History > 2006 > USA > Death penalty (V)

Death-row hunger strikers, clockwise from top left:

Stephen Moody, Travis Runnels, Justen Hall, Richard Cobb, Kevin Watts and Steven Woods.

None have yet been force-fed, corrections officials say.

Texas Inmates Protest Conditions With Hunger Strikes        NYT        8.11.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/us/08prison.html

Condemned killer

claims innocence 25 years later

Sat Dec 23, 2006 9:15 AM ET
Reuters
By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Condemned killer Mumia Abu-Jamal isn't getting his hopes up. The former radio reporter who was convicted of murdering a Philadelphia policeman in 1981 is appealing his death sentence on grounds that his lawyer Robert Bryan says offer his best chance yet of a new trial.

But the former Black Panther who has spent almost a quarter-century on Death Row for a crime he says he did not commit -- and become an international cause celebre for the anti-death penalty movement -- says he knows better than to pin his hopes on the latest twist in a long legal saga.

"I have learned over the years to not get into the prediction business, and I have learned that the hard way," he said in an exclusive interview with Reuters from a state prison near Waynesburg in western Pennsylvania.

His earlier hopes were dashed in 1989 when his attorneys went before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court and returned full of optimism.

"They came back and reported to me, 'You got it, you won,' and of course I believed them. Obviously, that was not the case," the 52-year-old said.

Abu-Jamal, who is black, was convicted and sentenced to death in July 1982 for killing Daniel Faulkner, a white policeman, in Philadelphia on December 9, 1981.

He has maintained his innocence, saying he was framed in a city that had a reputation for police brutality and where he had antagonized officials with his reporting on alleged police corruption.

Critics including the Fraternal Order of Police argue that several eyewitnesses identified Abu-Jamal as the killer, that the bullet that killed the policeman was of the same type used in Abu-Jamal's gun and that Abu-Jamal confessed to the killing while recovering from his wounds, according to testimony of a hospital security guard.

"What more do you need?" said Peter Wirs, a Philadelphia Republican whose local party branch recently filed a lawsuit against the mayor of Paris for making Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen of the city. "It's an open-and-shut case."

RACIST JUDGE?

The city council in Paris made Abu-Jamal an honorary citizen, while Paris suburb St. Denis has named a street after him.

Abu-Jamal also has attracted support from Amnesty International, the European Parliament and South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who say they believe he was a victim of police and judicial racism and deserves at least a new trial.

Among other evidence, his backers cite a statement by the now-deceased trial Judge Albert Sabo, who sentenced Abu-Jamal to death and who, according to court documents, was overheard saying, "Yeah, and I'm going to help 'em fry the nigger."

Wirs denied Sabo's statement indicates the trial was racially biased. "He was just expressing the general sentiment of most Philadelphians. He was biased and prejudiced against criminals," he said.

Faulkner's widow, Maureen, could not be reached for comment. The Philadelphia District Attorney, whose office prosecuted Abu-Jamal, declined to comment because the case is under appeal.

In Abu-Jamal's latest appeal, expected to be heard in early 2007, the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia will decide whether his trial was tainted by racial discrimination and whether he is entitled to a new trial.

For now, Abu-Jamal remains on Death Row because of appeals against another judge's lifting of the death sentence in 2001.

In a telephone interview lasting 15 minutes, the most allowed by prison authorities, Abu-Jamal said he lives a largely solitary life.

"The day can be encapsulated in the word 'isolation,'" he said. "For 22 hours a day, you are in a cell by yourself. That's where you eat, that's where you sleep, that's where you do your ... bodily functions."

The only possibility of contact with others is a two-hour exercise period at the maximum-security prison. But even that is often solitary during the winter because many inmates avoid the cold, he said.

In his cell, Abu-Jamal said he reads, writes columns on topics such as politics, the death penalty and the war in Iraq for a Web site run by his supporters and makes radio broadcasts for a San Francisco-based organization called Prison Radio.

Contact with his family is largely limited to phone calls because they live some 300 miles away in Philadelphia.

"My people are poor," he said. "I don't see them often, maybe once or twice a year if we can manage it but sometimes not even that."

    Condemned killer claims innocence 25 years later, R, 23.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2006-12-23T141429Z_01_N22314311_RTRUKOC_0_US-CRIME-ABUJAMAL.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-3

Florida Governor Suspends the Death Penalty

December 16, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK and TERRY AGUAYO

Gov. Jeb Bush yesterday suspended all executions in Florida, citing a troubled execution on Wednesday and appointing a commission to consider the humanity and constitutionality of lethal injections.

Hours later, a federal judge ruled that the lethal injection system in California violated the constitutional prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.

“Today has been the most significant day in the history of the death penalty in America in many years,” said Jamie Fellner, director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch. “These developments show that the current lethal-injection protocols pose an unacceptable risk of cruelty.

“The way states have been killing people for the last 30 years has yielded botched execution after botched execution.”

California has the largest death row in the nation, at about 650. The state has executed 13 people since the United States Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976.

Florida, by contrast, has executed 64 people in the modern era of the death penalty, trailing four states.

The California decision, which followed a four-day evidentiary hearing and a session at the San Quentin prison, was eagerly awaited and probably represents the fullest and most careful consideration yet of whether the way inmates are executed violates the Eight Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Judge Jeremy Fogel of Federal District Court in San Jose delivered a mixed verdict, writing, “Defendants’ implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed.”

The new commission in Florida, which will include doctors, lawyers, scientists and law enforcement officials, will consider many of the same issues, including whether the state protocol satisfies “humanity, constitutional imperative and common sense,” Mr. Bush said in his order.

Deborah W. Denno, an authority on execution at the Fordham University Law School, said Judge Fogel’s decision was “both bold and safe.”

“Judge Fogel’s decision is the most definitive response so far in concluding that a state’s lethal injection protocol, in its current form, is unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment,” Professor Denno said.

Even as Judge Fogel issued a withering critique of the way California executes condemned inmates, he invited the state to submit a revised protocol to remedy the shortcomings. Similarly, Mr. Bush suggested that executions in Florida might resume after his panel gives its final report in March.

Judge Fogel found that prison execution teams had been poorly screened and had included people disciplined for smuggling drugs and with post-traumatic stress disorder. Moreover, the team members are poorly trained and supervised, he said.

Record keeping is spotty, the judge found, and the chemicals used are sometimes improperly prepared. The death chamber, he added, is badly lighted and overcrowded.

“Defendants’ actions and failures to act have resulted in an undue and unnecessary risk of an Eighth Amendment violation,” Judge Fogel wrote. “This is intolerable under the Constitution.”

Judge Fogel also noted concerns about the chemicals that California, Florida and 35 other states use. The protocols vary slightly, but almost all call for a series of three chemicals. The first is a barbiturate to render the inmate unconscious. The second is a paralyzing agent that makes the inmate unable to speak, move or breathe. The third is potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

Both sides in California agreed that it would be unconstitutional to inject a conscious person with either or both of the second two chemicals. The paralyzing agent would leave the inmate conscious while he suffocated, and potassium chloride is extremely painful.

The two sides also agreed that if the first drug was effective, using the others did not violate the constitution.

Judge Fogel suggested a way out. Were inmates executed in the same way that animals were euthanized, solely by an anesthetic, that would, he wrote, “eliminate any constitutional concerns, subject only to the implementation of adequate, verifiable procedures to ensure that the inmate actually receives a fatal dose of the anesthetic.”

Kent Scheidegger, the legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports the death penalty, said the decision was in that sense a welcome one.

“It’s unfortunate that we have another delay,” Mr. Scheidegger said. “But it does appear that there is at least one path to a constitutional procedure.”

Florida started its moratorium two days after Angel N. Diaz’s execution appeared to go awry. Dr. William Hamilton, medical examiner in Alachua County, Fla., said yesterday that the needle with the lethal chemicals that should have gone directly into Mr. Diaz’s veins punctured the veins before entering soft tissue. It took a second dose and 34 minutes for him to die.

    Florida Governor Suspends the Death Penalty, NYT, 16.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/us/16death.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Executions halted in California and Florida

Updated 12/15/2006 6:46 PM ET
AP
USA Today

OCALA, Fla. (AP) — Gov. Jeb Bush suspended all executions in Florida after a medical examiner said Friday that prison officials botched the insertion of the needles when a convicted killer was put to death earlier this week.

Separately, a federal judge in California extended a moratorium on executions in the nation's most populous state, declaring that the state's method of lethal injection violates the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled in San Jose that California's "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed."

In Florida, medical examiner Dr. William Hamilton said Wednesday's execution of Angel Nieves Diaz took 34 minutes — twice as long as usual — and required a rare second dose of lethal chemicals because the needles were inserted clear through his veins and into the flesh in his arms. The chemicals are supposed to go into the veins.

Hamilton, who performed the autopsy, refused to say whether he thought Diaz died a painful death.

"I am going to defer answers about pain and suffering until the autopsy is complete," he said. He said the results were preliminary and other tests may take several weeks.

Bush created a commission to examine the state's lethal injection process in light of Diaz's case, and he halted the signing of any more death warrants until the panel completes its final report by March 1.

The governor said he wants to ensure the process does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, as some death penalty foes argued bitterly after Diaz's execution. Florida has 374 people on death row; it has carried out four executions this year.

Fogel said the California case raised the question of whether the three execution drugs administered by the San Quentin State Prison are so painful that they "offend" the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Fogel said he was compelled "to answer that question in the affirmative."

California has been under a capital punishment moratorium since February, when Fogel called off the execution of rapist and murderer Michael Morales amid concerns that condemned inmates might suffer excruciating deaths.

Fogel found substantial evidence that the last six men executed at San Quentin might have been conscious because they were still breathing when lethal drugs were administered.

Lethal injection is the preferred execution method in 37 states. Last month, a federal judge declared unconstitutional Missouri's injection method, which is similar to California's.

The U.S. Supreme Court has upheld executions — by hanging, firing squad, electric chair and gas chamber — despite the pain they might cause, but has left unsettled the issue of whether the pain is unconstitutionally excessive.

Diaz, 55, was put to death for murdering the manager of a Miami topless bar during a holdup in 1979.

The medical examiner's findings contradicted the explanation given by prison officials, who said Diaz needed the second dose because liver disease caused him to metabolize the lethal drugs more slowly. Hamilton said that although there were records that Diaz had hepatitis, his liver appeared normal.

Executions in Florida normally take no more than about 15 minutes, with the inmate rendered unconscious and motionless within three to five minutes. But Diaz appeared to be moving 24 minutes after the first injection, grimacing, blinking, licking his lips, blowing and appearing to mouth words.

As a result of the chemicals going into Diaz's arms around the elbow, he had an 12-inch chemical burn on his right arm and an 11-inch chemical burn on his left arm, Hamilton said.

Florida Corrections Secretary James McDonough said the execution team did not see any swelling of the arms, which would have been an indication that the chemicals were going into tissues and not veins.

Diaz's attorney, Suzanne Myers Keffler, reacted angrily to the findings.

"This is complete negligence on the part of the state," she said. "When he was still moving after the first shot of chemicals, they should have known there was a problem and they shouldn't have continued. This shows a complete disregard for Mr. Diaz. This is disgusting."

Earlier, in a court hearing in Ocala, she had won an assurance from the attorney general's office that she could have access to all findings and evidence from the autopsy. She withdrew a request for an independent autopsy.

David Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said experts his group had contacted suspected that liver disease was not the explanation for the problem.

"Florida has certainly deservedly earned a reputation for being a state that conducts botched executions, whether its electrocution or lethal injection," Elliot said. "We just think the Florida death penalty system is broken from start to finish."

Florida got rid of the electric chair after two inmates' heads caught fire during executions in the 1990s and another suffered a severe nosebleed in 2000. Lethal injection was portrayed as a more humane and more reliable process.

Twenty people have been executed by lethal injection in Florida since the state switched from the electric chair in 2000.

    Executions halted in California and Florida, UT, 15.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-15-execution-botched_x.htm

Convicted murderer Angel Diaz poses in this undated handout provided by the Florida Department of Corrections.
Florida halted executions on Friday after a medical examiner found that it took a condemned killer 34 minutes to die
from a lethal injection because the needles were inserted improperly.
Needles used in the execution of Diaz on Wednesday punctured through both veins,
allowing the chemicals to leak out, the medical examiner said.
FOR EDITORIAL USE ONLY REUTERS/Florida Department of Corrections/Handout

Lethal injection halted in Calif., Florida        R        15.12.2006
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=
2006-12-16T044441Z_01_N15203754_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-EXECUTION.
xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Lethal injection halted in Calif., Florida

Fri Dec 15, 2006 11:44 PM ET
Reuters
By Adam Tanner

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Botched executions in California and Florida that required more than 30 minutes to kill condemned prisoners prompted a moratorium of the lethal injection procedure in both states on Friday.

Federal Judge Jeremy Fogel found California's method of execution unconstitutional, concluding its "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed."

The decision follows the state's 2005 execution in which guards failed to connect a back-up intravenous line to Stanley "Tookie" Williams, the former Crips gang leader who garnered global publicity after writing anti-gang books.

Then on Wednesday Florida executioners botched the insertion of needles into condemned killer Angel Diaz, which meant lethal chemicals did not go directly into his veins, according to the state's medical examiner.

Florida's incoming governor, Charlie Crist, responded on Friday by saying he would halt executions until a commission investigated the state's procedures.

Death penalty opponents have for years argued that lethal injection is cruel and unusual punishment barred by the U.S. Constitution, but only such recent instances have given legal and political traction to their arguments.

"When properly administered, lethal injection results in a death that is far kinder than that suffered by the victims of capital crimes," said Fogel, who earlier this year visited the death chamber at San Quentin State Prison north of San Francisco.

"At the present time, however, defendants' implementation of California's lethal-injection protocol lacks both reliability and transparency," he wrote.

"In light of the substantial questions raised by the records of previous executions, defendants' actions and failures to act have resulted in an undue and unnecessary risk of an Eighth Amendment violation. This is intolerable under the Constitution."

Lethal injection is used in 37 U.S. states, but legal challenges have delayed such executions this year in not only California and Florida, the first and fourth most populous states, but several others including New Jersey and Ohio.

The United States has executed 53 people in 2006, a 10-year low, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

THREE-DRUG DOSE

California has long executed its worst criminals. Its famous San Quentin prison hanged the condemned starting in 1893; the state turned to lethal gas in 1938. It turned to lethal injection in 1994 after a federal judge found gassing cruel and unusual.

Florida lawmakers voted to switch to lethal injection in 2000 after a series of bungled executions using the state's electric chair, including one where flames shot from a prisoner's head.

Executioners now typically attach two intravenous lines to condemned U.S. inmates, one tube acting as a backup to assure a continuous flow of the three chemicals that anesthetize, paralyze and then kill.

In the Williams execution, prison guards struggled for 25 minutes to insert the intravenous lines and it took another 10 minutes for the lethal drugs to take effect, said Barbara Becnel, a witness to the execution and co-author of Williams' anti-gang books.

Journalists at several recent California executions have seen guards struggle to insert the IV lines to the condemned killer.

Witnesses in Florida this week said Diaz appeared to grimace and gasp for breath in what was supposed to be a quick but painless procedure. Prison officials had to give Diaz the drugs twice and it took him 34 minutes to die from the start of the execution.

"The court I think correctly recognized that there are severe flaws in the system," said Richard Steinken, a Chicago attorney who has worked with Death Row inmate Michael Morales, whose case sparked Judge Fogel's decision on Friday. "Whether it can be fixed remains to be seen."

(Additional reporting by Jim Christie in San Francisco and by Michael Peltier in Tallahassee, Florida)

    Lethal injection halted in Calif., Florida, R, 15.12.2006, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=newsOne&storyID=2006-12-16T044441Z_01_N15203754_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-EXECUTION.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C1-TopStories-newsOne-2

Florida executioner botched needle insertion, autopsy shows

Updated 12/15/2006 4:15 PM ET
AP
USA Today

OCALA, Fla. (AP) — The execution of a convicted killer took 34 minutes — twice as long as normal — because officials botched the insertion of the needles that delivered the lethal chemicals, a medical examiner said Friday.

Gov. Jeb Bush responded to the findings by halting the signing of more death warrants until a commission he created to examine the state's lethal injection process completes its final report by March 1.

Dr. William Hamilton, who performed the autopsy, said the needles pierced Angel Nieves Diaz's veins and then went into soft tissue in his arms. The lethal chemicals are supposed to go directly into the veins.

Hamilton refused to say whether he thought Diaz died a painful death.

"I am going to defer answers about pain and suffering until the autopsy is complete," he said. He said the results were preliminary and toxicology tests and other tests may take several weeks.

Diaz, 55, was put to death Wednesday for murdering of the manager of a Miami topless bar during a holdup in 1979. The condemned man not only took 34 minutes to die, but also needed a rare second dose of the lethal chemicals.

The medical examiner's findings contradicted the explanation given by prison officials, who said Diaz needed the second dose because liver disease caused him to metabolize the lethal drugs more slowly.

Hamilton said that although there were records that Diaz had hepatitis, his liver appeared normal.

In halting the signing of any more death warrants, the governor said he wants to ensure the process does not constitute cruel and unusual punishment, as some death penalty foes argued bitterly after Wednesday's execution.

Executions in Florida normally take no more than about 15 minutes, with the inmate rendered unconscious and motionless within three to five minutes. But Diaz appeared to be moving 24 minutes after the first injection, grimacing, blinking, licking his lips, blowing and appearing to mouth words.

As a result of the chemicals going into Diaz's arms around the elbow, he had an 12-inch chemical burn on his right arm and an 11-inch chemical burn on his left arm, Hamilton said.

Florida Corrections Secretary James McDonough said the execution team did not see any swelling of the arms, which would have been an indication that the chemicals were going into tissues and not veins.

David Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said experts his group had contacted suspected that liver disease was not the explanation for the problem.

"Florida has certainly deservedly earned a reputation for being a state that conducts botched executions, whether its electrocution or lethal injection," Elliot said. "We just think the Florida death penalty system is broken from start to finish."

As a result of the chemicals going into his arms, around the elbow, he had an 12-inch chemical burn on his right arm and an 11-inch chemical burn on his left arm, Hamilton said.

Florida Corrections Secretary James McDonough said the execution team did not see any swelling of the arms, which would have been an indication that the chemicals were going into tissues and not veins.

Hamilton also said that although there were records that Diaz had hepatitis, his liver appeared normal. State corrections officials said after Wednesday's execution that Diaz had liver disease, which caused him to metabolize the lethal drugs more slowly.

Gov. Jeb Bush's office said he learned of the medical examiner's preliminary findings and has since ordered the creation of a commission to review the way lethal injection is administered in Florida.

David Elliot, spokesman for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said experts his group had contacted suspected that liver disease was not the explanation for the problem.

"Florida has certainly deservedly earned a reputation for being a state that conducts botched executions, whether its electrocution or lethal injection," Elliot said. "We just think the Florida death penalty system is broken from start to finish."

Copyright 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

    Florida executioner botched needle insertion, autopsy shows, UT, 15.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-15-execution-botched_x.htm

Political Drama Re-enacts Moments in a Death Chamber

December 14, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

BERKELEY, Calif., Dec. 13 — As drama, what happened on stage at the Black Repertory Theater of Berkeley early Wednesday morning was not classic theatrical fare. The actors were mostly motionless, the play had only one line, and everyone in the audience knew how the story was going to end.

But creating a compelling narrative may not have been the authors’ point. The play was a re-enactment of the execution of the convicted killer Stanley Tookie Williams, staged on the first anniversary of his death by lethal injection at San Quentin State Prison.

The performance was written and produced by Barbara Becnel and Shirley Neal, two friends of Mr. Williams and death penalty opponents, who were unapologetic about their play’s being agitprop.

“This is political theater in the extreme,” Ms. Becnel told a crowd of about 150 people who gathered to watch the performance. “But it’s political theater in the extreme because we need it.”

The execution of Mr. Williams, 51, a founder of the Crips gang who was convicted of murdering four people in 1979, has continued to be a rallying point for death penalty opponents as well as a source of contention about the methods of lethal injection.

In September, a representative of the state attorney general’s office acknowledged that prison guards and nurses had botched Mr. Williams’s lethal injection, failing to hook up a backup intravenous line to his arm. Ms. Becnel said Mr. Williams was in agony during his execution, which took 35 minutes to complete.

“I was there, I saw what they did,” Ms. Becnel said. “And I can tell you it was a 35-minute torture-murder.”

State officials deny that Mr. Williams suffered unnecessarily. “The execution went exactly as the protocol is designed to carry it out,” said Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer. “The lack of the extra IV line was definitely a mistake, but it didn’t affect the execution.”

Michael Rushford, president of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, an advocate for victims’ rights and law enforcement, said he believed Mr. Williams was a bad role model for a play.

“I think it hurts the anti-death-penalty movement to hold up as dastardly a criminal as Tookie,” Mr. Rushford said, citing Mr. Williams’s work with the Crips, a violent gang based in Los Angeles.

Mr. Rushford added that Wednesday morning’s performance was simply “preaching to the choir” of Mr. Williams’s supporters, many of whom rallied in front of San Quentin the night of his execution.

“I don’t expect an accurate portrayal of what happened,” he said. “But when you’ve made such a big deal of it, you can’t just let it drop after a year.”

Mr. Williams’s experiences in the death chamber were part of a Federal District Court hearing in September — stemming from a lawsuit by Michael Morales, a condemned rapist and killer — that may affect death penalty methodology in California. The judge overseeing the hearings, Jeremy Fogel, effectively halted executions in California until he could hear arguments on whether methods of lethal injection caused undue pain. Judge Fogel is expected to issue a ruling soon.

For supporters of Mr. Williams, his execution, which drew international press attention and a cadre of celebrity protesters, was unjust, in part because of his post-incarceration work speaking about the dangers of gangs through a series of children’s books, lectures and memoirs, many of which were written with Ms. Becnel. Mr. Williams also claimed to be innocent.

On Wednesday, the theatrical re-enactment began at 12:01 a.m., the time Mr. Williams entered the death chamber. It was performed by six actors, including Darby Tillis, 64, an exonerated death row inmate from Chicago who played Mr. Williams and said he had little trouble connecting with the role.

“When you’re on death row, you always have an imaginary scene that you live out many times: how you would feel if you went down for an execution,” Mr. Tillis said.

With a simple set — folding chairs, a gurney and a platform — the play’s action was minimal: three witnesses stood, a guard strapped Mr. Tillis to a gurney, a nurse fumbled with an IV. Only once did anyone speak, when Mr. Tillis asked the actor playing the frustrated nurse whether she knew what she was doing. The entire performance took about 12 minutes — about a third of the actual execution time.

And while the audience was silent throughout, some said the experience had left them shaken. Kirya Traber, 22, who wore a Save Tookie T-shirt, said she had been outside San Quentin the year before, but felt a lot closer to the drama on Wednesday.

“Here tonight,” Ms. Traber said, “was a lot more solemn.”

    Political Drama Re-enacts Moments in a Death Chamber, NYT, 14.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/14/us/14tookie.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Study: Fewer inmates on death row in '05

Posted 12/10/2006 12:30 AM ET
AP
USA Today

WASHINGTON (AP) — Fewer prison inmates were moved to death row in 2005, according to a federal study that shows one more person was executed than in the year before.

Four states — California, Texas, Florida and Pennsylvania — held half of the 3,254 inmates awaiting execution at the end of 2005, the study by the Bureau of Justice Statistics showed. There were 37 death row inmates in federal prisons at that time.

Sixteen states executed 60 prisoners last year, one more inmate than in 2004

Overall, however, the number of inmates on death row on Dec. 31, 2005, or the number of inmates moved there during the year dipped.

Among the findings by the Justice Department agency:

•128 inmates were moved to death row in 2005, the third consecutive year with a decline in year-long totals. It was the lowest number of prisoners put on death row since 1973.

•Sixty-six fewer inmates were on death row at the end of 2005 than in 2004. That was a decrease for the fifth straight year and about a 10% drop since Dec. 31, 2000, when there were 3,601 death row prisoners nationwide.

The Justice Department data, the most recent available, confirmed similar trends over the past five years as identified by Amnesty International USA, which opposes the death penalty.

Sue Gunawardena-Vaughn, director of the group's Program to Abolish the Death Penalty, said the drop in part reflects the public's squeamishness in approving executions for people who ultimately may be found innocent.

Since 1973, when watchdog groups began keeping track, 123 death row inmates have been cleared of crimes that had earned them death sentences.

Juries "don't want to be culpable for possibly putting an innocent person to death," Gunawardena-Vaughn said.

Moreover, because of lengthy trials and inevitable years of appeals in capital murder cases, the death penalty is expensive and "dilutes very, very crucial resources — many of which could be put toward more policing or mental health programs," she said.

As of the beginning of this month, 52 inmates have been executed so far in 2006, according to data provided by the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Center.

Thirty-eight states and the federal government allow juries to consider the death penalty in the most heinous criminal cases. All states except Nebraska allow lethal injection in executions. Inmates in Nebraska and eight other states can be electrocuted. Additionally, three states allow death by hanging, another three by firing squad and four by lethal gas.

At the end of last year, 56% of death row inmates were white and 42% were black, the Justice Department study reported. Women accounted for 2% of those people facing execution.

    Study: Fewer inmates on death row in '05, UT, 10.12.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-12-10-death-row_x.htm

A Growing Plea for Mercy for the Mentally Ill on Death Row

November 23, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

LIVINGSTON, Tex. — Scott Louis Panetti says he was drowned and electrocuted as a child and that he was recently stabbed in the eye in his death row cell by the devil. Mr. Panetti says he has wounds that were inflicted by demons and healed by President John F. Kennedy.

“The devil has been trying to rub me out to keep me from preaching,” Mr. Panetti, explaining why he faces execution, said in an interview from behind thick glass in the Polunsky Unit here in East Texas, where condemned prisoners are held before transfer to the death house 45 miles west in Huntsville.

Despite Mr. Panetti’s obvious mental illness — he was a mental patient long before he gunned down his in-laws in 1992 — he served as his own lawyer at his murder trial, throwing the courtroom into chaos with frequent gibberish. Now the hyperactive and gangling Mr. Panetti, 48, has become an illustration of the growing quandary over the application of a 1986 Supreme Court decision barring execution of the insane.

The ruling appears to be limited to those without the capacity to understand that they are about to be put to death and why. Whether Mr. Panetti fits that definition is a matter of dispute.

In an appeal to the Supreme Court that could affect the cases of other mentally ill prisoners awaiting execution, Mr. Panetti’s lawyers argue that while he has a “factual awareness” of his execution, he has a “delusional belief” that it is unconnected to his crime, and that he should therefore be spared lethal injection.

The case of another mentally ill death row inmate, Guy T. LeGrande, who represented himself and is scheduled to die Dec. 1 in Raleigh, N.C., is going through its final state appeals, with his lawyers arguing that he, too, is delusional, and that he hastened his execution by abandoning his defense.

Charged in the contract killing of a woman whose husband pleaded guilty to plotting the murder and is serving life, Mr. LeGrande, 47, says he is innocent and was framed. He appeared in court in 1996 in a Superman T-shirt, cursed the jurors as “Antichrists” and taunted them, “Pull the switch and let the good times roll.” They took less than an hour to sentence him to death.

Experts and advocates in the field say the issue of executing the mentally ill is the next frontier in death penalty law.

“This is an emerging issue,” said Richard C. Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research institute in Washington that opposes capital punishment.

Mr. Dieter cited the Panetti and LeGrande cases as gray areas in which “the death penalty may be extreme punishment given their reduced culpability.”

Franklin E. Zimring, a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley, and author of “The Contradictions of American Capital Punishment” (Oxford University Press, 2003), said there was something “indigestible” about these cases.

“We assume people don’t want to die,” Mr. Zimring said. “But these are defendants that call the legal system’s bluff.”

Concern over execution of the mentally disabled prompted the American Bar Association last August to join a widening chorus of professionals calling for a halt to death sentences and executions for defendants with severe mental disorders that “significantly impaired” their rational judgment or capacity to appreciate the wrongfulness of their conduct. The moratorium was endorsed earlier by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Psychological Association and the National Alliance on Mental Illness.

The groups also opposed death sentences for prisoners with mental disorders that impaired their ability to assist their lawyers and make rational decisions on their appeals. The Supreme Court has already barred execution for the mentally retarded and for juveniles.

“An increasing percentage of people executed are people giving up their appeals,” said Ronald J. Tabak, a lawyer at the firm Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom in Manhattan and a specialist in capital cases who led the bar association’s death penalty task force. “And of these, a significant percentage have serious mental illness.”

The Supreme Court’s 1986 ruling, on a Florida case, Ford v. Wainwright, left much unclear. Although no state permitted execution of the insane, the justices affirmed that the Eighth Amendment against cruel and unusual punishment prohibited it. But they did not provide a standard for determining when someone was competent enough to be executed.

In a concurring opinion later adopted as law by lower courts, Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. said it was enough “if the defendant perceives the connection between his crime and the punishment.” Justice Powell also said that the Constitution “forbids the execution only of those who are unaware of the punishment they are about to suffer and why they are to suffer it.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found that Mr. Panetti had the requisite legal awareness. And the Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, has argued that the execution, as yet unscheduled after having been postponed in 2004, should proceed.

There is no dispute that Mr. Panetti is “profoundly mentally ill,” his lawyers Gregory W. Wiercioch, Keith S. Hampton and Michael C. Gross said in a petition seeking to overturn the Fifth Circuit ruling. In the decade before the murders, they said, he was hospitalized 14 times in six institutions for schizophrenia, manic depression, auditory hallucinations and delusions of persecution. Believing the devil was in his furniture, he buried it in the backyard, and thinking the devil was in the walls, he hallucinated that they were running with blood.

On Sept. 8, 1992, Mr. Panetti, dressed in military fatigues and carrying a sawed-off shotgun, a rifle and knives, invaded the Fredericksburg home where his estranged wife, Sonja Alvarado, had taken refuge with her parents, Joe and Amanda Alvarado. In front of his wife and their 3-year-old daughter, known as Birdie, he shot the Alvarados to death and took his wife and daughter captive before releasing them unharmed and surrendering.

In 1994, a first jury deadlocked on his mental competency, but a second found him able to stand trial.

Waiving legal counsel, Mr. Panetti represented himself, appearing in court in cowboy garb and seeking to subpoena Jesus before deciding “he doesn’t need a subpoena — he’s right here with me.” He attributed the killings to an alter ego named Sarge Ironhorse and, testifying in Sarge’s voice after calling himself as a witness, recounted the killings:

“Sarge is gone. No more Sarge. Sonja and Birdie. Birdie and Sonja. Joe, Amanda lying kitchen, here, there blood. No, leave. Scott, remember exactly what Sarge did. Shot the lock. Walked in the kitchen. Sonja, where’s Birdie? Sonja here. Joe, bayonet, door, Amanda. Boom, boom, blood, blood. Demons. Ha, ha, ha, ha, oh, lord, oh, you.”

When Judge Stephen B. Ables tried to cut him off, Mr. Panetti said, “You puppet.”

Mr. Panetti does appear to have moments of lucidity, and these disconcerted the juries at his competency hearing and trial, planting suspicions that he might have been faking.

“Not to make excuses,” he said in the death row interview, “but when someone’s insane, they’re insane.”

Psychiatrists testified that schizophrenic patients often spoke intelligently.

Asked in the interview if he understood he was on death row for crimes he committed, Mr. Panetti said: “Certainly not. They are in a strong delusionment. They’ll be undeceived by delusionment.”

    A Growing Plea for Mercy for the Mentally Ill on Death Row, NYT, 23.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/us/23execute.html

Court Rules for Kentucky on Executions

November 23, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

While conceding that the chemicals used to execute death row inmates in Kentucky might cause needless pain, the state’s Supreme Court ruled yesterday that using them did not violate the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.

“Conflicting medical testimony prevents us from stating categorically that a prisoner feels no pain,” Justice Donald C. Wintersheimer wrote for the unanimous court. “The prohibition is against cruel and unusual punishment and does not require a complete absence of pain.”

The lawyers for the two inmates who brought the challenge, like lawyers in scores of other cases around the country, had presented evidence that the three chemicals used in lethal injections had the potential to produce excruciating pain.

Thirty-seven states and the federal government execute condemned prisoners by injection. A federal judge in California will soon decide a challenge to that state’s lethal injection protocol, and Deborah W. Denno, a Fordham law professor and expert on execution methods, said similar litigation was pending in nearly all those states.

The states’ protocols vary slightly, but almost all call for a series of three chemicals. The first is a barbiturate meant to render the inmate unconscious. The second is a paralyzing agent that makes the inmate unable to speak, move or breathe. The third is potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

Veterinarians, by contrast, use a single large dose of barbiturate to euthanize animals.

Lawyers for the Kentucky inmates, Ralph Baze and Thomas C. Bowling, relied on interpretation of autopsy records from the last execution in the state, that of Edward L. Harper in 1999. The lawyers said the drug meant to make Mr. Harper unconscious had not worked, meaning the two other drugs had subjected him first to smothering and then to searing pain while he was awake but unable to cry out.

But the justices’ decision yesterday said Corrections Department personnel present at Mr. Harper’s execution disputed that he had suffered.

“Harper went to sleep within 15 seconds to one minute from the moment that the warden began the execution,” Justice Wintersheimer wrote, “and never moved or exhibited any pain whatsoever subsequent to losing consciousness.”

Professor Denno, who testified on behalf of the inmates, said the court’s opinion was flawed. She said it did cite the correct constitutional standard, which bars punishments that create a substantial risk of wanton and unnecessary infliction of pain. But because the decision, in an apparent allusion to veterinary euthanasia, acknowledged that “there are other drugs which may further assure the condemned person feels no pain,” the court’s own reasoning should have required a contrary ruling, she said.

In a statement, Attorney General Greg D. Stumbo said he was pleased that the executions could now proceed.

“We have moved the process forward,” Mr. Stumbo said, “and at the appropriate time will seek a warrant for execution from the governor.”

David M. Barron, a lawyer for the inmates, said the justices had failed to address his clients’ claims in detail. He said he would seek reconsideration and, if necessary, review by the United States Supreme Court.

    Court Rules for Kentucky on Executions, NYT, 23.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/23/us/23kentucky.html

Ky. Court Upholds Lethal Injection

November 22, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 3:00 p.m. ET
The New York Times

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) -- Kentucky's lethal injection method is constitutional, the state Supreme Court said in a ruling Wednesday that could clear the way for executions to resume.

Kentucky death row inmates Thomas Clyde Bowling, 52, and Ralph Baze, 49, challenged the state's method of execution in 2004, saying the drug formula causes inmates to feel pain and is therefore cruel and unusual punishment.

The state has not declared a moratorium on executions but had not scheduled any since the lawsuit was filed. Bowling and Baze have received several stays of execution because of the court challenge.

''We have moved the process forward and, at the appropriate time, will seek a warrant for execution from the Governor,'' Kentucky Attorney General Greg Stumbo said in a news release Wednesday.

Affirming a lower court ruling issued after a lengthy trial last year, the Supreme Court said the judge in that case made no errors.

''It is not the role of this Court to investigate the political, moral, ethical, religious or personal views of those on each side of this issue. ... We are limited in deciding only whether the method defined by the Legislature and signed into law by the Executive, survives constitutional review,'' Justice Donald C. Wintersheimer wrote in the unanimous opinion, issued from Frankfort.

David Barron, the public defender for both Bowling and Baze, called the ruling disappointing, but said other inmates' challenges to lethal injection are pending. Barron said he will ask the high court for a rehearing and appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.

Bowling was sentenced to be executed for killing Edward and Tina Earley and shooting their 2-year-old son outside the couple's Lexington dry-cleaning business in 1990.

Baze was convicted of killing Powell County Sheriff Steve Bennett and Deputy Arthur Briscoe during an attempted arrest in 1992.

Kentucky, like many states, uses a four-drug combination that includes Valium, which is designed to relax the inmate; sodium thiopental, which is designed to render the inmate unconscious; and pancuronium bromide, also known as Pavulon, which paralyzes the inmate. The final drug injected, potassium chloride, causes a heart attack.

Kentucky, which has 39 death-row inmates, has executed two men since reinstating the death penalty in 1976, and only one by injection: Eddie Lee Harper, in 1999. Injection is the only method of execution used on inmates who have been condemned since 1998; those sentenced to death earlier can choose electrocution.

    Ky. Court Upholds Lethal Injection, NYT, 22.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Lethal-Injection-Kentucky.html

Texas Inmates Protest Conditions With Hunger Strikes

November 8, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Nov. 7 — Likening themselves to prisoners at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, a dozen inmates on death row in Texas have staged hunger strikes over the last month to protest what they call abusive conditions, including 23 hours a day of isolation in their cells.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice said that the first inmates began refusing food Oct. 8 and that two were still on hunger strikes in the Polunsky prison unit in Livingston, about 45 miles east of the execution unit in Huntsville. The Polunsky Unit houses death-row inmates until their executions. As of Tuesday, one inmate had missed 35 consecutive meals and one 17 meals, but no one has yet been force-fed, said a department spokeswoman, Michelle Lyons.

Two other prisoners who had not eaten since Oct. 8 began taking food Oct. 27 and Nov. 4, Ms. Lyons said, and others abandoned their protests after a short time.

But Vickie McCuistion, program coordinator of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, said some inmates had been reported as eating when they were still refusing food. Ms. Lyons said that a prisoner needed to miss nine meals to be considered on hunger strike and that some who had refused meals had eaten snacks at visiting sessions.

“Either conditions will improve, or we will starve to death,” vowed one of the first hunger strikers, Steven Woods, in an Internet posting put up by groups opposed to the death penalty. Since death row was moved from an older and more open facility in 2000, he said, “We lost all our group recreation, art programs, and supplies” in addition to “work programs, televisions and religious services.”

Because the inmates are not allowed to have contact visits, “the only physical contact we’ll get until they kill us is when the C.O.’s hold our restrained arms while escorting us,” he wrote, referring to corrections officers.

The protests are the latest disruptions at the nation’s busiest execution complex, where 23 inmates have been put to death by lethal injection so far this year and another is scheduled to die Wednesday. Although California leads the nation in prisoners on death row, Texas executes them far more frequently, with 378 put to death since capital punishment was reintroduced in 1982. Virginia is second with 97.

Prison officials say the harsher conditions on death row came in response to a notorious escape in 1998 and a move to the more secure Polunsky Unit. Ms. Lyons said Mr. Woods had refused meals the longest but began eating again on Saturday.

Mr. Woods, 26, was convicted with a co-defendant of killing a man and woman in a robbery north of Dallas in 2001.

The hunger strikes in the Polunsky Unit were already under way when Michael D. Johnson, a 29-year-old convicted killer protesting his innocence, used a razor blade to slash a vein and an artery on Oct. 20, committing suicide in his cell hours before his scheduled execution for the murder of a convenience store clerk. He used his blood to scrawl a message on the wall: “I didn’t shoot him.”

John Moriarty, the inspector general for the prison system, said an inquiry was continuing into how Mr. Johnson had secreted the blade and used it in the 15 minutes between checks by officers on “death watch.”

The longest-striking inmate still refusing food, Ms. Lyons said, is William M. Mason, 52, who was convicted of murdering his wife and dumping her body in the San Jacinto River after he complained that she had played the radio too loud. After refusing 35 meals over 17 days, Ms. Lyons said, Mr. Mason has lost 20 pounds and now weighs 239.

Also on a hunger strike, Ms. Lyons said, was Larry Estrada, 27, who was convicted with a co-defendant of killing a Houston convenience store clerk and shooting another during a robbery in 1997. Mr. Estrada has refused 17 meals over a week, she said. But she said neither inmate was at the point of needing to be force-fed, a determination made by doctors from the University of Texas Medical Branch.

Mary Felts, a civil lawyer in Austin who helps the inmates with wills and other personal legal services, said she found many of the complaints valid. “Sensory deprivation is the worst kind of abuse,” Ms. Felts said. “If I were the warden I’d want the men to have TVs; the women have TVs. It would cut down on mischief.”

Ms. Lyons, the prisons spokeswoman, said that while television sets could alleviate the monotony of solitary confinement, there was no place to hang the sets outside the cells where the men could see them. The old Ellis Unit, where death row was housed from 1965 to 1999, had a wall opposite the cells where the sets could be installed.

“It’s not something we’ve made a priority,” she added. “We have not sought funding, and not many taxpayers would approve.” Prison activists say the state has rejected offers of donated sets.

Ms. Lyons also said the inmates “have not made any formal request” to have grievances heard, “so there’s no formal response.”

Most of what officials know about the complaints, she said, “we’ve gleaned from the antideath-penalty postings.”

    Texas Inmates Protest Conditions With Hunger Strikes, NYT, 8.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/08/us/08prison.html

Despite Flawed Defense, a Death Sentence Stands

November 2, 2006
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

Defense lawyers in capital cases are often criticized for conducting superficial investigations of their clients’ backgrounds, but Ferdinand Radolovich’s performance in a Kentucky case, one that ended in a death sentence, may have set a new standard.

“Apparently,” a federal judge wrote in 2001, “neither attorney Radolovich nor the prosecution knew of petitioner’s actual identity until his case had been affirmed on appeal.”

When he was later challenged about the quality of his work on the case, Mr. Radolovich testified that he was an accomplished death penalty lawyer at the time, having tried four capital cases. The real number was zero, the federal judge, Jennifer B. Coffman, found, and Mr. Radolovich has been indicted for perjury for his statement.

But none of this has helped the inmate in question, who was sent to death row as James Slaughter but whose real name is Jeffrey Leonard.

Yesterday in Cincinnati, splitting 7 to 7, the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit declined to rehear the case. A dissenting judge, R. Guy Cole Jr., said the decision to allow Mr. Leonard to be executed even though the jury did not even know his real name, much less his background, opens a “new chapter in our death penalty history.”

The case is not one of mistaken identity, and there is substantial evidence that Mr. Leonard is guilty of murder. But Mr. Leonard’s current lawyers say a competent investigation of his background would have yielded a trove of evidence that might well have persuaded the jury to spare his life. He is, for instance, apparently brain damaged, and he endured a brutal childhood.

In June, the federal appeals court’s three-judge panel agreed that Mr. Radolovich’s performance was so bad that it violated the Constitution. But the two judges in the majority ruled against Mr. Leonard anyway, saying that better legal work would not have caused the jury to sentence him to life in prison instead of death.

Mr. Leonard, as James Slaughter, was sent to death row in 1983 for the stabbing death that year of Esther Stewart at a Louisville consignment store she owned.

In an interview yesterday, Mr. Radolovich defended his work.

“Mr. Slaughter admitted that he had lied to me, that he had given me a false name, a false date of birth, a false Social Security number.” Mr. Radolovich said. “He told me he had no living relatives. Where was I supposed to go? What was I supposed to do?”

He added that the perjury charge, to which he has pleaded not guilty, was a result of a misunderstanding. While he acknowledged that the Leonard case was his first capital trial, he said that his testimony, at a 1994 state court hearing on Mr. Leonard’s motion to vacate his conviction, meant to refer to experience he gained after the trial.

Judge Coffman, of Federal District Court in Lexington, Ky., wrote that Mr. Radolovich’s investigation was inadequate.

“Petitioner could not even correctly spell the name, Slaughter, which he misspelled phonetically as being ‘Slawter,’ ” Judge Coffman wrote. “This fact alone would cause the effective attorney to wonder about the veracity of his client’s background information.”

In yesterday’s dissent, Judge Cole listed some of the information that Mr. Radolovich had failed to locate. Mr. Leonard “has possible brain damage from an untreated childhood skull fracture.” His mother and stepfather “beat him so badly as a child that scars remain all over his body.” His stepfather “once fired a gun at him as he ran out of his home carrying his younger brother.” And “his mother, brothers and grandparents (who did not know about the trial) would have testified on his behalf.”

The judges who declined to rehear the case yesterday did not give reasons. In the panel decision in June, the two judges in the majority said that “we do not find it reasonably probable that the outcome of Slaughter’s sentencing would have been different if Radolovich had unearthed” the additional information.

Judge Cole, dissenting yesterday, said that was speculation.

“Although we cannot be absolutely certain,” Judge Cole wrote, “that a single juror sentencing Jeffrey Leonard — a brain-damaged man whose family would corroborate his testimony and plead for his life — would come to a different conclusion, this court’s decision leaves one aspect of this case indisputable: We will never know.”

Judge Cole noted that one juror in the 1983 trial, in a sworn statement, said she would have voted to spare Mr. Leonard’s life had she known more about him.

Kathleen K. Schmidt, a lawyer for Mr. Leonard, said she would ask the United States Supreme Court to hear the case.

Mr. Radolovich said he had mixed sentiments about yesterday’s decision. “I’m heartsick that James went to death row,” Mr. Radolovich said. “But after he told me he did it and after he lied to me, I’m a little less sympathetic.”

    Despite Flawed Defense, a Death Sentence Stands, NYT, 2.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/02/us/02death.html