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United Nations
Sixty-second session
Promotion and protection of human rights: human rights questions, including alternative approaches for improving the effective enjoyment of human rights and fundamental freedoms Albania, Andorra, Angola, Argentina, Armenia, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Benin, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cape Verde, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Estonia, Finland, France, Gabon, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Guinea-Bissau, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Latvia, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Marshall Islands, Mexico, Micronesia (Federated States of), Moldova, Monaco, Montenegro, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Panama, Paraguay, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Samoa, San Marino, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Timor-Leste, Turkey, Tuvalu, Ukraine, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, Uruguay, Vanuatu and Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of): draft resolution Moratorium on the use of the death penalty The General Assembly, Guided by the purposes and principles contained in the Charter of the United Nations, Recalling the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,[1] the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights[2] and the Convention on the Rights of the Child,[3] Recalling also the resolutions on the question of the death penalty adopted over the past decade by the Commission on Human Rights in all consecutive sessions, the last being its resolution 2005/59,[4] in which the Commission called upon States that still maintain the death penalty to aboli sh it completely and, in the meantime, to establish a moratorium on executions, Recalling further the important results accomplished by the former Commission on Human Rights on the question of the death penalty, and envisaging that the Human Rights Council could continue to work on this issue, Considering that the use of the death penalty undermines human dignity, and convinced that a moratorium on the use of the death penalty contributes to the enhancement and progressive development of human rights, that there is no conclusive evidence of the death penalty’s deterrent value and that any miscarriage or failure of justice in the death penalty’s implementation is irreversible and irreparable, Welcoming the decisions taken by an increasing number of States to apply a moratorium on executions, followed in many cases by the abolition of the death penalty, 1. Expresses its deep concern about the continued application of the death penalty;
Former Warden Reconsiders Executions Jim Willet was warden of the Walls Unit for 3 years. The executions were never easy, he says. "The hardest were the young fellows. You think, there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably could have really been something." He's witnessed so many executions, it's hard to remember them all. But certain memories stand out. There was the man who fought so hard he had to be restrained and carried convulsing to the death chamber. The one who'd done so many IV drugs the medical team had to shoot the lethal fluids through a vein in his leg. There was the man who asked to sing "Silent Night" as his final statement and expired in mid-verse, and the one from Dallas who followed up a heartfelt apology to the victim's family with an enthusiastic "How 'bout them Dallas Cowboys!" Jim Willett is surrounded by such memories as director of the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville. From 1998 to 2001, three of the death chamber's busiest years, he served as warden of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice's Walls Unit and presided over 89 executions. He was the man who gave the signal to take an inmate's life. A straight-shooting 57-year-old, Willett is broad and solidly built, with clear blue eyes and a bald head ringed with white hair. As a boy growing up in an East Texas farming town, he dreamed of driving a tractor and planting crops. Instead, he wound up working in prisons and eventually found himself overseeing executions. He dreaded that part of the job and often prayed about it. As many interviews as he's given on the topic and as much as he's thought about the morality of execution, it's never easy to put into words what it's like to lead a man into the death chamber, listen to his last words and then, minutes later, hear him sputter and be still. "The first time is unbelievable," he tells me, standing in the museum's gallery next to a glass case that contains a plastic IV bag and three large syringes used to inject the deadly chemicals. "You have this healthy personthis person who was able to just jump up on the gurneyand you've said, 'Kill this person,' and someone's fixin' to. You're about to put someone to death in front of all these people. It's an overwhelming feeling. I can't describe it." It's a bright fall day in Huntsville, and Willett is preparing for an afternoon of interviews. A news crew is setting up cameras by one of the most popular exhibits at the museum"Old Sparky," the decommissioned wooden electric chair with leather straps. The crew isn't from Houston or Dallas or even Los Angeles or Chicagoit's from the London-based BBC. Later, a Russian network will film here too. They've come to report on the free world's most efficient death chamber, which sits across town in the toweringred brick prison that looms over the quaint storefronts of Huntsville's Main Street. As the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to consider whether lethal injection is humane and across the country there is talk of freezing executions in the meantime, the foreign newscasters have come to puzzle over Texas, the state that has executed nearly half of the 1,099 people put to death in the United States since 1976. A front-page headline in The Dallas Morning News this October day reads, "Texas unlikely to halt executions: Some fault leaders for not following other states with moratoriums." Willett has grown accustomed to the spotlight. Television trucks and reporters were constant fixtures in Huntsville during his 30 years in the prison system, especially the last three, when he was in charge of the executions. As Willett speaks in the nearly empty museum, I notice soft music coming from an exhibit on 1930s chain gangs. "Back is weak and I done got tired," sing the low, mournful voices of black prisoners working the fields, their hoes striking the ground in time. "Boss on a horse and he's watchin' us all, better tighten up..." Willett stands next to a sign that tells the history of capital punishment from the days when the county sheriff conducted public hangings. He points to a nearby case. Above the syringes is a mug shot of Gary Graham, a thick-necked black man dubbed Death Row Inmate 696. "That's the one who fought," Willett says. "There were a couple of others that resisted, but they didn't fight like he did." Graham was convicted in 1981 of robbing and killing a man in a grocery-store parking lot in Houston. He became a symbol for death penalty opponents, and as his execution date drew near in 2000, celebrities such as Danny Glover and Bianca Jagger spoke out on his behalf. The day of his death, the crowd outside the prison included the Reverend Jesse Jackson and members of the New Black Panthers and the Ku Klux Klan. After a team of officers in riot gear carried Graham into the death chamber and strapped him onto the gurney, he shouted for nearly 10 minutes about how he never killed anyone and that the government needed to stop killing black people. Finally, Willett signaled the executioner and watched as Graham drifted to sleep in mid-sentence. As he gazes at the exhibit, which includes a sign that reads "Stop Executions" and a poster of Karla Faye Tucker next to a partially burned flag, Willett says that from what he remembers about Graham's lengthy rap sheet and nasty demeanor, the inmate was a bad choice for the protesters. "He was the sorriest person I came across in all my years in the prison system," he says. "Mean, uncooperativethe last guy you'd want as a poster child for the anti-capital punishment lobby." Willett may be certain that Graham was justly convicted, but is he so sure that all the men whose deaths he witnessed were guilty? Does he think any of the 89 may have been innocent? "I would hope not, with all of the appeals, the process that takes years and the judges and everybody looking at it," he says. "But I'm also clear that you're going to have mistakes if humans are messing with itit's just a fact." Indeed, a shameful array of legal blunders has been uncovered through DNA testing, especially in Texas, which leads the country in the number of people freed after biological evidence proved their innocence. Dallas County, meanwhile, has a greater number of DNA exonerations than any other jurisdiction in the nation. Some of the 13 Dallas inmates released since 2001 had been locked up for decades. I mention this, and Willett nods. "I think if we have DNA then we have to use it to prove the person did itisn't that just logical?" he says. "I don't know why anyone involved on either side wouldn't want to do that." Guilt or innocence aside, he says, watching each person die was wrenching. "The hardest were the young fellowsone was 29," he says. "They're like youperfectly healthy, some have good personalities. You think, there's a young man who ruined someone's life and ruined his own, and he probably could have really been something. These are people who might have gone a different direction. If they'd been with a different crowd, maybe they wouldn't be lying here tonight." When Willett was hired as a Huntsville prison guard in 1971, he took a tour of the units. He felt nervous and jumpy as he followed a captain through crowds of convicts in white uniforms. The inmates looked him up and down, sizing him up. He tried not to meet their gaze. Growing up in the nearby town of Groesbeck, he'd heard prisons were sad, rough places, full of long days of loneliness and backbreaking work. The only person he knew who'd gone to the pen was the father of a kid he'd known growing up. The man had been caught stealing cattle. Back then, Willett never expected to spend time in a prison. He'd been working at a gas station while attending Sam Houston State University, and he heard that guard jobs paid better. That's how he wound up sitting in a guard tower on a muggy summer night, looking out over the prison yard. His perch on the No. 1 picket was on the northeast corner of the Walls, the unit named for the red brick walls that reach 30 feet high. The picket was right over the death house and the warden's residence next door. Willett couldn't imagine that nearly three decades later, he would live there with his family. When I ask Willett what his reaction would have been had someone told him he would spend the next 30 years of his life in prisons, he thinks for a moment. "I'd have been really sad," he says. "It wasn't what I wanted to do. The first 6 months it was as boring as life could be, alone out there on the picket at night. Then I got switched to the day shift, and it went by faster." Though he had been raised in a farming familyhis mother's parents were illiterate Polish immigrants who grew tomatoes and sold them in nearby townshis dreams of working the land had given way to an interest in business and ideas of sitting in an office somewhere. But by the time he graduated with a business degree from Sam Houston, he was comfortable working in the prison and continued to be rewarded with promotions. One day in the late '70s, not long after he made lieutenant, Willett was introduced to Janice Joiner, a pretty blond criminal justice major. They married a year later at the clubhouse of the women's penitentiary on the outskirts of Huntsville. Their elaborate wedding cake and flower arrangements were made by female inmates in vocational classes. The couple moved into a two-story state residence that backed up to the Walls. On their wedding night, throngs of people streamed onto the grounds for the prison rodeo, a Texas tradition that drew thousands of spectators each year. Janice had worked in the prison and wasn't terribly frightened to live near it, but the transition wasn't seamless. "I wake up and Jim's working and I'm a bride and there's hundreds of people in our yard, inmates handing out programs," she says. "I walked back to my apartment that was empty and just cried." She soon grew accustomed to prison life. "I always felt very safe," she says. "Right outside our bedroom window was a picket." As the years went on, they had 2 children, Janice worked as a probation officer and Jim kept getting promoted. He had the rare combination of compassion, take-charge leadership skill and social ease that inspires trust and earns the respect and allegiance of other men. By the 1990s, he was an assistant warden. And then one day in 1998 he got a phone call. He was on his way to watch his son play baseball when the regional director of the Texas prison system called and said he wanted Willett to replace the outgoing warden of the Walls Unit. Willett immediately thought of what the position would mean. He didn't like the idea of accepting higher pay for a post that included executions. He said he'd have to talk to his wife about it. When he did, Janice suggested he pray about his dilemma. He followed her advice. "When I woke up I felt more at ease," he says. "I went and talked to [the regional director], told him I wasn't comfortable with the executions." Willett suggested they go through the rest of the people on their list, and if afterward they still thought he was the best candidate, he might reconsider. They called back a few days later and offered him the job again. This time, he accepted. If he was being called by God to do this, at least he'd made it clear that he wasn't comfortable taking people's lives in exchange for a raise. And he would see to it that when an execution did take place, it would go as smoothly as a killing can. The morning of his first execution, Willett woke up and immediately remembered what the day held in store. He dressed in a sportcoat as always, said goodbye to his wife and walked over to the prison unit that he'd just been chosen to manage. There, in the employee dining room, he ate his usual breakfast of sausage, eggs and bacon. A meticulous man, he repeatedly ran through the series of tasks that were now his: Ensure the inmate is delivered to one of the death house's eight cells, see that he gets his last meal by 4 p.m., find out what his last words will be so he knows when to give the signal, and then, at 6 p.m., lead him down the hallway to the death chamber. Willett, a Methodist, had prayed a lot about thisasking God to make it smooth and trouble-freeand as the day went on, he prayed some more. He reviewed the inmate's file. His name was Joseph Cannon, death row Inmate 634. He was 19 when his first mug shot was taken, and it shows a handsome young man, blond with a square jaw and a cleft chin. He'd been convicted of a petty crime in San Antonio a couple of years before, and his court-appointed attorney took an interest in the scrappy teenager. The lawyer's sister let Cannon stay with her while he served his probation. One day in 1977, Cannon shot her seven times with her own .22, then took some cash and traveler's checks from her purse and made off in her daughter's car. He was arrested a few hours later and confessed to the murder. The man Willett greeted in the death house cell hardly resembled the tough-looking youth in the photograph. He was 38 now, heavier and tired-looking, with the resigned look of a man who had spent decades in small cells and prison yards. "You'll be getting your supper after a while," Willett told him. "And the chaplain will be here with you until..." His words trailed off. He glanced toward the door. Hell, he thought, I'm not very good at this. He'd been worrying about this for days, planning ways to put the man at ease. Looking toward the door wasn't the way to do it. "Will you want to make a final statement?" he asked. Cannon was quiet for a moment and then nodded. "I guess I will," he said. A few minutes before six, Willett met in the office with Wayne Scott, a friend who had served as a guard with him and was now director of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, as well as a few regional and deputy directors. Governor Bush's office called and said to go ahead, followed by the state attorney general's office. Scott looked at Willett. So did the other men. He left the room and walked down the hall to the second-to-last cell, where the chaplain was waiting with Cannon. "Inmate Cannon," he said, "it's time for you to go into the next room with me." The inmate followed without a word. When they got to the death chamber, Cannon paused in the doorway, taking in the gurney covered in white sheets in the 9-by-12-foot room. Willett didn't even have to tell him to get on it. As Cannon lay down, Willett stood at his head, the chaplain at his feet. A group of officers called the tie-down team took their places around the gurney. In quick, practiced motions they strapped Cannon down, each person securing an arm, a leg, a wrist, an ankle. Others fastened belts over his torso. In about half a minute, their job was done and they were gone. Two people from the medical team came in to attach the IVs. The 3rd medical technician remained in the next room and would serve as the executioner. Twenty minutes later, the medical technician still hadn't found a vein. Usually they did two IVs, one as a backup. Willett's predecessor had told him that even on bad nights, this would take no more than five minutes, 10 at the most. What the hell was going on? Cannon watched quietly as the woman jabbed at his arm. Willett, sweating, wondered what the inmate was thinking. He hoped that Cannon's last meal of ribs, fried chicken, chocolate ice cream and chocolate cake wouldn't make him sick. Finally, the technician looked up. "Warden, I think we've got a good one in this arm," she said. "Can we go with just the one?" Willett nodded. The woman left, leaving just Willett, the chaplain and Cannon in the room. Cannon looked at the IV in his arm, then turned his head to watch through the plate glass window as the witnesses walked into the viewing gallery. Willett observed a woman enter the viewing area and come to a halt when she saw Cannon lying on the gurney. Willett guessed she was his mother. Cannon looked at her, expressionless. Somebody behind her touched her shoulder, and she moved closer to the glass. On the other side of a thin wall in the viewing area, five members of the victim's family gathered. All of the witnesses stood; a dozen sets of eyes peered through the glass into the death chamber. For his last statement, Cannon rambled in a nervous voice about his victim, his family and his crime, most of it jumbled together in an awkward rush of words. Then he shook his head and closed his eyes. The chaplain rested his hand on Cannon's ankle. As if in slow motion, Willett lifted his reading glasses from his nose, the signal for the hidden executioner to start the first of the three fluids flowing. As he gave the sign, he prayed. Lord, have mercy on this man's soul. It was silent. So quiet Willett could hear the liquids moving through the IV line. And then he heard a voice: "Warden." He looked at the chaplain, trying to figure out who spoke, then down at Cannon. "Warden," the inmate said again. "It fell out." Willett looked at the man's arm. Sure enough, the needle was spilling its contents onto the sheets. Willett ran over to the window and tugged at the curtain, trying to shield the witnesses. The fabric came unhooked from the rod. Standing on the other side using the drawstring, the chaplain managed to cover the glass. Someone was crying, probably Cannon's mother. What a nightmare. Willett had never heard of this happening before. In fact, 10 years before there had been a somewhat spectacular IV "blowout," complete with liquids spraying around the room and onto the viewing glass. But no one had told him about that one. The medical staff came in again and hooked up the IV for the second time. The curtains were opened, and Willett asked Cannon if he wanted to make another statement. This time, the inmate was more assured, clearer. He looked at the victim's daughter and said he was sorry. Again, Willett lifted his glasses. And again, the silence and flowing liquids. Outside the prison, people milled around Main Street, men got off work, mothers picked up children from ballet and soccer, and Willett's own wife made dinner. Here inside these tall prison walls, in this little room, sodium pentathol was easing into Cannon's veins and shutting down his central nervous system. Firing neurons and twitching muscles slowed as the drug put him to sleep. Then came the pancuronium bromide, a muscle relaxant. His diaphragm ceased its up-and-down motion, and the muscles covering his rib cage froze, paralyzed. As Cannon let out his last breath, there was a snoring sound, like the air escaping from a balloon. Then, to finish the job, the potassium chloride trickled through the line. It's the drug that stops the heart. Willett waited 3 minutes, just like he'd been told to, and called in the doctor. Joseph John Cannon was pronounced dead at 7:28 p.m. and wheeled out of the room. Minutes later Willett sat down to dinner with his wife. He was quiet, sitting at the dining room table pushing food around on his plate with a fork. "I didn't want to prod," Janice recalls. "So we just talked about other things." Later, he told her about the IV blowout. "You're not going to believe what happened," he said. "If anything could go wrong, of course it would be my first night." Before he went to bed, he recorded the day's events in his journal, a ritual that he would continue after every execution to come. "I know that I'll never want to do this, but I can hope that my next execution, and all the ones that follow, will go better," he wrote in his journal, parts of which were later published in a book called Warden: Prison Life and Death From the Inside Out. "Soon we'll move into the warden's residence, which is located just outside the Walls, not far from the number one picket, which hovers over the death house. The place where I will eat with my family, where I will joke with my kids and watch mindless TV shows with my wife, lies about 50 feet from where I take off my glasses and shut down a human life." To most people, raising a family on the prison grounds would seem grim and dangerous. But for the Willetts it was normaland an opportunity to set an example of family for people who had lost their way and wound up behind bars. Their children, Jacob and Jordan, were young adults by the time Willett took the warden post that required him to manage the executions. By then, they'd spent the better part of their lives living next door to the prison. "We got to see different cultures of people, different sides of people that other kids don't get to experience," says Jacob, 26. "I can get along with just about anybody." When he and his older sister Jordan were growing up, the prison system allowed well-behaved inmates to work on the grounds near their house, doing landscaping and odd jobs. When Jacob was 5, he would sometimes play with an inmate named Donald. "Once he snuck some Ding Dongs out of the prison and brought them out to the house, and we shared one," Jacob recalls. When he was older, he'd play catch with a middle-aged prisoner named Hines. The man had been in and out of prison for some 40 years, and when he got out, he sent Jacob a letter listing "the top 10 things you can do to enhance the quality of your life through God." Jacob still keeps it tucked in his Bible. "I treated him like just another person," he says. "They're human beings too, and a lot of people don't look at it like that." When his sister was little, she grew close to an inmate named Stafford who worked in the yard. Janice recalls that he had gorgeous handwriting and could make anything out of scrap. "One year he made little wooden pumpkins for every child in Jordan's classhe painted them and put their names on every one," she says. "They were beautiful. They'd make something for every holiday." After he got out of prison, Stafford came by the house and gave Jordan a present. He died a month later. "He'd gotten home from work, lay down on the couch and had a stroke. He wasn't even 50," Janice says. "That was a tough onehe'd been around for a long time." Janice kept an eye on the kids when they were with the inmates, and she always had a rule for the men: If my children ask you why you're here, tell them the truth. "Don't blame someone else," she says she told them. "That was very important to me. I didn't want them to feel sorry and think these guys didn't do something wrong. They just learned that these people are people, and they do have lives. They knew these guys had done something wrong to get there and that when they got their life turned around they had an opportunity to go back out and live with the rest of us." For Jacob, knowing that the men his father had a hand in putting to death had committed horrible crimes enabled him to accept capital punishment as part of his father's job and a logical consequence of unspeakable actions. "A lot of those guys don't get put in that position for something they did right," he tells me. "They don't get put in that position unless they've done something that's completely inhumane. I don't think that as human beings we have the right to judge, but if they do those things they've got to have some kind of consequence." When Jacob's high-school class visited the prison for a tour and his father escorted them through the death chamber, he watched impassively while other students reeled. "I wasn't really shocked," he says. "It was just his job. My dad's not the kind of person that would kill somebody. He's a solid guyhe was in a position to do a job he was called to do, and he did it as best he could." Janice, who seems to have more ethical concerns about the death penalty than her son, echoes Jacob's thoughts about her husband's job as warden and her belief that God had a hand in leading him to it. "It was interesting to me that those three years were the [death chamber's] busiest," she says. There were times during those years that three inmates were put to death in one week, sometimes two in the same day. "If there was going to be a time in our history when you would need someone who's a humble person who treats everyone with respect whether they're inside the bars or not, he does." This, she says, is why even though he was reluctant, Willett continued to give the prison system his time. "I always envision Jim as this horse, trying to slow down from going over a cliff," she says. "He never really wanted to move up in the system; he was always saying, 'Whoa.' [Criminal justice] was a profession for me; it was a job for him. But he was good at it." Willett stresses that his first priority was always his family. "Working at the prison was something I did eight hours a day so I could do what I wanted the other 16," he says. "I liked my job, but it wasn't my favorite thing in life." Jacob was an avid baseball player, and Willett asked his supervisors not to schedule an execution on game days. "He made it very clear to everyone that when there was a game, he was going to be there," Janice says. "He got an award our son's senior year in high school for being the only parent who never missed a game." The day Gary Graham was executed and troops of media and protesters camped out in front of the prison, Jacob was working at a nearby bar. Sports was on one TV and the news was on another, showing Jesse Jackson standing on the steps of the Walls amid hundreds of protesters. At one point, Jacob caught a glimpse of his father standing outside the prison. Jacob's boss came in and said there were several calls for him. One was a scout with good news: He'd been drafted by the Yankees (he decided to go to college instead). The other calls were from local reporters. Then, Jim Willett, having stepped away from the melee for a moment to use the phone, called to congratulate him. "He told me he loved me, that he was proud of me," Jacob says. While he has had brief conversations with his father about the executions, it's not something he likes to bring up. "If he has bad recollections about it, I don't want to be the one to talk about it," he says. "I'd much rather talk about baseball or something." If Willett struggled to cope with the impact of presiding over the deaths of 89 people and being there for their last moments, he didn't talk about it much to anyone. "Jim's pretty unflappablewhatever turmoil he's feeling inside, he's not going to show that," says Wayne Scott, Willett's old friend. "Jim was much more concerned about his staff than he was about himselfthat's just the sort of person he is." Willett was careful to rotate officers involved in the executions as much as he could, giving them breaks. And he always made sure they knew there were counselors available if they needed to talk. In 2000, when Texas set a record for the number of inmates put to death in one year40Willett and his employees participated in a National Public Radio documentary called Witness to an Execution. He ended up narrating it himself, and the haunting and evocative piece won a Peabody Award. As a lover of history and a longtime expert when it comes to the Texas prison system, Willett opens the broadcast with a description of the death house, the site of all state executions since 1924. "We've carried out a lot of executions here lately, and with all the debate about the death penalty, I thought this might be a good time to let you hear exactly how we do these things," he says. "Sometimes I wonder whether people really understand what goes on down here and the effect it has on us." Of the comments from nearly a dozen prison guards, chaplains and reporters who witnessed large numbers of executions, some of the most telling come from Jim Brazzil, the chaplain who worked under Willett and had by the time of the broadcast been with 114 inmates while they were put to death. "I usually put my hand right below their knee, you know, and I usually give 'em a squeeze, let 'em know I'm right there," Brazzil says. "You can feel the trembling, the fear that's there, the anxiety that's there. You can feel the heart surging, you know. You can see it pounding through their shirt." Later in the piece, he talks about his last interactions with inmates before they passed out. "One of 'em would say, 'I just want to tell you thank you.' One of 'em would say, 'Don't forget to mail my letters.' Another one would say, 'Just tell me againis it gonna hurt?' One of them would say, 'What do I do when I see God?' You've got 45 seconds and you're trying to tell the guy what to say to God?" One of the voices in the NPR story belongs to Fred Allen, a former officer on the tie-down team who participated in about 120 executions. He resigned after a mental breakdown. "I was just working in the shop and all of a sudden something just triggered in me and I started shaking," he says. His wife asked him what was wrong, and he started to weep uncontrollably. "All of these executions all of a sudden all sprung forward. Just like taking slides in a film projector and having a button and just pushing a button and just watching, over and over: him, him, him...You see I can barely even talk because I'm thinking more and more of it. You know, there was just so many of 'em." The broadcast closes with Willett as he looks forward to retiring. "To tell you the truth, this is something I won't miss a bit," he says. "There are times when I'm standing there, watching those fluids start to flow, and wonder whether what we're doing here is right. It's something I'll be thinking about for the rest of my life." As Willett leads me through the museum and recounts his time in the death chamber, he mentions that usually when an inmate was lying on the gurney he would ask the man if the straps were too tight. "It's about making the inmate comfortable," he says. I ask if he thinks it's ironic that he would try to make a man comfortable right before signaling the executioner to kill him. He looks at me for a moment and nods. "It's ironic as heck!" he says. We talk about reports of botched lethal injections across the country. Does he think lethal injection is inhumane? "I don't think Texas has any problem with that," he says. "A medical person once told me we give 'em enough to put a horse to sleep." Willett avoids making political statements or taking a position for or against the death penalty. But he's unabashed in expressing his compassion for all of the people brought together in the execution processthose who perform the execution itself, the inmates and their victims, and the families who sit in the viewing gallery on either side of the wall. "One night after an execution, the inmate had died and I called the doctor in," he tells me, standing in between Old Sparky and the case with the IV bag and syringes. "I move over and I'm facing these two [viewing] rooms. On one side of the wall was a daughter of the inmate, on the other side was the daughter of the victim, both deep in thought. And I thought, they don't even know the other is there. And what made it eerie was that they were both victims." Over the next 2 weeks, publications around the world will report that Texas, the epicenter of capital punishment, has put the brakes on its well-oiled death machine. On the day in late September when the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider the legality of lethal injection, several Texas inmates were scheduled for execution. A team of attorneys prepared an appeal for one of them based on the pending decision, but their computer reportedly crashed and while they were scrambling to fix it one of them called the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to say they would be a few minutes late and to please stay open. They were told no, and a few hours later, their client was dead. The other inmates, however, were granted stays, raising questions about a de facto moratorium even in the state of Texas. If that happens, Willett wouldn't necessarily oppose it. "I do wonder sometimes, the people who are guilty of real violent murders or crimes against children, why do they deserve to live?" he says. "But maybe we don't have the right to ask thatI don't know. For me, it's up to the people of Texas, whatever they want to do. If they said, 'Let's not have executions,' I'd be fine with that." (source: Dallas Observer)
For Victims, Against the Death Penalty From The web log of Murder Victims' Families for Human Rights
The events at the UN on Friday went very well. The delegation met with the president of the General Assembly for about forty minutes, during which (among other things) Renny Cushing was able to give a brief description of MVFHR's membership and the idea of victim opposition to the death penalty. Mario Marazziti of the Community of Sant'Egidio personally handed over the five million signatures in support of a global moratorium on executions that Sant'Egidio and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty have collected. The GA president said that five million was an impressive number of signatures, and he also commented that personal stories are very important in the discussion of the death penalty. After the press conference, MVFHR members Bill Babbitt and Marie Verzulli gave interviews to an Italian television station, and Renny and Sister Helen Prejean spoke w ith someone from the Inter-Press News Service. Here is a photo of Mario Marazziti, Sister Helen Prejean, and General Assembly President Srgjan Kerim. And here's an excerpt from an article by the Roman news service Zenit A global moratorium on the death penalty isn't just an idea of a few countries, but the wish of a large part of the world society, according to a representative of the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Mario Marazziti said this Friday as he led a delegation to the United Nations to deliver a petition signed by 5 million people from 154 countries calling for an end to capital punishment. ... Asked about the experience of having collected so many signatures, Marazziti told ZENIT that it was the fruit of nine years of work. He added, "To have and collect five million signatures you need to talk to about 50 million people in the world, in 154 countries." Friday, November 2, 2007
Today MVFHR is participating in the delegation of anti-death penalty activists from around the world who are meeting with the president of the United Nations General Assembly to deliver a petition containing over five million signatures that urge the General Assembly to pass a resolution calling for a global moratorium on executions. Italy’s Community of Sant’Egidio and the the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty collected the signatures from people all over the world. Mario Marazziti of Sant’Egidio is leading the delegation, which also includes Sister Helen Prejean, Yvonne Terlingen from Amnesty International, Speedy Rice from the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Elizabeth Zitrin from Death Penalty Focus, and Renny Cushing, Marie Verzulli, and Bill Babbitt from MVFHR. After they meet with the General Assembly President this morning, the delegation will hold a press conference at the UN. Renny will read a slightly adapted version of the statement we issued on World Day Against the Death Penalty. Here’s an excerpt from Marie’s statement: My sister, Catherine Marsh, was one of eight women murdered by a serial killer in Poughkeepsie a decade ago. It is impossible to overstate the pain that I felt, that my mother felt, that the rest of our family felt as we struggled to make sense of this tragedy. And from Bill’s statement: [The police] promised me that Manny would get the help he needed, but instead he was executed. For the rest of my life I have to live with the fact that I turned my brother in and that led to his death. I wish we had been able to get my brother the help we needed, and I wish families like mine could live in a society that properly treated its mentally ill citizens, rather than executing them. It will be interesting to watch what happens as the General Assembly considers the draft resolution. The group of countries who are the primary sponsors of the resolution come from a variety of regions: Angola, Albania, Brazil, Croatia, Gabon, Mexico, the Philippines, Portugal (for the EU), and New Zealand. As of this writing, close to a hundred other countries have signed on as co-sponsors.
DA decides to hold off on some death penalty cases
By MIKE TOLSON and ALLAN TURNER
The Harris County District Attorney's Office said Wednesday it will place some of its capital cases on hold until the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the lethal injection process next year. It made little sense to pursue execution dates when those who already have them are receiving stays, District Attorney Chuck Rosenthal said. "Since we don't know when the Supreme Court will rule, we thought we'd wait until they decided and then set them all," Rosenthal said. The decision will affect only defendants who have been convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death, and whose appeals are nearing an end. Roe Wilson, an assistant DA who handles appellate matters in capital cases, also said she will ask that an upcoming execution date for a man convicted of murdering an Humble woman and her 2-year-old son be withdrawn. Derrick Sonnier, 40, is scheduled to die Feb. 26 for the 1991 rape and murder of Melody Flowers and the stabbing death of her son, Patrick. Sonnier attacked the pair after Flowers rejected his sexual advances, authorities said. Dave Atwood, founder of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the respite from executions was welcome, albeit likely short-lived. "For people like myself, when there is any sort of break in this relentless execution machine, it's a good thing," Atwood said. "But I would be surprised if that subject matter caused this machinery to grind to a halt. I'm happy that they have (stopped asking for dates) because it might help with this image problem we have of pursuing the death penalty at all costs. But it only reflects that they just understand that the Supreme Court is not going to allow executions." The high court agreed in September to hear the appeal of a Kentucky inmate who argued that the lethal injection method of execution violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Such appeals have argued that the chemical cocktail used in most states could cause excruciating pain while masking the condemned prisoner's ability to express it. zThat court's acceptance of the case has resulted in a de facto temporary ban on executions across the United States. On Tuesday, Supreme Court justices stepped in again, staying the execution of Mississippi killer Earl Berry just minutes before he was to die. The only exception was 48-year-old Michael Wayne Richard of Houston, who went to his death just hours after the court said it would consider the Kentucky case. His lawyers contend they were unable to get courts to properly consider their last-minute appeal in light of the day's developments. Adding to the uncertainty, a California judge Wednesday tossed out the state's lethal injection method, saying prison officials failed to treat the procedure as a new state regulation, which mandates public comment among other requirements. Two executions are scheduled in Texas for early 2008, but neither is likely to go forward. In Central Texas, Bell County District Attorney Henry Garza said he asked a judge to cancel a Jan. 24 date for Bobby Woods. "It just seemed to me that the writing was very apparent," Garza said. "Now we'll let them rule, and we can come back in and act accordingly." Karl Chamberlain of Dallas has a Feb. 21 date. A spokeswoman for Dallas County District Attorney Craig Watkins said the office will ask to withdraw the date if the Supreme Court has not ruled by then. The Kentucky case has not been set for oral arguments yet, so a decision by that date is unlikely. In Texas, dates for executions are set by trial judges, typically at the request of local prosecutors. Wilson said her office waited to see how appeals courts responded to the Supreme Court's willingness to review the Kentucky case before deciding how to deal with execution dates. When Richard's case proved to be an exception, it became clear there was little reason to pursue them, she said. If the law is unchanged by the Supreme Court decision, executions could resume within a few months. Twenty-six of the nation's 42 executions this year have taken place in Texas. No other state has had more than three. Harris County leads the nation in sentencing killers to death and seeing those sentences carried out. The Associated Press contributed to this report.
Atwood: Capital punishment is unnecessary Murder is a horrible thing. The pain and suffering experienced by the victim and his/her family and friends are beyond description. However, is capital punishment the proper response of a civilized society to this horrible crime? The current debate about capital punishment is whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment" and, therefore, unconstitutional. No one knows how the U.S. Supreme Court will rule on this issue. Although we are aware that several executions using lethal injection have been botched over the years, we have not had anyone return from the dead to tell us what he experienced during the execution. When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that capital punishment was unconstitutional in the 1970s, it was because it was being applied in an arbitrary and capricious manner. Most objective legal scholars would admit that capital punishment is still being applied in an arbritrary and capricious manner despite improvements to the death penalty system in the 1970s. In 1994, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun acknowledged this fact and stated "I feel morally and intellectually obligated simply to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed. From this day forward, I no longer shall tinker with the machinery of death". My personal experience with the death penalty is that it is "cruel and unusual punishment" from many perspectives. First, it inflicts unbelievable mental anguish on the criminal, as well as his family and friends who are innocent of the crime. I have observed this pain and anguish many times when I have visited prisoners on death row, attended execution vigils and actually witnessed executions. Some may argue that the suffering of the offender is nothing compared to what he did to his victim. However, should we as a civilized society take human life and create more victims when it is totally unnecessary? What sort of an example does this set for our children and for the rest of the world? Secondly, the inconsistency with which the death penalty is applied in the United States is phenomenal. There are not only huge inconsistencies between states, but also within states because the attitudes, abilities and resources of the district attorneys vary significantly between counties. In some counties with unlimited financial resources such as Harris County, Texas, the district attorney will go for the death penalty at every opportunity. In rural counties, the district attorney will often choose an alternative punishment because of the high cost of trying a capital case. Thirdly, we have plenty of evidence that the criminal justice system is a human system. Mistakes have been made and innocent people have been sent to death row. Over 120 people have been exonerated and released from death row in the United States in recent years. Several of these were in Texas. And there is evidence that innocent people have been executed. If you execute an innocent person, there is no way to correct the error. Sending an innocent person to death row is certainly "cruel and unusual punishment". When Pope John Paul II visited St. Louis in 1999, he publicly stated that the death penalty was "cruel and unnecessary". It is cruel for the obvious reasons. It is also unnecessary since we can protect society by long-term incarceration of a dangerous criminal. Many states, including Texas, have life without parole as an optional punishment for capital murder. As a civilized society, we no longer have to take human life. Find this article HERE
UNITED NATIONS: UN draft resolution against death penalty to be heard Monday The UN General Assembly will hear on Monday a draft resolution proposed by European Union and other countries on a worldwide moratorium on the death penalty. This is the 3rd attempt by the countries opposed to capital punishment to pass a resolution. The previous attempts failed, due in part to U.S. opposition. However, the present resolution has softened its tone, calling for a moratorium rather than abolition. General Assembly resolutions are not binding, unlike those adopted by the UN Security Council, but they have political and moral force. The authors expect at least 106-108 members of the 192-nation organization to back the draft. While 146 countries have banned or imposed a moratorium on the death penalty, 51 states continue to carry out executions, often in public, according to the draft resolution. The vast majority of executions are carried out in China, which puts more people to death each year than the rest of the world combined. Other countries in which the death penalty is carried out include Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, and the United States, where capital punishment is applied in some states. The draft says at least 5,628 people were put to death in the world in 2006. Belarus was cited as the only country in Europe that has not rejected capital punishment. The report, to be presented at the General Assembly on Monday, says the state executed 3 people in 2006 and 4 in 2005. As death sentences are qualified as a state secret in the ex-Soviet state, the data is based on media reports and information provided by rights organizations and the families of those people put to death. (source: RIA/Novosti)
RUSSIA: Russian `Chessboard Killer' Gets Life for 48 Murders A Russian mass murderer known as the "chessboard killer'' was sentenced to life in prison for the murders of 48 people, most of whom he bludgeoned to death with a hammer in a Moscow park. The Moscow City Court also today ordered Alexander Pichushkin, 33, to undergo psychiatric treatment in prison. A jury convicted Pichushkin last week of the murders and 3 attempted killings. A life sentence in a high-security prison colony was the "maximum penalty'' for Pichushkin, since Russia suspended capital punishment in 1996, the prosecutor, Yury Syomin, said in comments broadcast by state television. Pichushkin, who claims to have killed 60 people and left 3 others for dead, expressed no remorse for his actions. In his final statement to the court, he said he was the ``judge, prosecutor and executioner'' of his victims, Russian media reported. Pichushkin told prosecutors he had marked 63 of the 64 squares on a chess board, one for each murder, leading Russian newspapers to dub him the "chessboard killer.'' The country's most notorious serial killer, Andrei Chikatilo, was convicted in 1992 of murdering 52 people and was executed 2 years later. Judge Vladimir Usov was quoted by the Interfax news service as saying Pichushkin had a "mental disorder'' but was sane and couldn't avoid criminal responsibility. 'Restore Justice' At a hearing attended by relatives of the victims, the judge added that Pichushkin posed an "extreme danger'' to society and was given a life sentence "to restore justice and prevent new crimes,'' Interfax reported. Pichushkin was defiant from behind a glass cage as the judge read out the sentence in televised footage. Asked if he understood, the convicted man replied: "I'm not deaf.'' Pavel Ivannikov, who represented Pichushkin during the trial, said on state television he would decide whether to appeal the sentence within 10 days after consulting with his client. Prosecutors say the first murder took place in 1992. After a nine-year break, Pichushkin went on a killing spree in southwestern Moscow's Bitsevsky Park that lasted until 2006. Many of his victims were elderly men whom he lured to their death by saying he wanted to show them the grave of his dog and offering to drink vodka together before killing them, state television channel Vesti-24 said. First Victim Pichushkin's first victim was a male schoolmate, whom he killed at age 18 and buried in Bitsevsky Park. Police detained Pichushkin last year after the murder of a female colleague at a grocery store where he worked. Russian media reported that she left Pichushkin's phone number with her son before going on a walk with her killer. The spate of murders in Bitsevsky Park revived memories of Chikatilo, who killed and mutilated his victims, mostly women and children, over 12 years until his capture in 1990. A married man with children who lived in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on- Don, he was executed by firing squad. The U.S. serial killer with the most victims was John Wayne Gacy, who was executed in 1994 after being convicted of murdering 33 men and boys in the 1970s. The victims' bodies were found under Gacy's suburban Chicago home. (source: Bloomberg News)
INDIA: Sikhs Worldwide Campaign for Death Penalty Abolition On March 23, 1931, an Indian Sikh named Bhagat Singh attained martyrdom when he was hanged by the British for his role in the militant freedom struggle against the colonial rulers. About 75 years later, Professor Jagmohan Singh, a nephew of the liberation hero, preaches peace and mercy as he joins a worldwide campaign, especially in Europe, by his Sikh community against death penalty. The life and work of Indian freedom fighter Bhagat Singh and his death by hanging in Lahore (now Pakistan) at the hands of British imperialism has been a great saga of patriotism for generations of Indians. But while Bhagat Singh trod a path of violence to achieve freedom, his Sikh community, though known as a courageous warrior race, today believes more in the non-violence preaching of Mahatma Gandhi, the man who brought India independence from British rule by peaceful non-cooperation. Gandhi was vocal against death penalty, saying: "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind." "We wish to argue that our country can honour Mahatma Gandhi, the apostle of peace and non-violence and (the) martyr Bhagat Singh by doing away with the death penalty altogether," says Professor Singh, a Sikh politician, and in the forefront of the current campaign. "A civil society should not descend to the status of murderers by preferring revenge over far better forms of justice. All investigations, however meticulous, are subject to human error. Such errors become irreversible in a case where the death penalty is imposed. All over the world, there have been cases of executed people being proved innocent after their death." Since early 2006, Sikhs in France have joined the campaign, organising protests and lodging petitions with the Indian embassy in Paris expressing their opposition to the death penalty. They are also calling for release of all Sikhs they claim have been jailed "unjustly" for political reasons in India. In August 2007, a Europe-wide protest by Sikhs calling for an end to the death penalty in India commenced in Brussels outside the European Commission headquarters and the European Parliament building. The Sikhs then urged European Parliament president Hans-Gert Poettering and the EC Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner to link future trade with India with abolition of the death penalty and respect for the rights of minorities, such as the Sikhs. The EU is India's largest trading partner, responsible for about 25 percent of its exports. Although India's highest courts have ruled that the death penalty can only be applied in the "rarest of rare" cases, there are believed to be as many as 700 people on the death row in India awaiting execution. Last July, death sentences were handed down to six convicted of involvement in the 1993 serial blasts in Mumbai, India's financial capital. The EU did lobby strongly, but unsuccessfully, before the execution of Dhanonjoy Chaterjee on Aug. 14, 2004. This was India's last execution, and ended a 9-year-long moratorium on executions in India. Bhai Amrik Singh, chair of the Sikh Federation (UK) comments: "The ending of the moratorium was a backward and retrograde step by the Indian regime, and a show of defiance to the EU." The current campaigning in Europe is highlighting the case of Professor Davinderpal Singh Bhullar where Germany, a prominent EU member, is directly involved. The Bhullar affair is one of the most controversial and high profile death penalty cases in recent Indian history. Almost 12 years ago, Bhullar, a Sikh political activist, was deported from Germany to India on the basis that he had nothing to fear on his return. But Bhullar was arrested immediately he landed in Delhi. In prison he was allegedly tortured to obtain a false confession, and in 2001 he was sentenced to death by hanging for a crime he allegedly did not commit. Sikhs say Germany's deportation of Bhullar to a country still retaining the death penalty was a violation of the European Convention on Human Rights. The latest death sentences to be handed down by Indian courts were on Jul. 30. Jagtar Singh and Balwant Singh, both Sikhs, were convicted of the August 1995 assassination of then Punjab chief minister Beant Singh and 17 others. The sentences triggered worldwide Sikh protest, including leading figures in the community in the Punjab province of India. The European Commission, European Parliament and Council of the European Union are now being urged to press for the death sentences to be lifted. According to Professor Jagmohan Singh, in a country like India, where there is a huge gap between the privileged and the dispossessed, the death penalty becomes the final method for implementing class injustice. Z"A cursory glance at the list of all those executed in our country will reveal that almost all of them were poor. The rich are rarely found guilty, and even if they are, they are rarely executed. "There is no international evidence to suggest that the death penalty is a deterrent to violent and heinous crime. Countries like Britain that did away with the death penalty did not see a rise in such crimes, while countries like the U.S., which continue to impose the penalty, show no decline," Jagmohan Singh says. To underline that the current anti-death penalty campaign is not only about Sikhs on the death row, Singh also calls for the sparing of another high-profile death row inmate in India, the alleged terrorist Mohammed Afzal, also known as Afzal Guru, a Muslim from India's trouble-torn state of Jammu and Kashmir. Afzal was convicted of conspiracy in the December 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament. In 2004, he was sentenced to death by the Supreme Court of India, but his sentence was stayed after his family filed a mercy petition to the President of India. "If Afzal is a terrorist today, he was surely not born one. And he need not die one. Circumstances made him what he is. And circumstances may change him. The death penalty will change no one. Far from being a deterrent, martyrdom, as some will surely perceive his death, can only achieve the opposite effect," says Singh. He adds: "I believe that the Sikh ethical approach of compassion, forgiveness and scope for reformation of one's life is a prerequisite for a progressive civil society. It is significant to mention that Maharaja Ranjit Singh, the famous Indian Sikh ruler, in his 40-year-reign (1799-1839) did not use the death penalty, even in cases where he was the subject of attack. It is high time we end this inhuman practice." (source: IPS News)
TURKEY: MHP, BBP urge reintroduction of death penalty The Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), the Grand Unity Party (BBP) and some nongovernmental organizations have been making preparations for the reintroduction of the death penalty, removed from the Turkish Constitution in 2002. Citizens condemning terrorism in nationwide protests call on the government to reintroduce the death penalty. The MHP argues that capital punishment should be included in the new constitution currently being drafted, for wartime crimes, massacres and similar crimes. BBP leader Muhsin Yazicioglu was the first politician to propose the reintroduction of the death penalty, particularly after 47 people were killed by the outlawed Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK). Yazicioglu maintains that the removal of the death penalty has encouraged terrorist crimes; he also noted that the frequency of general pardons in Turkey, a country going through trying times, has created risks for the security of the country, which could be minimized under the deterrent effect of the death penalty. Turkey had abolished capital punishment on Aug. 2, 2002, soon after the capture of the PKK leader Abdullah calan. This constitutional amendment had caused disputes among the members of the coalition government, at that time composed of the MHP, the Democratic Left Party (DSP) and the Motherland Party (ANAVATAN), and during the voting on the abolishment of the death penalty, the MHP did not back the amendment. Another party which did not back the abolishment of capital punishment was the Justice and Development Party (AK Party), which was a newly established party at the time. Turkey had ratified Protocol No. 6 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms concerning the abolition of the death penalty in peacetime. Having assumed office as a single party government following the general elections in 2002, the AK Party ratified Protocol No. 13 to the Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms concerning the abolition of the death penalty in all circumstances on Jan. 9, 2004. Professor Burhan Kuzu, the chairman of the parliamentary Constitution Commission, speaking to Todays Zaman, said: "Reintroduction of the death penalty is open to discussion. There are groups that seek reintroduction of a restricted death penalty. However, we must discuss it thoroughly and arrive at a healthy conclusion. We have ratified supplementary protocols no. 6 and 13 to the European Convention on Human Rights. The death penalty may be introduced for multiple killings. Capital punishment is implemented in the US. Some states abolished it, only to reintroduce it later. Having legal references to the death penalty may have some deterrence; but terrorism would continue its bloodshed if there was a death penalty in Turkey. We did not execute anyone under the death penalty after 1984. Well think about it when the proposal is made." (source: Today's Zaman)
ABA: Freeze executions nationwide----ABA project chairman: "The death penalty system is rife with irregularity" Among problems cited: spotty DNA evidence, false confessions, racial disparities Report based on 3 years of review of how death penalty operates in 8 states Serious problems in state death penalty systems compromise fairness and accuracy in capital punishment cases and justify a nationwide freeze on executions, the American Bar Association says. Death penalty opponents attend a rally in San Francisco in 2005. Problems cited in a report released Sunday by the lawyers' organization include:
The report is a compilation of separate reviews done over the past 3 years of how the death penalty operates in 8 states: Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Indiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Tennessee. Teams that studied the systems in Arizona, Florida and Pennsylvania did not call for a halt to executions in those states. But the ABA said every state with the death penalty should review its execution procedures before putting anyone else to death. "After carefully studying the way states across the spectrum handle executions, it has become crystal clear that the process is deeply flawed," said Stephen F. Hanlon, chairman of the ABA Death Penalty Moratorium Implementation Project. "The death penalty system is rife with irregularity." The ABA, which takes no position on capital punishment, did not study lethal injection procedures that are under challenge across the nation. The procedures will be reviewed by the Supreme Court early next year in a case from Kentucky. State and federal courts have effectively stopped most executions pending a high court decision. Prosecutors and death penalty supporters have said the eight state studies were flawed because the ABA teams were made up mainly of death penalty opponents. (source: CNN)
New York Court Blocks Death Penalty Exception ALBANY, N.Y. (AP) -- New York's highest court has refused to carve out an exception to its 2004 decision that found the state's death penalty law unconstitutional. In a 4-3 decision, the Court of Appeals said the death penalty for a defendant in one of the state's most horrific murders was the result of a "coercive" instruction to the jury that faced choosing a sentence of death or life without parole. The court was being asked to reconsider its landmark decision that invalidated a crucial part of New York death penalty statute. The court effectively halted death penalty prosecutions statewide when it found a constitutional shortcoming in the provision of the law spelling out how trial judges instruct juries during sentencing in capital cases. But prosecutors who won a death sentence against John Taylor for the murders of five Wendy's workers in Queens claimed that ruling did not affect Taylor's sentence. Prosecutors said judge in that case was careful not to violate the constitution -- an argument that would have opened an exception to the court's 2004 finding. Taylor, 43, has been the only person on New York's death row and will now be re-sentenced to life without parole. The court said New York's current death penalty statute is fatally flawed, but the state Legislature could enact a law that is constitutional. "We are ultimately left exactly where we were three years ago: The death penalty sentencing statute is unconstitutional on its face and it is not within our power to save the statute ... the Legislature, mindful of our state's due process protections, may re-enact a sentencing statute that is free of coercion and is cognizant of a jury's need to know the consequences of its choice," wrote Chief Judge Judith Kaye in the majority decision. Taylor was sentenced to die by lethal injection after his conviction for the execution-style killings of five employees of the Wendy's restaurant in 2000. He and an accomplice forced seven workers into a walk-in refrigerator in the basement, bound their hands, blindfolded them, forced them to kneel and shot each in the head. Only two survived. A co-defendant with mild retardation was sentenced to life in prison without parole. The six other killers sentenced to die under New York's 1995 capital punishment law had their sentences reduced after the Court of Appeals overturned the death sentence against Long Island school teacher killer Stephen LaValle. The judges found that part of the law was unfair to defendants because it required judges to tell jurors that if they deadlocked, the court would sentence the defendant to a parole-eligible life term. Critics said the provision might make jurors more likely to apply the death penalty.
Editorial: On Thursday, September 27,2007 , Ester, Massoud and I took a 45 minute trip to the Woodlands to hear and see Sister Helen Prejean. I had a prior engagement which I cancelled in anticipation of this opportunity to meet the woman whom I had heard so many good things about, who had been instrumental in sparking national dialogue on the death penalty and in shaping the Catholic Church's opposition to state executions. When we arrived at St. Anthony of Padua Catholic Church, we were amazed by the large number of people that were already sitting down inside the Fellowship hall. I could sense that we were in for an unforgettable experience as the atmosphere was extremely peaceful and almost magical. Sister Helen shared her story about getting involved in the life of a death row inmate, becoming his spiritual adviser and friend and then being the last person that he would see before his execution and how this experience changed her life forever. She also shared with us the experiences and the pain of the victims' families and gave us a better understanding of how society really neglects them, as well. After a question and answer session and signing of her books, Sister Helen wholeheartedly supported us with her endorsement of our 8th Annual March To End Executions and took numerous photos with the group. Needless to say, we were overly excited about this. I will forever cherish the memories of that evening and every time I open her book I am reminded to continue fighting by these kind words: "To Regina - seek justice! Love & Prayers, Helen Prejean"
Editorial: There are several good reasons to give every death row inmate an indefinite reprieve. This week the U.S. Supreme Court found another. Particularly in Texas, the nation's execution leader, the criminal justice system is prone to mistakes and abuse. The system is too unreliable in its assessment of guilt to justify exacting the ultimate, irrevocable penalty. As recorded by the Innocence Project, advances in DNA analysis have exonerated more than 200 convicted prisoners nationwide since 1989. The wrongful convictions often involved cases of mistaken identity. Police and prosecutorial misconduct were common. The odds are that many more innocent people are in prison for crimes they did not commit and for whom there is no DNA to analyze. In Houston, the Police Department crime lab's incompetent testing of all kinds of evidence — combined with false testimony — tainted hundreds of cases, placing their convictions in doubt. Tuesday the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to decide whether lethal injections are cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional. Critics allege the injections can cause great agony, but the drugs paralyze the prisoner before he can protest. In an earlier case, Justice John Paul Stevens informed a deputy attorney general from Florida that the drug cocktail used by her state and all the others — sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride in various dosages — would not be allowed to be used to euthanize cats and dogs. In a California case, a member of the American College of Veterinary Anesthesiologists testified that those drugs were soundly rejected by his peers and would be very likely to cause pain in animals. With lethal injections suspected of being cruel and unusual and therefore unconstitutional and unjust, it is inappropriate for Texas to proceed with executions until the court has ruled. A spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry, however, said executions in Texas would continue, as the cases under review affect only Kentucky. That is a narrow and mean view of justice. Do the governor and the members of the Board of Pardons and Paroles wish to look back on a series of cruel and possibly illegal executions carried out under a legal cloud? Death row inmates about to be executed committed their crimes 15-20 years ago. Where is the harm in postponing executions for a few months until the court makes its ruling? After executing more than 400 people since 1977, Texas can afford to wait.
EUROPE: Italy's leader urged United Nations member states to back a resolution declaring a moratorium on the death penalty, saying the worldwide campaign had reached a "decisive moment." Prime Minister Romano Prodi told the General Assembly in New York City Tuesday evening that the resolution "will prove that human beings today are better than they were yesterday also in moral terms." The resolution Italy is promoting with the European Union's support calls for a universal moratorium on the death penalty, ahead of eventual total abolition. In an open letter published in Italian, French and Spanish dailies earlier Tuesday, Prodi acknowledged that the campaign faced challenges. "We know that we cannot harbor illusions. The battle against capital punishment is a difficult one, because many countries still practice it." To pass, the resolution will need the backing of two-thirds of the 192 U.N. member states, or 128 votes, and Prodi told the meeting that Italy had been working hard to muster the necessary support. According to Italy's mission to the U.N., an earlier Italian-led declaration on the subject was signed by 85 nations last December and another 10 subsequently. It called on countries with the death penalty "to abolish it completely and, in the meantime, to establish a moratorium on executions." Amnesty International (AI) says 133 countries have abolished the death penalty in law or in practice, while 64 other countries and territories retain it. In 2006, 25 countries carried out executions, the rights group says. It recorded 1,591 executions last year, of which at least 1,010 took place in China (although AI says the true figure in China could be as high as 8,000). Elsewhere in 2006, "Iran executed 177 people, Pakistan 82 and Iraq and Sudan each at least 65. There were 53 executions in 12 states in the U.S.A." Although any General Assembly resolution will not be legally binding on member states, "it would carry a heavy moral and political weight of united international pressure," according to AI. 'European values' European institutions are at the forefront of the international campaign to outlaw capital punishment, and the 47-nation Council of Europe (CoE) says one of its top priorities is "to make abolition a universally accepted value." Having achieved a de-facto moratorium on the death penalty across Europe (Belarus, a non-member, is the sole exception), the CoE says it is working to extend the prohibition to countries that have observer status, primarily the U.S. and Japan. European politicians and officials frequently characterize an anti-penalty stance as a "European value." When Poland's conservative government this month went against the E.U. consensus on the issue of the death penalty, left-wing critics in the European Parliament questioned its commitment to "European values." A year earlier, when Polish President Lech Kaczynski argued in favor of reinstating capital punishment, E.U. Commission spokesman Stefaan de Rynck reacted by declaring that "the death penalty is not compatible with European values." Yet in Europe, as in the U.S., opinion polls have for years reflected significant levels of support for the death penalty. At an Oct. 2006 press conference in Brussels marking the "world day against the death penalty," CoE Secretary-General Terry Davis conceded that "many Europeans are still in favor of the death penalty." "This is not something we can ignore," he said. "We need to go out and explain to people why the death penalty is wrong, why it has been abolished and why it should stay abolished." In a separate statement the same day, Rene van der Linden, head of the CoE's parliamentary assembly, referred to member states having "the political will and courage to abolish the death penalty despite the potential unpopularity of the measure." Soeren Kern, senior fellow in transatlantic relations at the Strategic Studies Group in Madrid, Spain, says that although support for the death penalty has been declining on both sides of the Atlantic, there is in fact little difference between Americans and Europeans on the matter. "Despite all the media hype, public opinion polls consistently show that Europeans and Americans hold similar views on the death penalty," he said Tuesday, adding that "roughly half" of Europeans and "roughly half" of Americans support it. Kern said there were questions about the basis to Europe's anti-death penalty stance. "Many analysts say that European opposition to the death penalty has little to do with morality, and much to do with the desire by European elites to build a European identity that is based on being different from the United States," he said. "Because there is no such thing as a pan-European identity -- unlike, say, a French identity or a German identity -- Europeans, who for centuries have been the primary champions of the death penalty, now say they are purveyors of a superior morality in a contrived effort to be better than the United States," he said. (source: CNS.News.com) USA: The Supreme Court on Tuesday stepped into the debate over whether the most commonly used drug "cocktail" used to execute prisoners on death row is so likely to produce needless pain and suffering as to be unconstitutional. The justices agreed to hear an appeal by two men on Kentucky's death row who argue that the combination of three drugs amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The case, which comes at a time when challenges to lethal injections have effectively stopped executions in a growing number of states, will be argued in January or February and decided by early next summer. While it is pending, judges around the country are certain to be asked to bar executions in those states that are not already under an official or de facto moratorium. In 2004, while the Supreme Court was considering an ultimately successful challenge to the execution of juvenile killers, judges blocked all such executions. Of the 38 states with the death penalty, 37 use lethal injection - all except Nebraska, which still uses the electric chair. Lethal injection was adopted in the 1980s as a more palatable alternative to electrocution, but it has proven increasingly troublesome. Leading medical organizations have told their members not to participate, and lawyers for death-row inmates have produced evidence showing that in the absence of expert medical attention, there is a substantial risk of error in administering the combination of anesthesia and paralyzing drugs necessary to bring about a quick and painless death. Litigation over the issue has brought executions to a halt in 9 states: California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Oklahoma and Tennessee, according to lawyers at the Death Penalty Clinic at the Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California. The issue in the case, Baze v. Rees, No. 07-5439, is not whether lethal injection, in the abstract, is constitutional or unconstitutional; the question is more specific and less conclusive than that. It is, rather, the standard by which courts are to evaluate the evidence that lethal injection, predictably and with some regularity, goes wrong: that a paralyzing drug can leave an inadequately anesthetized inmate with the ability to feel severe pain as another drug stops the heart, but without the ability to move or call for help. There have been other problems with lethal injection as well. 4 months ago, an execution in Ohio was delayed 90 minutes as medical workers struggled to find a vein in the prisoner's arm into which they could insert the shunts to carry the intravenous lines. Under the Supreme Court's precedents on prison conditions, inadequate medical care is not deemed to violate the Eighth Amendment unless it is the product of "deliberate indifference." Under the court's death penalty precedents, a method of execution must not be "contrary to evolving standards of decency" and may not inflict "unnecessary pain." In rejecting the challenge to lethal injection last year, the Kentucky Supreme Court found that the method did not present a "substantial" risk of pain and suffering, and so met these constitutional standards. "The prohibition is against cruel punishment and does not require a complete absence of pain," the state court said. In their appeal, the two inmates, Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, represented by the Kentucky Public Advocate's office, said the Kentucky court failed to consider that the risk of pain was "unnecessary," in that alternative methods of lethal injection could eliminate the chance that inmates would remain conscious but paralyzed. They urge the justices to incorporate "unnecessary risk" into the standard for evaluating lethal injection. The 3 chemicals used for lethal injections are sodium thiopental, which renders a person unconscious; followed by Pavulon, which paralyzes the muscles, including those that control breathing; followed by potassium chloride, which causes cardiac arrest. Lawyers have argued that the 2nd drug could be eliminated and that a less painful drug could be substituted for the 3rd. The Kentucky attorney general's office, in urging the justices to turn down the appeal, argued that the fact that the three chemicals were so widely used demonstrated that the protocol was acceptable. "Condemned inmates will never run out of ideas for changes to the procedures, drugs or equipment used during lethal injection," the state said, warning that the Supreme Court would go "down an endless road of litigation" if it accepted the case. The 2 inmates were convicted of separate, unrelated crimes: Mr. Baze for killing a sheriff and deputy sheriff who were trying to serve him with a warrant, and Mr. Bowling for killing a couple whose car he had damaged in a parking lot. In 2 earlier cases on lethal injection, the Supreme Court removed procedural obstacles to bringing such cases but did not deal directly with the constitutionality of the method. But those two rulings led to an explosion of litigation. The only time the court ever ruled directly on a method of execution was in 1878, when it upheld the use of the firing squad. In 1999, the justices agreed to hear a challenge to Florida's use of the electric chair, but the state substituted lethal injection for electrocution before the case could be decided. In 1972, the court struck down all existing death penalty statutes, but in 1976 allowed executions to resume under newly written laws that gave jurors more precise guidance in an effort to make death sentences less arbitrary. There have been 1,097 executions since then, with Texas accounting for 403. There have been 40 executions this year, 24 of them in Texas. (source: New York Times) ********************** Supreme Court to review lethal injection methods The U.S. Supreme Court took up a constitutional challenge to lethal injections Monday, agreeing to decide how far states must go to reduce the risk of excruciating pain during an execution. The court's decision to accept an appeal from 2 death row inmates in Kentucky will almost certainly slow the pace of executions around the nation in the short term. While the case is under review, moratoriums will continue in California and nine other states where judges have halted lethal injections during court challenges. Of the 27 other states with death penalty laws, lethal injection is the sole or primary means of execution in all but one - Nebraska, which uses the electric chair - and it is also used in federal executions. Legal commentators expect judges or prison officials in many of those states to delay executions until after the Supreme Court's ruling, due by June. The case is scheduled to be argued in early January. "This is huge news which could (and probably should) lead to a de facto moratorium on all lethal injection executions nationwide until the Supreme Court issues a ruling," Douglas Berman, a law professor and sentencing law expert at Ohio State University, wrote in his blog on sentencing issues. But the ruling could also remove long-term legal obstacles to lethal injections if, as expected, the court sets a constitutional standard under the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Federal and state courts around the nation have been weighing legal challenges to lethal injection from condemned prisoners for most of this decade, with varying results and with no clear guidance from the high court. "Having the court take the issue up will mean that we're going to get some finality on this method of punishment," said Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in Sacramento, which supports capital punishment. He said his organization will file arguments urging the court to give states considerable leeway in lethal injection, which he likened to euthanasia. Fordham Law Professor Deborah Denno, a death penalty opponent who testified for the inmates in the Kentucky case, agreed that the ruling should help to clear up confusion about execution methods. "The lack of Eighth Amendment guidance has unraveled the death penalty in this country," she said. Berman said he expects the court to allow lethal injections to continue while concluding that some safeguards are needed to reduce the risk of a botched and painful execution. Although the justices have been divided over capital punishment-related issues, the Ohio State professor said, they probably will reach a consensus that "the state can't be sloppy to the point of risking extreme pain when it may not be necessary, but the Constitution doesn't demand eliminating all risks of pain." The court in recent years has barred executions of juveniles and mentally retarded prisoners. But a ruling last term made it easier for prosecutors in capital cases to remove jurors who had qualms about the death penalty. According to documents filed by defense lawyers in the Kentucky case, this will be the first time that the Supreme Court has reviewed the constitutionality of a method of execution since 1878, when the court upheld Utah's use of a firing squad. In that ruling, the court said the Constitution prohibits executions that involve torture, such as burning alive or drawing and quartering, and other infliction of "unnecessary cruelty" that the justices did not define. Lawyers for the Kentucky inmates argue that the state is violating that standard by using drugs that pose a risk of extreme pain if something goes wrong, and by failing to provide adequate safeguards. The 2 inmates, Ralph Baze, 49, and Thomas Bowling, 52, were both convicted of double murders and have lost appeals of their death sentences. Baze shot a sheriff and his deputy who were serving warrants on him in 1992. Bowling killed a husband and wife outside their dry-cleaning store in 1990. A state judge upheld Kentucky's procedures after hearing testimony from medical experts and other witnesses in a 2005 trial, and the Kentucky Supreme Court affirmed that decision in a brief ruling last November, saying the Constitution "does not require a complete absence of pain." Lethal injection was first used by Texas in 1982 and was adopted by California in 1996 after a federal judge barred use of the state's gas chamber. Executions by injection, largely the same in all states, begin with the use of a powerful sedative to render the inmate unconscious and conclude with drugs to paralyze the muscles and stop the heart. The medical-style procedure was widely viewed as a humane alternative to more traumatic execution methods such as hanging, electrocution and lethal gas. But in recent years some studies have suggested that flaws in states' administration of the sedative, sodium pentothal, have left prisoners conscious and in agony, but paralyzed and unable to cry out, while they are dying. In California, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel of San Jose ruled last\ December that the state's lethal injection procedures were so haphazard, with poorly trained prison staff operating in a dimly lit chamber, that they created an undue risk of a needlessly painful execution. Fogel had previously blocked the February 2006 execution of Michael Morales of Stockton, convicted of raping and murdering 17-year-old Terri Winchell near Lodi in 1981. The judge said then that the state could execute Morales if a doctor was present to make sure he was unconscious, but prison officials were unable to find a physician who would participate. Ethical standards set by medical associations bar doctors from taking part in executions. The state has since announced changes in its execution protocol, including better training for prison staff and closer monitoring of the inmate, and is building a new execution chamber at San Quentin State Prison. Fogel plans to visit the prison in November and is scheduled to hold a hearing on the new procedures in December. It's not clear whether those plans will be affected by Monday's Supreme Court order, said Ronald Matthias, a senior assistant attorney general who oversees death penalty cases in California. Morales' lawyers were unavailable for comment. In Business: Court to consider legality of federally ordered revisions in power contracts between suppliers and states. What it means What the court did: Agreed to review an appeal by 2 Kentucky death row inmates who challenged the state's plans to execute them by lethal injection. They argued that the 3 drugs used in executions, and the state's procedures, poses a needless risk of causing severe pain to a dying inmate. The implications: The ruling, due by June, is likely to set constitutional standards for the 37 states and the federal government that use lethal injection as their sole or primary method of execution. California: A federal judge in San Jose has halted all lethal injections in the state since granting a stay of execution in February 2006 to Michael Morales, convicted of a 1981 rape and murder. The Supreme Court's decision to review the Kentucky case extends court-imposed moratoriums on executions in California and 9 other states. The Supreme Court case is Baze vs. Rees, 07-5439. (source: San Francisco Chronicle) *****************************
Death row ruling may suspend U.S. executions If the Commonwealth of Kentucky had had its way, Ralph Baze would have been dead this morning, executed by lethal injection for the murder of two police officers more than 15 years ago. But the 52-year-old death row inmate, originally scheduled to die last night, instead celebrated news that the U.S. Supreme Court would hear his appeal in a high-profile case that could force the suspension of capital punishment in America. In a surprise decision, the high court justices agreed to review the claim by Baze and a fellow Kentucky death row inmate, Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., that lethal injection violates the U.S. Constitution's protections against cruel and unusual punishment. "This is huge news which could, and probably should, lead to a de facto moratorium on all lethal injection executions nationwide until the Supreme Court issues a ruling," said Douglas Berman, an Ohio State University law professor and author of a popular legal blog. The decision to take up the Kentucky cases marks the 1st time in 129 years that the Supreme Court will hear a test of a method of execution on constitutional grounds. The legality of capital punishment itself is not being challenged, only the question of whether the administration of a lethal 3-drug cocktail causes death row inmates unnecessary or unbearable pain. Nevertheless, the potential consequences of the upcoming Supreme Court ruling are huge. Thirty-six of the 38 American states that allow capital punishment use the same combination of drugs to put condemned prisoners to death. "I think it is necessarily going to be a nuanced ruling," said Prof. Berman. "It is unlikely to be a curt 'You can't do lethal injection because it always will cause pain.' " In the 30 years since the death penalty was reinstated in the American states have overwhelmingly turned to lethal injection as a replacement for hanging, gassing, shooting and electrocution, forms of capital punishment deemed inhumane. Of 1,097 executions since 1977, lethal injections have been used 927 times, according to the Death Penalty Information Center. 2 of the nation's largest states, Florida and California, abruptly halted lethal injection executions in 2006 amid a swirl of controversy about the procedure. In Florida, former governor Jeb Bush took action after it took 34 minutes to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz because of a botched needle placement. In California, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger ordered revisions to the state's lethal injection procedure after a state judge found a "pervasive lack of professionalism" in carrying out the death sentences. Most American states carry out the death penalty by injecting inmates first with sodium pentathol, a fast-acting barbiturate that knocks prisoners unconscious. They are then given a dose of pancuronium bromide to stop their breathing and, finally, potassium chloride to stop their heart. Baze was originally scheduled for execution yesterday, but won a reprieve earlier this month as he awaited news of his appeal. Lawyers for Baze and Bowling argued last year before Kentucky's Supreme Court that death row inmates are potentially exposed to horrifying pain if given too low a dose of the first drug. The court ruled against them because of "conflicting" evidence about whether prisoners feel any pain. There was insufficient evidence that lethal injection "creates a substantial risk of wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain, torture or lingering death," the threshold of suffering prohibited by the Constitution, according to the court. But Baze told The New York Times in 2005: "From all accounts that I've read, the stuff is like liquid fire going into your veins ... Taking my life should be enough ... To make me have to live the last few minutes of it in a living hell is beyond comprehension." As symbols of the anti-death penalty movement, Baze and Bowling hardly make for sympathetic figures. Baze was convicted of shooting an eastern Kentucky sheriff and deputy 3 times in the back when the police officers were serving a fugitive warrant against him. Bowling murdered a husband and wife, and shot their 2-year-old son, outside the couple's dry cleaning business in Lexington, Ky. The Supreme Court's decision to hear their case is "interesting and not insignificant," says Prof. Berman. "To the extent that they have picked one involving two less than sympathetic fellows may make it easier for them to come up with a less than sympathetic ruling," he said. (source: National Post) ****************
High Court to hear lethal injection case The Supreme Court said Tuesday it would hear a new challenge to the way states carry out executions by lethal injection, possibly banning outdated chemical concoctions that may cause dying inmates excruciating pain. Such a ruling would not prohibit lethal injections, but it could force officials in most states to use new or different chemicals so inmates are not subjected to an "unnecessary risk of pain and suffering." This probably would not have much effect in California. In December, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel in San Jose blocked the state from carrying out executions using the older chemical concoction on the grounds it would cause an unnecessary risk of a painful death. In July, lawyers for two Kentucky death row inmates appealed to the Supreme Court and cited Fogel's ruling. They urged the justices to adopt the "unnecessary risk" rule as a constitutional standard for deciding what is "cruel and unusual punishment." In a brief order Tuesday, the justices said they had voted to hear this claim early next year. The court's intervention may halt some pending executions until the question is resolved, although authorities in Texas, the nation's busiest death penalty state, said the announcement would not affect its execution docket. Texas executed an inmate Tuesday night and has another execution set for Thursday. When capital punishment was upheld as constitutional more than 30 years ago, states relied on electrocution, the gas chamber, hanging or the firing squad to put an inmate to death. Lethal injections were introduced in the 1980s as a new and supposedly painless method of execution. Today, 37 of the 38 states with the death penalty have adopted this method. Nebraska still relies on electrocution. In recent years, new medical evidence has suggested that the commonly used three-chemical compound of sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride may be anything but painless. Some experts say that, while pancuronium bromide may paralyze the inmate, potassium chloride causes intense pain while stopping the heart. This evidence has been brought before judges across the country, prompting some of them to halt executions. The Kentucky Supreme Court was unconvinced, however. Its judges said they did not see proof of a "substantial risk of wanton and unnecessary pain," and based on that legal standard it upheld the continued use of the 3-chemical concoction. Kentucky has had only 2 executions in recent decades, although it has 41 inmates who are under a death sentence. Nonetheless, David M. Barron, a 29-year-old public defender from Frankfort, Ky., wrote an appeal to the Supreme Court and recommended the justices set a national rule for deciding what constitutes "cruel and unusual punishment" in evaluating a method of execution. The state's lawyers replied that the two inmates were good candidates for the death penalty. In 1992, Ralph Baze shot and killed 2 county sheriffs who had come to arrest him on a felony warrant from Ohio. The other inmate, Thomas Clyde Bowling Jr., shot and killed a mother and father in 1990 after his car had crashed into theirs. "This is not a case for the U.S. Supreme Court to tell the states how to carry out an execution or what chemicals to use," Barron said in an interview Tuesday. "Rather it is for the justices to articulate the proper legal standard and whether what is being done complies with that." If it doesn't, how to fix it would be left to the states, he said. Barron said there was ample evidence that other chemicals would be less painful than the current trio used by three dozen states, including California. Since Fogel's ruling, California has retooled its protocol for carrying out executions and state officials are in the process of building a new death chamber. Fogel has scheduled a December hearing to assess whether the new procedures pass constitutional muster. The high court's action Tuesday will reverberate around the nation. University of Richmond law professor Carl Tobias said a key issue is looming well before the court hears the case: what will happen with executions scheduled before the court rules. "I assume most states will await the Supreme Court ruling, but there may be pressure not to wait," Tobias said. Ty Alper, associate director of the death penalty clinic at UC Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law, who maintains the website lethalinjection.org, said he expected the high court's ruling to affect every pending lethal injection challenge, but certainly would not lead to the abolition of lethal injection. He emphasized that in recent years stays of execution stemming from lethal injection challenges had been granted in some cases and denied in others "with no meaningful difference between the substance of the cases." "I think it has finally sunk in that there are arbitrary differences between how these cases are being treated in the lower courts" and that there is a need for a uniform standard on what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment in these circumstances, Alper said. (source: Los Angeles Times)
A message from the Foster family Dear Friends, Family and supporters, Oh my God, where to start. We are estatic, overwhelmed and full of smiles! Finally the Death row nightmare is over, no more seeing him from behind glass- soon we will be able to hug him. Nydesha will be able to hug him :-) Without all the hard work from all of you- it would have not been possible. You guys worked around the clock, made the calls, wrote the letters, marched with us, signed petitions, helped us organize, contacted the media and made this cross bareable for us. We thank God for having you all. we won guys- and all because of the fantastic team work!!!!! We love you all! Tasha & Kenneth
Perry Commutes Death Sentence AUSTIN - Gov. Rick Perry today commuted the death sentence of Kenneth Eugene Foster of San Antonio to life imprisonment after the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles (TBPP) recommended such action. On May 6, 1997, Foster was sentenced to death for his role in the 1996 capital murder of Michael LaHood. Foster sought to have his death sentence commuted to a life sentence arguing that he did not shoot the victim, but merely drove the car in which that the actual killer was riding. In addition, Foster was tried along side the actual killer, Maurecio Brown, and the jury that convicted Foster also considered punishment for both him and his co-defendant in the same proceeding. "After carefully considering the facts of this case, along with the recommendations from the Board of Pardons and Paroles, I believe the right and just decision is to commute Foster's sentence from the death penalty to life imprisonment," Gov. Perry said. "I am concerned about Texas law that allows capital murder defendants to be tried simultaneously, and it is an issue I think the legislature should examine." The TBPP voted 6-1 to recommend commutation, and the governor signed the commutation papers Thursday morning. T he governor's action means Foster's sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment as soon as the Texas Department of Criminal Justice can process this change. Contact the Governor by Telephone and Thank him for this decision! Telephone
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Jimmy Carter, Desmond Tutu Urge Texas to Stay Execution of Kenneth Foster
Former President Jimmy Carter and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu have urged Texas to stop Thursday's scheduled execution of death row prisoner Kenneth Foster. Meanwhile, Foster's attorney has filed a last minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles meets today to decide Kenneth Foster's fate. We speak with Liliana Segura of the Campaign to End the Death Penalty. Calls for Texas death row prisoner Kenneth Foster to be granted clemency are increasing. Former President Jimmy Carter and South African archbishop Desmond Tutu have urged Texas to stop Thursday's scheduled execution. Foster's attorney has filed a last minute appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. Meanwhile the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles meets today to decide Kenneth Foster's fate. Foster is one of three death row prisoners set to die this week in Texas. Last night the state executed DaRoyce Mosley. Tonight John Joe Amador is scheduled to be killed. All three men are African-American or Latino. What makes Foster's case unique is that he is set to be executed for a murder that the state of Texas admits he didn't commit or plan. Eleven years ago, Foster was driving a car with three passengers. One of the passengers left the car, got into an altercation and shot a man dead. The shooter was executed for this crime last year. At the time of the shooting, Kenneth Foster was 80 feet away in his car. But Foster was sentenced to die as well under what's known as the law of parties. The law imposes the death penalty on anybody involved in a crime where a murder occurred. From Democracynow.org
As clock ticks toward execution Support builds to save Kenneth Foster's life
Kenneth Foster’s Aug. 30 execution is only days away, yet he, his family and supporters are not willing to give up the fight to save his life. Foster did not kill anyone. The state of Texas is the first to admit this. But because when he was 19 years old, on Aug. 14, 1996, someone he was with murdered a young man, Foster was convicted and sentenced to death under Texas law. However, under the law, Foster should not have been convicted because he did not fit the criteria of planning or conspiring or even anticipating a murder. The last month has been a whirlwind of rallies, marches, forums, hip-hop concerts, and radio and TV interviews. Public meetings have been held in Houston, San Antonio and Austin, and also in Harlem, N.Y. Foster’s case has been covered in news media across the country and around the world. Even in Texas, several of the major daily newspapers, in Austin, Dallas, Fort Worth and Galveston, have editorialized against his execution. From Australian radio to Spanish television, the world is learning about yet another case of an innocent person set for execution in Texas. Texas state legislators have received more than 2,500 email letters asking them to look into Foster’s case and to contact the governor and Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop his execution. Web sites and blogs are spreading the word. This week a YouTube campaign to stop the execution began. People are recording a statement and uploading it to YouTube saying why Texas Gov. Rick Perry and the Board of Pardons should stop Foster’s execution. Then they are sending a message to the governor and board that includes a link to their videos. Also this week, civil disobedience was planned for an Austin rally at the governor’s mansion. And death penalty abolitionists in New York City planned to take signs against the execution of Kenneth Foster to the big glass windows at the ABC studio broadcast of “Good Morning America.” A public forum featuring Foster’s family is being held in Houston on Aug. 25. Only four states across the country have laws that enable prosecutors to hold those who were merely present at the scene of a crime legally responsible. Texas is the only state that applies this statute in capital cases, making it the only place in the United States where a person can be factually innocent of murder and still face the death penalty. Foster’s attorney, Keith Hampton, filed a last appeal with the U.S. Supreme Court in mid-August, calling it a “shot-in-the-dark brief.” It is based on the court’s 1982 ruling in Enmund vs. Florida that forbade capital punishment for a getaway driver sitting in the car during a botched robbery-turned-murder. The court decided the case under the premise that the driver “did not kill or intend to kill, and thus his culpability is different from that of the robbers who killed.” In a separate case five years later, the justices ruled the death penalty can be imposed on an accomplice if he or she was a “major participant” in a murder and acted with “reckless indifference” to human life. “There are constitutional limitations on what you can do to somebody who isn’t the triggerman,” said Steven Shatz, director of the University of San Francisco’s Keta Taylor Colby Death Penalty Project. “Merely participating in a robbery is not sufficient, is not in itself a reckless disregard.” In Foster’s case, not only was he not a participant in the robbery or murder, he did not have any knowledge that his friend was going to do it and he had no way of anticipating it. Foster was driving his grandfather’s car with three friends on that night in 1996. Two of the young men had committed two robberies that evening. As they were driving one man home, Foster’s companion Maurecio Brown got out of the car to talk with a young woman while Foster and the other two sat in the car about 80 feet away with the windows rolled up and the radio playing. They reportedly heard a “pop” and realized that a shot had been fired. Foster and Brown were tried together even though Brown admitted to the shooting as an act of self-defense. Both had inadequate court-appointed attorneys. Brown was executed in July 2006. Two weeks ago, journalists Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzales interviewed Foster’s family on the radio and television show “Democracy Now.” During the program, Foster’s 11-year-old daughter, Nydesha, talked with wisdom and strength about her father. “He encourages me,” she said. “That’s what keeps me strong. ... I would probably not be able to do anything, because I’d be so sad and stressed out. ... And even though he is a father behind glass, he does a lot of stuff for me. You know, he still is a father. And people need to recognize that. “When somebody is a big part of your heart, like my father is—I mean, my father is more than half of my heart. I mean, I love him so much. And if the state of Texas kills him just for driving a car, it’s like you’re killing my heart. It’s like you’re killing half of me. It’s like if you execute him, you might as well execute me. ... But I think that I manage to keep myself together, because, you know, me and my father, we write back and forth. And, you know, we’re constantly talking to each other. ... We’re not going to let Texas separate us, because we love each other so much. I mean, I don’t think there is a relationship this big, as me and my father’s.” Foster’s web page, www.freekenneth.com, has many of his writings. He ends one passage with these words: “I’m here to expose the death penalty for what it is ... and I will continue to scream that CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IS GENOCIDE! AND I MEAN THAT!” Call Texas Gov. Rick Perry at 512-463-1782 to demand that the execution of Kenneth Foster be stopped. Call the Texas Board of Pardons to ask for clemency for Foster at 512-463-1679.
In Texas, books are a danger to death row
By DAVE ZIRIN
Who knew sports history could strike fear in the most fearsome prison system in the United States? But what other explanation could there be for the fact that the history of "America's pastime" is being denied to Texas death row prisoner Kenneth Foster? Kenneth's case has garnered international attention since both prosecution and defense agree that he was 80 feet away from the murder of Michael LaHood at the time it occurred. Earlier in the evening, he was driving the man who pulled the trigger, Maurecio Brown. In Texas that's enough to dust off the proverbial noose. Foster and I began to exchange letters on sports and politics after he read my book Welcome to the Terrordome. He wrote to me: "I have never had the opportunity to view sports in this way. And as I went through these revelations I began to have epiphanies about the way sports have a similar existence in prison. The similarities shook me. Facing execution, the only thing that I began to get obsessive about was how to get heard and be free, and as the saying goes — you can't serve two gods. Sports, as you know, becomes a way of life. You monitor it, you almost come to breathe it. Sports becomes a way of life in prison, because it becomes a way of survival. For men that don't have family or friends to help them financially it becomes a way to occupy your time. That's another sad story in itself, but it's the root to many men's obsession with sports." It didn't matter if he was on death row or Park Avenue, I felt smarter having read his words. But even more satisfying was the thought that thinking about sports took his mind — for a moment — away from his imminent death, the 11-year-old daughter he will never touch and the words he will never write. I thought sending him my first book, What's My Name Fool?: Sports and Resistance in the U.S., would be a good follow-up — but here is where the Texas Department of Corrections got their briefs in a bunch. A form titled "Texas Dept. of Criminal Justice, Publication review/denial notification" issued to Kenneth on August 9 reads that What's My Name Fool? Was banned from the row because, "It contains material that a reasonable person would construe as written solely for the purpose of communicating information designed to achieve the breakdown of prisons through offender disruption such as strikes or riots." They |
