozens of
inmates here have languished on death row for decades.
Actually, few individuals have death sentences thrown out because a jury just
got it wrong. Most reversals involve some other circumstance, such as
prosecutorial misconduct, but in rare instances, post-trial evidence comes to
light to corroborate the innocence of a death row inmate. If there are fewer
close calls among jurors, there's a smaller chance of a mistake.
Convictions by split juries - currently, in Louisiana, for felonies only 10 of
12 jurors need to vote to convict - likely involve more of these close calls,
as the clearer the evidence of guilt, the less likely any juror would dissent.
So requiring jury unanimity bolsters confidence in the system, which should
reduce obstacles to carrying out executions. That would give capital punishment
more teeth, making it more of a deterrent.
This fall, Louisiana residents will vote on a proposal to amend the state
constitution to require unanimous juries for felony convictions. They should.
Requiring unanimous juries for felony cases could help prevent wrongful
convictions. It would also strengthen the death penalty, making it more likely
that potential killers think twice before ending the lives of innocent victims.
Meanwhile, Louisiana Catholics should pray that the Holy Father's rewriting of
the Catechism on the death penalty doesn't undermine the church's claim of
teaching eternal truths.
(source: Jeff Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana
State University-Shreveport, where he teaches Louisiana government----The
Advocate)
TENNESSEE:
As I watched Billy Ray Irick executed, I could feel the heartbeat of another
mom
As I watched Billy Ray Irick die Thursday, I couldn't stop thinking about Paula
Dyer, the sweet little 7-year-old Knoxville girl he savaged and suffocated, and
the mother who never got to kiss her goodbye.
I was supposed to be at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution to document
Irick's death - to watch and witness how the state killed him.
A Knox County jury, way back in 1986, sentenced him to die for grabbing little
Paula, forcing her into a bedroom, barricading the door as her siblings
screamed, holding that child down, covering her mouth, raping her over and
over, then casting her aside inside her Exeter Avenue home.
Thirty-three years after his crimes, I sat in a tiny room, a note pad and
pencil in my hand with instructions to watch him die.
But my eyes kept shifting from the gurney where Irick was dying - with his eyes
closed and his body barely moving - to a room just a few feet away from me
where Paula's mother, Kathy Jeffers, sat watching, too.
I couldn't see her. The execution chamber is designed that way - to keep folks
who know nothing of a survivor's pain away from their display of it. But I
could feel her heart beat as a fellow mother.
We mothers do all we can to raise good kids and keep them safe. Kathy Jeffers
certainly did. She was raising 5 children and working as a waitress at a truck
stop to keep them fed. Little Paula was already an honor student and as
friendly as she was adorable.
Irick was the bogeyman we mothers fear - a predator disguised as a friend, the
monster - not in the closet or under bed - but in your neighborhood or even
your home.
Of course, Irick didn't set out to be a monster. He was an innocent boy, too,
before the bogeymen in his life - cruel caretakers and untreated mental illness
- did their damage.
The seats in the witness room reserved for a condemned man's loved ones were
empty. Irick's last kiss came from a lawyer. The mom in me hurt for him, too,
as I watched him staring at the ceiling as his unseen executioners prepared the
drug cocktail intended to kill him.
Whether he suffered as he died, I can't tell you. He didn???t show signs of it.
He closed his eyes. His breathing grew labored and raspy, a bit loud. But he
never moved. His breathing slowed and quieted within minutes - others kept
better notes on the timing of his death - and then he simply stopped breathing.
I didn't get to ask Kathy Jeffers what she felt when she watched a man, largely
unrecognizable from that bogeyman he was 33 years ago, die for killing her
innocent daughter. She's walked these years of grief privately and she did so
again on Thursday - arriving and leaving quietly, avoiding the waiting cameras.
The journalist in me would have been compelled to ask her if justice had been
served in that roughly 20 minutes of scripted death inside the execution
chamber.
But the mom in me already knew that answer. The bogeyman is dead, but Kathy
Jeffers is doing life without her precious Paula. There's no justice in that.
(source: Jamie Satterfield is a legal affairs investigative journalist for
Knoxville News Sentinel, where this column first appeared----brinkwire.com)
*********************************
From gallows to gurney: 6 of East Tennessee's most infamous executions
Billy Ray Irick became the 6th man in Tennessee to die by lethal injection on
Thursday night.
A total of 132 men have died like Irick - either by poison cocktail or
electrocution - since Tennessee began carrying out executions at the main state
prison in Nashville in 1916.
Before that, sheriffs hanged the condemned in the counties of their crimes. An
estimate by the Death Penalty Information Center, which tracks capital
punishment in the U.S., places Tennessee's hangings through those years at 210.
Here's a half-dozen of East Tennessee's most infamous executions, from the
gallows to the electric chair to the gurney.
John Bane was convicted in Memphis for the 1988 robbery and strangulation
murder of Royce Frazier. Frazier's body was found in his bathtub.
From hoods to hanging
The spectacle offered everything but a big top on July 7, 1899, when men, women
and children gathered on the courthouse lawn in Sevierville to see Pleas Wynn
and Catlett Tipton hanged side-by-side.
The 2 Sevier County farmers had become the face of the masked vigilantes that
terrorized rural communities for years in a kind of gangland war.
Farmers in the rural Emert's Cove community initially banded together for
masked nighttime raids to drive out local prostitutes. A counter-vigilante
group, the Bluebills, formed, and the rivalry spiraled into a series of fatal
shootouts and ambushes.
The violence climaxed when whitecaps killed a tenant-farming couple, William
and Laura Whaley. Their landlord had hired the men for $200 to force the couple
out.
The killing sparked a crackdown by the state Legislature that led to the
arrests of Wynn and Tipton, identified by Laura Whaley's sister, who'd watched
the murders as she hid under a bed. Her testimony earned them a death sentence.
Wynn was led to the river to be baptized before the noose graced his neck. Each
found the time to address the crowd before the trapdoor swung open.
"Let my evil deeds be forgotten," Tipton begged the spectators. "If I ever did
any good, I hope it will be remembered."
Last man hanging
The crowd that gathered outside the Knox County Courthouse on Main Street went
home disappointed on March 23, 1908, when Sheriff Lum Reeder decided to close
the night's hanging to the public.
John McPherson, 24, became the last man hanged in the county. He fidgeted on
the gallows inside the jail and asked the sheriff to loosen the rope as the
clock ticked to the appointed hour.
McPherson had killed a deputy, William Walker, 2 years earlier as he made his
getaway from killing another man, Grant Smith, in a drunken rage. He'd hidden
in the coal mines of West Virginia for a year before authorities tracked him
down.
"He drew a number of long breaths and inflated his lungs and held his breath
when the trap was dropped," a reporter for the Knoxville Sentinel wrote. "He
was a perfect specimen of humanity, and very strong."
4 in a day
The lights at the Tennessee State Prison dimmed 4 times the morning of March 1,
1922 - once for each of the men strapped into the electric chair inside an
hour.
Tom Christmas, Charles Petree, John McClure and Otto Stephens sat down one
after the other to pay with their lives for the robbery that killed George
Andrew Lewis in Anderson County. It's the only recorded quadruple execution in
Tennessee history.
The 4 kidnapped Lewis and taxi driver Andrew Crumley the night of May 30, 1921,
and left them to die - bound and gagged with their throats slashed - near a
gravel quarry in the Robertsville community. Lewis died. Crumley survived,
worked himself free and found help at a nearby farmhouse.
The 4 used the taxi the next day as a getaway car in a failed robbery of the
Oakdale Bank and Trust in nearby Roane County. They didn't count on being
caught by an armed posse and identified by Crumley.
An Anderson County jury sentenced all 4 to die. Guards at the death house threw
the switch first for Petree at 6:15 a.m. The lights blinked for the last time
just before 6:50.
'Innocent as the sun that shines'
Maurice Mays never gave up proclaiming his innocence - not until the
executioner's current cut his life short.
Mays died at age 35 in the electric chair March 15, 1922 - nominally for
killing Bertie Lindsey, a white woman shot by an intruder in the bedroom of her
North Knoxville home. But supporters suspected Mays' only true crime to be
defiance of a segregated society.
Mays, a black man rumored to be the illegitimate son of Knoxville's white
mayor, paid no mind to the written and unwritten laws of his day. He dated
white women, ran back-alley bootleg and gambling operations, and helped
organize black voters for the city political machine.
The night Lindsey died, police headed straight to Mays' home, led by Andy
White, an officer who'd cursed and threatened Mays for years. The only witness
to the shooting, Lindsey's cousin Ora Smyth, who'd been sharing a bed with her
that night, took just one look at Mays under the dim glow of a streetlamp and
pronounced him "the man."
A white mob blasted into the county jail with dynamite in a vain search for
Mays the next day. He'd been spirited to Chattanooga by the sheriff. He stood
trial less than a month later in front of an all-white jury that took 18
minutes to find him guilty.
A 2nd trial ordered by the state Supreme Court ended with the same verdict and
sentence - death. Despite pleas from prominent Tennesseans white and black,
Gov. Alf Taylor refused to intervene.
Mays, his health ruined by the years of confinement, walked his last steps to
the electric chair on crutches.
"I am as innocent as the sun that shines," he said from the death seat. "I hope
the politicians are satisfied."
He was still speaking when the current silenced him forever. Efforts to clear
his name over the decades, including entreaties to Gov. Bill Haslam, have
failed.
Shootout with the sheriff
Gus McCoig had 2 main skills: he could pick the guitar, and he could point a
gun.
The guitar got him girls. The gun got him a seat in the electric chair.
McCoig made a name for himself as a young man hot-rodding the highways of
Appalachia through the early 1930s with outlaws like Clarence Bunch, East
Tennessee's counterpart to John Dillinger. Their exploits ended in 1934 with
Bunch dead from a hail of bullets and McCoig behind bars in the Tennessee State
Penitentiary. But McCoig wasn't ready to bow out.
He and fellow inmate Pete Dean kidnapped a deputy warden and escaped the
prison, then made their way to New Tazewell, Tenn., where they and a third
bandit, Frank Hopson, robbed the Citizens Bank on Dec. 6, 1935, and headed
south on state Highway 33.
Union County Sheriff L.B. Hutchison was ready. He and a deputy staked out the
highway at the bridge over the Clinch River and gave chase.
The sheriff wasn't ready when the getaway car stopped and McCoig shot him dead
- just as a Greyhound bus full of passengers drove up.
The gang split up, and McCoig stayed on the run until February 1936. Officers
finally caught up with him in a Cumberland County tourist camp, where they
found him strumming his guitar and singing a prison worksong.
"Here I go to ride that long trail, not to come back," he sang as deputies led
him away.
He was right. McCoig died in the chair April 3, 1937.
Last of a generation
William L. "Willie" Tines was less than 2 years from parole when he broke out
of Brushy Mountain Prison. His escape route led him to the electric chair.
Tines was serving a 99-year sentence for killing 2 men in Knoxville when he and
a couple of other inmates split from a wood-chopping detail April 23,1957,
outside the prison near Petros. The next day, a black man wearing striped
convict pants broke into a home on state Highway 61 near Harriman and walked in
on a white housekeeper as she ironed clothes. A struggle knocked the phone off
the hook, and neighbors on the party line heard her scream.
Officers found the woman beaten and bloody, with her eyes swollen shut and her
nose broken. She said she'd been raped. As an armed posse fanned out along the
highway, Tines flagged down a passing state trooper to give himself up.
He admitted he'd broken into the house. But he denied he raped the woman.
He signed a confession to rape. But he couldn't read or write.
The woman testified she couldn't swear what her attacker looked like. A Roane
County jury deliberated 25 minutes before finding Tines guilty.
Three years of appeals and bids for clemency followed. On Nov. 7, 1960, Tines
took his seat where 124 men had sat before.
"Pray for me," he asked as the guards fastened electrodes to his body.
7 minutes later, a doctor pronounced him dead.
"He stood up well at the end," the warden remarked later.
No one knew it then, but Tines's death marked the last inmate executed in
Tennessee for a generation. Forty years would pass before the next inmate,
Robert Glen Coe, died on the lethal-injection gurney on April 19, 2000.
(source: Knoxville News Sentinel)
NEBRASKA----impending execution
2nd drug maker joins lethal injection lawsuit against Nebraska
A 2nd drug-maker has joined the lethal injection fight.
Sandoz Inc. joined the appeal drug maker Fresenius Kabi filed after a judge
denied their claims Friday. Judge Richard Kopf told the company there is no
proof their drugs would be used in the execution of Carey Dean Moore, because
the State of Nebraska has not revealed its suppliers.
Sandoz manufactures the muscle relaxant Cisatracurium. It is the 2nd of 4 drugs
that will be used in the execution.
In the suit, the company said if the drugs did come from them, it wants them
back. The company also requests a temporary restraining order on their use,
which could put a stay on the upcoming execution.
There's still no word on when the appeals hearing will happen.
Moore's execution is still scheduled for Tuesday at 10 a.m.
(source: KETV news)
***************************
History of the death penalty in Nebraska
1903 - Gottlieb Neigenfind is the 1st person to be executed by the state of
Nebraska by hanging. Earlier executions were carried out by individual
counties.
1913 - Nebraska's execution method changes from hanging to electrocution.
1972 - The U.S. Supreme Court struck down capital punishment statutes in Furman
v. Georgia, reducing all death sentences pending at the time to life
imprisonment.
1976 - Nationwide, the death penalty is reinstated.
1979 - Legislature repeals death penalty; vote is vetoed by Gov. Charles Thone.
1982 - Legislature excludes offenders younger than 18 from death penalty.
1994 - Harold Otey, who raped and murdered Omaha student and waitress Jane
McManus in 1977 is the 1st person executed since Charles Starkweather in 1959.
1996 - John Joubert, who confessed to killing Danny Jo Eberle and Christopher
Walden in Sarpy County, is executed.
1997 - Robert Williams is executed for the 1977 murders of Catherine Brook and
Patricia McGarry of Lincoln.
1998 - Legislature excludes developmentally disabled offenders from death
penalty. A year later Jerry Simpson and Clarence Victor are taken off death row
because their IQs are less than 70.
1999 - Nebraska is the 1st state in the nation to pass a moratorium on carrying
out the death penalty while it studies the fairness of its application. The
Legislature unanimously overrides Gov. Mike Johanns' veto.
2000 - Nebraska Supreme Court vacates the death sentence of Randy Reeves
because he was sentenced with improper procedures. Reeves had been sentenced to
death for the drug-induced murders of Janet Mesner and Victoria Lamm in Lincoln
in 1980. Reeves is sentenced to 2 life terms instead.
2001 - Peter Hochstein and Michael Anderson are taken off death row and given
life in prison because their sentencing judicial panels could not reach a
unanimous decision to impose the death sentence. Anderson and Hochstein had
been sentenced to death for the 1975 murder-for-hire of an Omaha businessman.
2007 - Nebraska Legislature comes within 1 vote of passing a repeal bill.
2008 - Nebraska Supreme Court rules the electric chair is cruel and unusual
punishment. Nebraska is the last state with electrocution as its sole means of
execution.
2009 - During a special session, the Legislature makes lethal injection the
state's new method of execution; appeals and lack of the drugs needed to
implement it prevent the state from using it.
2012 - A Swiss pharmaceutical company recalls the lethal injection drug sodium
thiopental held by Nebraska, because it says it was illegally obtained and sold
by a middleman. The drug later expires.
2015 - The Legislature passes a bill abolishing the death penalty, which is
vetoed by Gov. Pete Ricketts. The 49-member legislature overrides the veto,
30-19. It is the 1st time a state with a predominantly Republican legislature
has repealed the death penalty since North Dakota abolished the death penalty
in 1973.
2015 - The Food and Drug Administration halts delivery to Nebraska of execution
drugs from a distributor in India. The state is later unsuccessful in
attempting to be reimbursed for $26,700 it paid.
2016 - Nebraska voters approve a ballot question 61 to 39 % reversing the
Legislature's repeal of the death penalty and restoring capital punishment in
the state.
2018 - The Nebraska Supreme Court sets an execution date of Aug. 14 for
condemned prisoner Carey Dean Moore.
****************************
Sandoz seeks to intervene in drug manufacturer's Nebraska execution lawsuit
Another drug company has jumped into the last-minute flurry of legal protests
of the state's lethal injection drugs.
Sandoz Inc. filed a brief Saturday in federal court asking to intervene in a
lawsuit filed last week by drug manufacturer Fresenius Kabi. U.S. District
Court Judge Richard Kopf ruled on that complaint Friday afternoon, denying a
temporary restraining order and allowing the execution of Carey Dean Moore to
go forward as planned on Tuesday.
Fresenius Kabi has appealed, and Sandoz's motion to intervene will be heard by
Kopf on Monday at 10 a.m.
Sandoz is a manufacturer of cisatracurium, a muscle relaxant, and wants to
force the state to identify the manufacturer of the drug to be used in Moore's
execution.
"The use of cisatracurium in this unauthorized manner will cause substantial
reputational and other harm to Sandoz, and compromise Sandoz's longstanding
efforts to ensure its products are not used for capital punishment," the
complaint said.
The drug has never been used in an execution, nor tested or approved for that
purpose, the company said.
"The proposed misuse of the drug in executions is therefore experimental and
without precedent establishing that it can be administered without causing
unconstitutional suffering," it said.
Sandoz seeks an injunction to require the Nebraska Department of Corrections to
disclose the drug's manufacturer and distributor.
Sandoz has for years been steadfast in disallowing use of its drugs for
off-label use for lethal injection, the company said. In 2011 it took steps to
prevent the sale of sodium thiopental in the U.S., a drug frequently used in
lethal injection cocktails.
In 2013 it put restrictions on rocuronium bromide to prevent its capital
punishment use. In 2017 it put those restrictions on Anectine, a paralytic.
That same year, it began to add distribution restrictions for cisatracurium
when customer agreements came up for renewal.
Sandoz sent a letter to Corrections Director Scott Frakes this year, and a 2nd
one to Frakes, Gov. Pete Ricketts and Attorney General Doug Peterson in August,
objecting and requesting they immediately disclose whether the cisatracurium to
be used in Nebraska's protocol was manufactured by Sandoz.
The drug is made by multiple companies.
In his ruling on the Fresenius Kabi lawsuit, Kopf said he did not believe its
reputation would be irreparably harmed if the execution proceeds using the
drugs cisatracurium and potassium chloride, which the company believes are from
its supplies.
But the state of Nebraska would be "greatly and irreparably harmed," he said,
if he stopped the execution.
*********************************
Untested drug concoction still on track for Nebraska execution
Condemned Nebraska prisoner Carey Dean Moore has made it clear he prefers not
to stay on death row the rest of his life. He's ready to die.
Saying the time had come, after seven prior dates with death imposed but not
carried out by the state, a federal judge on Friday accommodated Moore, ruling
against a drug company that asked for a delay.
It's been 39 years since Moore took his little brother with him to rob a cabbie
and kill his 1st victim, Reuel Van Ness Jr., then kill a 2nd man, Maynard
Helgeland, by himself.
Although the drug company has appealed Friday's court ruling, Moore is not
fighting his execution.
He has named his witnesses: His brother David Moore; a friend, Gary Cross; a
niece, Taylor Brouillette; his spiritual adviser and friend, Bob Bryan. He has
asked for the state to pay for his cremation, according to prison documents,
and would like his ashes given to his brother David.
He is scheduled to die Tuesday morning, and the state appears ready to proceed,
even with an untested combination of 4 drugs, 3 of which - fentanyl, diazepam
and cisatracurium - have not been used in capital punishment. The protocol was
put in place by the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services.
Outside of a short list of people with the need-to-know, no one else has been
told details of how Director Scott Frakes and prisons staff came up with the
protocol. Frakes said in an affidavit last week he relied upon "expert opinions
of qualified pharmacological and medical anesthesiology experts." He also got
legal advice from Nebraska assistant attorneys general.
The combination is an unusual one, in which there is no experience as to how
the dosages and drugs will work together to cause death. The drugs actually are
meant not to cause death, but to relieve pain, reduce anxiety, facilitate
surgery or treat medical conditions.
* Diazepam, first marketed as Valium, acts as an anti-anxiety medication and
has a sedative effect.
* Fentanyl citrate, a potent narcotic painkiller, is an opioid said to be 30-50
times more potent than heroin and 50-100 times more potent than morphine. It
can cause respiratory depression, stop a person's breathing and render them
unconscious.
* Cisatracurium besylate is a muscle relaxant and in high enough doses can
paralyze the muscles, including those used for breathing.
* Potassium chloride is used to treat or prevent low potassium levels in the
body. Too much can cause heart failure.
* * *
Attorney Eric Berger, associate dean and professor of the Nebraska College of
Law, is concerned about the concoction of drugs. It's not clear, he said, that
the initial drugs in the protocol can sufficiently prevent the pain - he called
it excruciating pain - that the last 2, cisatracurium and potassium chloride,
could cause.
"I'm not saying that the execution will necessarily be painful, but I am saying
that the state has thrown together an especially novel and problematic protocol
that raises serious questions," he said.
The paralytic to be used, Berger said, could conceal the pain an inmate might
feel.
Compounding that, Berger said, it's not certain how competently the protocol
will be carried out. The qualifications, training and procedures of those
administering the drugs are unknown, he said. And prison officials have not
revealed where they got the drugs, how they were manufactured and what testing
assures they are what they purport to be.
Frakes has said only that the drugs were purchased legally from a pharmacy in
the U.S.
Because Moore hasn't allowed his attorneys to challenge the protocol, the state
thus far hasn't had to defend it in court, Berger said.
* * *
Omaha Sen. Ernie Chambers, the state's highest profile opponent of the death
penalty, has diligently worked behind the scenes to derail the execution,
staying up late at night, getting up early in the morning.
He contacted manufacturers of drugs he thought might be used in Moore's
execution to persuade them to attempt, through the courts, to stop the use of
any of their drugs.
Companies have made successful arguments elsewhere defending their reputations
and missions, and the fact that their medicines are meant to cure or enhance
health and not to kill.
"Anything that can contribute to derailing this execution ought to be done," he
said. "And that's a self-imposed obligation on me."
It's not enough to request any drugs to be used in an execution be returned,
Chambers said. The companies have to go all the way to the mat with the state
if they really mean to defend their reputations, integrity and mission, he
said.
He was pleased Fresenius Kabi stepped in with a lawsuit, even if it was, so
far, unsuccessful.
Fresenius Kabi sought to stop the use of what it believes are 2 of the drugs,
cisatracurium besylate and potassium chloride, it makes and supplies to
wholesalers and distributors.
U.S. District Court Judge Richard Kopf denied a temporary restraining order.
The company has appealed.
On Saturday, Sandoz Inc. filed a brief with the federal court to intervene in
the lawsuit, saying a Sandoz product, cisatracurium, could be used by the state
in an unauthorized manner, and seeking an order to immediately force the state
to identify the manufacturer of the drug.
Chambers, too, has been in close contact with Jeff Pickens, chief counsel of
the Nebraska Commission on Public Advocacy, who represents Moore, to the extent
Moore would allow.
And he wrote a letter to Chief Justice Mike Heavican, pointing out what he
believed was the fatal flaw in the request from Attorney General Doug Peterson
to set an execution date for Moore. The court would not read the letter,
considered an ex parte communication, he said, but communication from the court
said it would put it into the record.
"I didn't want to leave any stone unturned," Chambers said. "And if this bad
thing had happened, I wouldn't want to look at it after the fact and say this I
could have done. And if I could have done it, I should have done it. But that
would be too late."
You never know when you might strike the right chord, he said.
* * *
Brent Martin, news director with Nebraska Radio Network, observed 13 lethal
injection executions in Missouri between 1996 and 2005. He was selected by the
Corrections Department to represent radio media for Moore's death.
All of the executions he witnessed were carried out with a 3-drug protocol:
Sodium thiopental, which rendered the inmate unconscious; pancuronium bromide,
which stopped breathing; and potassium chloride, which stopped the heart.
Missouri has since moved to a 1-drug protocol, using pentobarbital.
Martin said every witness he has talked to says the same thing about lethal
injection executions.
"You go into it the 1st time you ever witness one with so much foreboding. It
is such a solemn, sober responsibility. ... It has a certain emotional weight
that just is unlike anything you ever do as a reporter," he said.
But then to actually see it, lethal injection is so almost antiseptic, it
becomes anticlimactic, he said.
In Missouri, condemned inmates could choose to have midazolam, marketed under
the trade name Versed, before the execution as a sedative or to decrease
anxiety. Midazolam has become controversial when used as part of an execution
protocol.
The 1st drug, sodium thiopental, a fast-acting anesthetic, usually elicited the
only response from the inmate, Martin said, a cough or a slight rising up from
the gurney. After that, there was no movement until prison officials announced
the execution was complete.
Normally, it took 5 minutes from the time the 1st drug was administered, Martin
said. Frequently, however, there were delays before the start - sometimes
minutes, sometimes hours.
If witnesses felt anxious about witnessing someone die, he said, they were told
to review the case file of what the inmate did to get there.
"We always believed it was a solemn responsibility, when the state decided to
exact the ultimate punishment, that we be there to view it for the public, and
to ensure it was done correctly, humanely if that's applicable," he said.
* * *
The next condemned killer who has been notified of the drugs the state plans to
use in his execution is Jose Sandoval, convicted of killing 5 people at a bank
branch in Norfolk. But Sandoval, unlike Moore, could present a legal challenge
against the execution protocol and tie the state up in litigation, Berger said.
The state has the upper hand in that kind of lawsuit, because both the U.S.
Supreme Court and the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals have shown hostility to
inmates' legal challenges of lethal injection protocols, he said.
But the Nebraska protocol is so unusual, a judge might conduct a trial to get
more information, he said.
"It is becoming increasingly unlikely that states can get their drugs from what
might be called 'big pharma,' from major pharmaceutical companies," Berger
said.
Those companies, like Alvogen, Hikma, Lundbeck, APP Pharmaceutical, Fresenius
Kabi, Sandoz, are more and more unwilling to sell their drugs for a state's use
in executions.
Frakes told the federal court last week in an affidavit that one of the
department's drugs, potassium chloride, is set to expire this month, and the
state doesn't have any way to buy more to comply with state law and protocol.
Some states started using just 1 drug, and Nebraska could try changing its
protocol, which would require a public administrative hearing and approval by
the governor and attorney general.
3 states have made available alternative methods for carrying out the death
penalty. One of those is nitrogen hypoxia, a method available in Missouri,
Oklahoma and Alabama.
Nitrogen hypoxia would cause death by the inmate breathing in pure nitrogen,
which keeps the brain from getting enough oxygen. It would be a new method,
never before used in executions.
If the state would move away from lethal injection as a method of enforcing the
death penalty, it would require the Legislature to write a bill, hold a
hearing, get it out of committee, debate it and pass it with at least 25 votes,
or more than likely 33 to break a filibuster.
(source for all: Lincoln Journal Star)
****************************
Moore's execution must wait for state's answers
Carey Dean Moore deserves to die in prison.
He murdered Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland, 2 Omaha cab drivers, in 1979.
The 1st killing came with his younger brother in tow; the 2nd was committed
alone to callously prove that Moore could take a man's life on his own.
This is a man whose crimes against innocent victims must mandate he remains
incarcerated until his final breath. However, Moore should not die under the
circumstances he presently faces.
Moore is slated to be put to death for his crimes Tuesday morning at the
Nebraska State Penitentiary in Lincoln. Questions about the efficacy of
Nebraska's 4-drug lethal injection protocol - never before used in capital
punishment and written in 1 draft without any external input - and the sources
from which the state obtained those drugs remain unknown.
Yes, Moore broke the law in killing 2 men. That cannot be disputed. But the
state has yet to definitely prove it can follow the law while killing him.
An open-records lawsuit filed by the Journal Star and other media outlets
sought to prove if that were indeed the case. A judge ruled that most of the
documents requested in the suit - including many surrounding the sourcing of
the drugs - were in fact public records that should be released.
Quickly, the state appealed the decision. Around that same time, the Attorney
General's Office took what appears to be an unprecedented step by challenging a
subpoena issued by the Nebraska Legislature's Judiciary Committee to
Corrections Director Scott Frakes.
The lengths to which state officials have gone to hide the details of this
process should trouble all Nebraskans. Both of these court actions are
indisputably designed to hide specifics of the state's death penalty protocol
from the public, as if something unsavory lurks beneath the surface.
The open-records case remains on appeal, and the subpoena suit remains under
advisement. It's unclear if either will be decided before Moore's execution -
the 1st in Nebraska since 1997.
That???s assuming everything occurs as scheduled, of course, never a guarantee
with capital punishment.
The latest potential wrench came from a pharmaceutical company, which filed a
lawsuit late Tuesday. The suit aims to prevent what it believes is its
potassium chloride - since, again, the state refuses to identify where it
bought the execution drugs - from being used in next week's lethal injection.
Unwarranted secrecy and unmerited opacity spite the esteemed words above the
State Capitol's north door: "The salvation of the state is watchfulness in the
citizen." The citizens have done everything in their power to be watchful
regarding capital punishment, only to be rebuffed by the state.
Too many grave concerns remain unaddressed for Moore's execution. Until the
state provides the requisite answers and proves it's acting in accordance with
the law, his death is a bridge too far.
(source: Editorial, Sioux City Journal)
***********************************
How Carey Dean Moore's execution, Nebraska's 1st lethal injection, will be
carried out
Nebraska's official death penalty procedure says this week's execution of Carey
Dean Moore will be accomplished by the injection of substances in a quantity
sufficient to cause death without the unnecessary and wanton infliction of
pain.
If a federal appellate court doesn't halt Moore's execution between now and 10
a.m. Tuesday, the prison staff members responsible for what sounds like a
straightforward task will be under a high degree of scrutiny.
Nebraska has carried out 37 state-sanctioned executions, but Moore's will be
the 1st by lethal injection. Bill Clinton occupied the White House the last
time the Nebraska Department of Correctional Services executed an inmate, using
the electric chair.
Moore, 60, has served for 38 years on death row for the 1979 killings of Omaha
cabdrivers Reuel Van Ness and Maynard Helgeland. He has recently told friends
and family that he is ready to die and does not want his execution halted.
Another factor at play Tuesday: The state will give Moore a 4-drug combination
never used before in an execution. Death penalty critics have said that raises
the likelihood of a botched execution, meaning it could take longer than normal
or Moore could experience excess pain.
"Nobody is hoping things go wrong," said Robert Dunham, director of the Death
Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C. "Everybody is hoping, if it
happens, it happens smoothly."
Corrections Director Scott Frakes declined a request to be interviewed for this
story.
But a former high-ranking member of the department said no one wants the
execution to go smoothly more than staff members who will serve on the
execution team.
"My concern is that it's been so long," said Brian Gage, who spent 34 years
with corrections and served as warden of Tecumseh State Prison. "The majority
of them will be new to an execution."
Based upon the state's protocol document, the execution team conducts training
sessions at least once a month throughout the year. But when an execution date
has been set, the frequency of training increases to at least once per week.
The Nebraska Supreme Court set Moore's execution date on July 5.
Execution team members volunteer for the duty, and most have their identities
shielded under state law.
With the execution just 2 days away, Moore will have been transported from
death row at the Tecumseh prison to a holding cell at the Nebraska State
Penitentiary in Lincoln, Gage said. The penitentiary houses the execution
chamber.
He will be under what's called death watch, which means he will be closely
monitored so he doesn't commit suicide.
At least 48 hours before the execution, the IV team leader will examine Moore
to find appropriate veins to insert the IV needle. The IV team leader must have
completed training as an emergency medical technician and in needle insertion.
As the hour of his execution approaches, Moore will be given expanded visiting
time with his minister, family and friends. He also will be afforded the chance
to eat a "final meal," which Gage said is not an elaborate dinner ordered from
outside the facility. Rather, he can make a choice of whatever happens to be on
the cafeteria's full menu at the time.
When the time arrives, Gage said members of the escort team will accompany
Moore to the execution chamber. When the state last carried out an execution,
the inmate walked from the holding cell down a set of stairs to the execution
chamber.
Moore will then be placed on the padded table, where his arms, legs and torso
will be secured in place by restraints. The escort team will then leave the
room.
The IV team leader will set primary and backup IV lines in two of Moore's
veins. The team leader will test the lines using saline fluid and will attach a
heart monitor to the inmate.
When the corrections director gives the order, the IV team leader will begin
the lethal injection. The sequence of drugs and doses to be injected:
2 milligrams of diazepam (a sedative) per kilogram of body weight followed by
additional doses until the inmate is unconscious. A 50 cc saline flush will
follow the diazepam.
25 micrograms of fentanyl (a powerful opioid painkiller) per kilogram of body
weight, followed by a 50 cc saline flush.
1.6 milligrams of cisatracurium (a paralyzing drug intended to stop the
inmate's breathing) per kilogram of body weight followed by a 50 cc saline
flush.
240 milliequivalents of potassium chloride (a drug that causes heart attack in
high doses) followed by a final saline flush.
After the diazepam is given, the IV team leader must conduct a consciousness
check of Moore. Common methods include pinching an eyelid or cheek and calling
his name. The inmate must be unconscious before the remaining 3 drugs are
injected.
Lethal injections without obvious complications typically take about 10 minutes
to result in death, Dunham said. But some botched executions have taken
significantly longer.
If the staff member who sets the IV misses a vein and the drugs flow into the
inmate???s muscles, death can be prolonged and extremely painful, he said. Or
if the inmate regains consciousness, he can experience an intense, burning pain
from the potassium chloride, the drug that stops the heart.
A coroner or medical professional will check to determine whether Moore is dead
after the 4 drugs are injected. If the coroner determines he is still alive,
the IV team leader must carry out the injection sequence a 2nd time.
In a lawsuit heard Friday in federal court, a lawyer for a Germany-based drug
company said state documents suggest the paralyzing drug has not been stored at
the proper temperature by corrections staff. The lawyer said if the drug has
degraded as a result, it may not work as prison officials hope.
Eric Berger is a professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law who has
studied lethal injection for over a decade. In an opinion piece published by
The World-Herald, Berger wrote that if the inmate is not properly anesthetized
by the 1st 2 drugs, Moore could experience a sensation that???s been described
as "being burned alive from the inside" when the final drug, potassium
chloride, enters his bloodstream.
"Nobody disputes that the injection of potassium chloride alone would violate
the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment," Berger
said.
Frakes, the prisons director, said in a court affidavit filed this week that he
relied on "opinions of qualified pharmacological and medical anesthesiology
experts" to come up with the drugs and dosages. In addition, he said the drugs
underwent lab testing to confirm their composition.
(source: Omaha World-Herald)
CALIFORNIA:
California Has The Largest Death Row Population In The Country
California has the largest death row population in the country, though the
trend showed an opposite effect nationally, according to a study released
Friday.
Pew Research Center analyzed data from the Death Penalty Information Center and
the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, where it found California's death
row population in 2017 increased by almost 100 inmates since January 2000. The
state currently has 744 inmates on death row.
"The increase reflects the fact that California juries have continued to
sentence convicted defendants to death even as executions themselves have been
on hold in recent years amid legal and political disputes," according to Pew.
California has not executed an individual since 2006, after courts halted a
3-drug execution process between February 1996 to January 2006. The courts
struck it down because of fear defendants could face inhumane suffering if one
of the drugs failed, according to a Los Angeles Times article on Nov. 6, 2015.
The state proposed a single-drug lethal injection on Nov. 6, 2015, though it
has not been carried out, the L.A. Times reported.
Death by capital punishment became the 3rd leading cause of death in
California, behind natural causes and suicide, due to the long-term deferral of
the death penalty.
Federal death sentences have also increased by 37 inmates since 2003.
The number of deaths across the states, however, decreased from 3,682 to 2,792,
or by 24 %, between 2000 to 2017, according to the NAACP.
The overall decrease in the death penalty could be due to the number of people
sentenced to death row have decreased. Other factors include defendants dying
from other causes or they were exonerated, according to Pew.
There were 31 states plus the federal government and military that used the
death penalty, while 18 states and the District of Columbia did not, according
to the study.
The 11 states that have capital punishment have not executed an individual for
at least a decade and the U.S. Military has not done an execution since 1961,
Pew reported.
Death Penalty Information Center is "an information clearinghouse that has been
critical of capital punishment," while the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational
Fund follows death row populations for all 50 states, according to Pew.
(source: The Daily Caller)
USA:
Capital punishment stumbles ahead in US
3 news items this week illustrate the patchwork of capital punishment
legislation in the United States.
On Thursday, a 59-year-old man, Billy Irick, was executed in the state of
Tennessee for the rape and murder of a 7-year-old, a crime he had committed in
1985.
Tennessee, whose last execution took place in 2009, uses a cocktail of drugs to
sedate and then kill the prisoner. Lawyers for prisoners on Tennessee's death
row described this as inhumane, but the challenge was dismissed by the State
Supreme Court. A last-minute challenge on grounds of mental incapacity failed
in the US Supreme Court in an 8-1 decision. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote a
scathing dissent: "If the law permits this execution to go forward in spite of
the horrific final minutes that Irick may well experience, then we have stopped
being a civilized nation and accepted barbarism."
The state of Oklahoma has not executed anyone for more than 3 years, partly
because it cannot obtain the necessary drugs. After a botched execution in
2014, a 3-year moratorium was declared on lethal injections. In 2015 the
legislature made nitrogen asphyxiation the preferred method of dispatching
prisoners. However, this week it was announced that protocols for this new
method had not been finalised; it is unclear when executions will resume. 16
inmates on death row have exhausted their appeals and await the dates of their
execution.
The state of Nebraska is planning its 1st execution in 21 years - a 60-year-old
man, Carey Dean Moore, who killed 2 taxi cab drivers in 1979. But a German
pharmaceutical company has sued to stop the execution because it will suffer
reputational damage if its drug is used. Fresenius Kabi claims that the state
obtained 2 of its drugs through illegal channels.
Adding heat to the debate over capital punishment in the US was a recent move
by Pope Francis condemning it as "inadmissible". He decreed that the Catechism
of the Catholic Church, an authoritative reference for official teaching,
should be amended to read: "the death penalty is inadmissible because it is an
attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person". This came at an awkward
time for Nebraska's governor, Pete Ricketts, a Catholic who is an ardent
supporter of the death penalty.
(source: bioedge.org)
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