CJ stories you usually do not see in the news ...

Wow, good thing I follow the right people and organizations on Facebook, or else I might have missed these important stories, just as most media organizations usually do.

First, check out this amazing series from PBS titled, "Guilty and Charged" about class bias in the US criminal justice system.

It includes many great stories including this one:

The proliferation of court fees has prompted some states, like New Jersey, to use amnesty programs to encourage the thousands of people who owe fines to surrender in exchange for fee reductions. At the Fugitive Safe Surrender program, makeshift courtrooms allow judges to individually handle each case. hide caption

itoggle captionNicole Beemsterboer/NPR

As Court Fees Rise, The Poor Are Paying The Price

An NPR investigation has found an explosion in the use of fees charged to criminal defendants across the country, which has created a system of justice that targets the poor.

 

Then there is this great story from the National Journal titled, "Treating Prisonsers with Dignity can Reduce Crime." This story notes a recent report from the National Academy of Sciences that notes that countries which humanize prisons actually have more effective prisons! You don't see stories like that in the mainstream news.

 

Finally, there are these stories about states that are so desperate to keep their executions going that they are having to turn back to historically flawed methods like the electric chair and firing squad.

 

 

 

 

Botched execution in the news

Botched executions are nothing new. See?

And then, last night, in Oklahoma, we saw this (from the Death Penalty Information Center):

BREAKING NEWS: (4/29). The first of two planned executions in Oklahoma tonight was botched, with the inmate, Clayton Lockett, dying of a heart attack. Lockett sat up and uttered words, even as the execution was going forward. The second execution of Charles Warner was called off. Oklahoma was trying a new execution protocol for the first time. It had refused to reveal the source of the drugs or the names of those involved.

Why did this happen? Here are the basic facts:

* The Constitutionality of lethal injection in Oklahoma, like in other states, is being challenged on the basis of allegedly causing pain to inmates
* Painful and lingering deaths are considered a violation of the Eighth Amendment to the US Constitution, according to the US Supreme Court
* States are thus changing their execution protocols, including which drugs they use to put inmates to death and where they get the drugs
* In Oklahoma, the process was kept secret
* Inmates challenged the process
* An Oklahoma court declared a stay in these two executions for this reason
* Oklahoma's governor said she was going to make sure they were killed anyway, in spite of the court order
* The court lifted the stay

And the rest is history. More of our sordid death penalty history, that is.

According to the Associated Press:

Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of the state's new three-drug lethal injection combination was administered. Three minutes later, though, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.

The blinds were eventually lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching what was happening in the death chamber, and the state's top prison official eventually called a halt to the proceedings. Lockett died of a heart attack a short time later, the Department of Corrections said.

Now, let's be clear. We're not talking about a nice guy here. From the AP:

A four-time felon, Lockett was convicted of shooting 19-year-old Stephanie Neiman with a sawed-off shotgun and watching as two accomplices buried her alive in rural Kay County in 1999 after Neiman and a friend arrived at a home the men were robbing.

Regardless, to be put to death, the practice has to be Constitutional. And right now, it is not.

Incredibly, another inmate in Oklahoma was supposed to be executed the same night. But his execution was stayed for 14 days after this mess. What was he convicted of?

According to the AP: 

Warner had been scheduled to be put to death two hours later in the same room and on the same gurney. The 46-year-old was convicted of raping and killing his roommate's 11-month-old daughter in 1997. He has maintained his innocence.

See that last part? Don't think it's possible?

Consider this then:

On April 28 a study published in the prestigous Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences indicated that far more innocent people have been sentenced to death than those found through the legal process. According to the study, many innocent defendants are probably not being identified because they were taken off death row and given a lesser sentence. The rate of exonerations for those sentenced to death would be over twice as high if all cases were given the heightened scrutiny often accorded to those who remain on death row. The authors of "The Rate of False Conviction of Criminal Defendants Who are Sentenced to Death" concluded: "[A] conservative estimate of the proportion of erroneous convictions of defendants sentenced to death in the United States from 1973 through 2004 [is] 4.1%." The percentage of death row inmates who were actually exonerated during the time of the study was only 1.6%. Professor Samuel Gross (pictured) of the University of Michigan Law School, one of the authors of the study, pointed to the gravity of the problem: “Since 1973, nearly 8,500 defendants have been sentenced to death in the United States, and 138 of them have been exonerated. Our study means that more than 200 additional innocent defendants have been sentenced to death in that period. Most of these undiscovered innocent capital defendants have been resentenced to life in prison, and then forgotten.”

Are you tired of this process yet?

Important news on two major criminal justice policy arenas

First, the drug war is slowly but surely being dismantled, ending, whatever.

For example, see this.

The Smarter Sentencing Act is the biggest overhaul in federal drug sentencing in decades. It would:

• Cut federal mandatory minimums for drug law violations, so that nonviolent offenders serve less time behind bars.
• Make the reform to the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity that Congress passed in 2010 retroactive, so that thousands of people sentenced under the old draconian and racially unjust policy can leave prison early.
• Expand the ability of judges to use their own discretion when sentencing defendants, so that judges can consider the unique facts of each case and each individual before them.

Second, states are very desperate, in the face of evidence that lethal injection has serious consequences, to maintain the death penalty, even if it means turning back to old (and seriously flawed execution methods).

Hanging anyone?

Firing squad?

Electrocution?

Wow, all this is happening now, in our lifetime.

Experimental execution in the news

We live in an era where, in spite of overwhelming evidence that the death penalty is unnecessary to reduce crime, ineffective at providing justice, and fundamentally flawed because it is racially biased and a serious threat to the innocent, some states continue to cling to it. This is true, in spite of the national (and international) move away from capital punishment.

Facing shortages of lethal injection drugs, as well as serious legal challenges to the Constitutionality of the traditional three-drug protocol used to kill death row inmates, states are beginning to experiment--yes, EXPERIMENT--with new methods of death (as in by trying them out on living human beings).

Here is one witnesses description of a recent experimental execution in Ohio:

_____________________

At about 10.31am, his stomach swelled up in an unusual way, as though he had a hernia or something like that. Between 10.33am and 10.44am – I could see a clock on the wall of the death house – he struggled and gasped audibly for air.

I was aghast. Over those 11 minutes or more he was fighting for breath, and I could see both of his fists were clenched the entire time. His gasps could be heard through the glass wall that separated us. Towards the end, the gasping faded into small puffs of his mouth. It was much like a fish lying along the shore puffing for that one gasp of air that would allow it to breathe. Time dragged on and I was helpless to do anything, sitting helplessly by as he struggled for breath. I desperately wanted out of that room.

For the next four minutes or so a medical tech listened for a heart beat on both sides of his chest. That seemed to drag on too, like some final cruel ritual, preventing us from leaving. Then, at 10.53am, the warden called the time of death, they closed the curtains, and that was it.

I came out of that room feeling that I had witnessed something ghastly. I was relieved to be out in the fresh air. There is no question in my mind that Dennis McGuire suffered greatly over many minutes. I'd been told that a "normal" execution lasted five minutes – this experimental two-drug concoction had taken 26 minutes. I consider that inhumane.

_____________________

My state, North Carolina, has declared, by law, that lethal injection is not a medical procedure and thus doctors do not need to be present for an execution. Further, the General Assembly has replaced the three-drug protocol with a one-drug protocol (with an unnamed drug) so that it can resume executions by getting around pending lawsuits about the Constitutionality of lethal injection. In essence, the state wants to EXPERIMENT on a living human being.

Is this in the news? No, it is not.

No more lethal injection?

It's national and international news.

The US has no more of its supplies of the drugs we need to kill murderers. And there is no company in that makes them in the US.

From the article:

"The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations.

"The manufacturer, Hospira, of Lake Forest, Ill., had originally planned to resume production of the drug, sodium thiopental, this winter at a plant in Italy, giving state corrections departments hope that the scarcity that began last fall would ease.

"But the Italian authorities said they would not permit export of the drug if it might be used for capital punishment. Hospira said in a statement Friday that its aim was to serve medical customers, but that “we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections” and the company did not want to expose itself to liability in Italy.

"Hospira does not have domestic facilities that can make sodium thiopental, said Daniel Rosenberg, a spokesman, and has decided to “exit the market.” No other American companies manufacture the drug, which has largely been supplanted by alternatives in hospitals but is used by 34 of the 35 states that use lethal injection to carry out the death penalty."

Just another cost of outsourcing jobs!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/22/us/22lethal.html