Europe’s moral stand has U.S. states running out of execution drugs, complicating capital punishment

Screen shot from "Dead Man Walking"

BRUSSELS (AP) — There’s one big reason the United States has a dearth of execution drugs so acute that some states are considering solutions such as firing squads and gas chambers: Europe won’t allow the drugs to be exported because of its fierce hostility to capital punishment.

The phenomenon started nine years ago when the EU banned the export of products used for execution, citing its goal to be the “leading institutional actor and largest donor to the fight against the death penalty.” But beefed up European rules mean the results are being most strongly felt in the United States now, with shortages becoming chronic and gruesome executions making headlines.

In Ohio last month, Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die after a previously untested mix of chemicals began flowing into his body, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney. On Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson’s last words were: “I feel my whole body burning.”

The dilemma again grabbed national attention this week when an Oklahoma pharmacy agreed Monday to refrain from supplying an execution drug to the Missouri Department of Corrections for an upcoming lethal injection. Death row inmate Michael Taylor’s had argued in a lawsuit that recent executions involving the drug pentobarbital would likely cause “inhumane pain” — and, ahead of a hearing set for Tuesday, The Apothecary Shoppe said it would not provide the drug.

EU nations are notorious for disagreeing on just about everything when it comes to common policy, but they all strongly — and proudly — agree on one thing: abolishing capital punishment.

Europe saw totalitarian regimes abuse the death penalty as recently as the 20th century, and public opinion across the bloc is therefore staunchly opposed to it.

The EU’s uncompromising stance has set off a cat-and-mouse game, with U.S. corrections departments devising new ways to carry out lethal injections only to hit updated export restrictions within months.

“Our political task is to push for an abolition of the death penalty, not facilitate its procedure,” said Barba Lochbihler, chairwoman of the European Parliament’s subcommittee on human rights.

Europe’s tough stance has caused U.S. states to start experimenting with new drug mixtures, even though convicts’ lawyers and activists argue they increase the risk of painful prolonged death and may violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

In an upcoming execution in Louisiana, the state is set to follow Ohio’s example in using the untested drug cocktail used in McGuire’s execution. It changed its execution protocol last week to use Ohio’s two-drug combination because it could no longer procure pentobarbital, a powerful sedative.

The execution was scheduled for February, but was stayed pending a federal judge’s examination in April regarding whether the state can proceed with the plan to execute Christopher Sepulvado, convicted in the 1992 killing of his 6-year-old stepson.

In 2010, Louisiana switched from the established three-drug protocol to a one-drug pentobarbital lethal injection, but eventually that drug also became unavailable because of European pressure.

“The lethal injection that they are using now in certain states has never been tested, verified, let alone been approved for executions,” said Maya Foa of Reprieve, a London-based charity fighting the death penalty. “This amounts to using humans as guinea pigs. No doctor would ever do that.”

Ohio prosecutors counter that condemned inmates are not entitled to a pain-free execution under the Constitution.

Even if the effect of the two drugs used by Ohio “presents some inherent risk of discomfort, that does not amount to cruel and unusual punishment,” Christopher Conomy, an assistant Ohio attorney general, argued in court documents last month.

The U.S. execution dilemma goes back to 2005, when the EU restricted exports of goods “for the purpose of capital punishment or for the purpose of torture.” That ban includes items such as electric chairs and lethal injection systems.

The drug shortage then started biting in 2010 when Hospira Inc., the sole U.S. manufacturer of sodium thiopental, a sedative that is part of the normal three-drug mixture, stopped production. A few months later, Hospira dropped plans to produce it in Italy because the government there asked for guarantees that it would never be used in executions.

States in 2011 switched to pentobarbital, but Denmark-based Lundbeck Inc., the drug’s only U.S.-licensed maker, faced a public backlash and quickly said it would put the medication off-limits for capital punishment through a tightly controlled distribution system.

Fearing for their reputation, the companies never wanted to see their drugs used in executions.

As U.S. authorities started looking for other sources, Britain went ahead and restricted exports of sodium thiopental and other drugs at the end of 2010.

“This move underlines this government’s … moral opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances,” Business Secretary Vince Cable said then.

Germany’s government also urged pharmaceutical companies to stop exports, and the country’s three firms selling sodium thiopental promised not to sell to U.S. prison authorities.

The EU then updated its export regulation in late 2011 to ban the sale of eight drugs — including pentobarbital and sodium thiopental — if the purpose is to use them in lethal injections.

That produced a flurry of action in the United States. In May 2012 Missouri announced it would switch to using the anesthetic propofol, infamous for its role in Michael Jackson’s overdose death. But propofol, too, was manufactured in Europe, by Germany’s Fresenius Kabi.

Missouri’s plan prompted an outcry across Europe and the EU threatened to restrict propofol exports. That in turn provoked a medical outcry in the U.S. because propofol is used in about 95 percent of surgical procedures requiring an anesthetic, according to the American Society of Anesthesiologists.

Pharmaceutical companies around the globe have been loath to see their drugs used in executions because the market is tiny and promises close to no financial gain, while potentially exposing them to costly bad PR.

In the United States, there is a variety of reason no U.S. manufacturer will supply execution drugs, from the desire to avoid lawsuits to the makers’ own opposition to the use of such drugs in capital punishment.

Fresenius Kabi, whose slogan is “caring for life,” swiftly moved to introduce a stringent distribution control to prevent sales to U.S. prisons. Another manufacturer, Germany’s B. Braun, immediately followed suit.

In October 2012 Missouri Governor Jay Nixon expressed indignation, saying state and federal court systems, not European politicians, should decide death penalty policy. Still, a month later he backtracked and halted what was to have been the first U.S. execution using propofol.

Missouri and other states have since also resorted to custom-made batches of drugs, while refusing to divulge which pharmacy produced them — as in the case being heard Tuesday.

The secrecy has led to new lawsuits, not least after safety concerns over such drugs arose in 2012 after contaminated injections from a Massachusetts facility caused a meningitis outbreak that killed 64 people and sickened hundreds.

An attorney for McGuire’s family supported the European position.

“I think it’s right for the (pharmaceutical) companies to draw a line when people are using the drugs for the wrong purposes,” said Jon Paul Rion.

In principle, there are a number of painkillers, sedatives and paralyzing agents that can kill if administered in high doses. But switching drugs will invite new lawsuits and could involve drawn-out bureaucratic or legislative delays — in addition to doubts about how quickly and mercifully these drugs can kill.

“Such botched executions go some way to debunking the myth that lethal injection is a humane way to kill someone,” said Reprieve’s Foa.

When Europeans criticize the U.S., they frequently cite the inequality of health care and the continued use of capital punishment.

Europe has seen autocratic or totalitarian regimes corrupting justice throughout the 20th century with people being executed for political reasons or without fair trial, resulting in strong opposition to the death penalty after World War II.

Western Germany forbade capital punishment after the war, just as Italy did. France, which gave the world the word guillotine, decapitated only a few people after WW II amid increasing public opposition.

“There will be no lasting peace either in the heart of individuals or in social customs until death is outlawed,” French Literature Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus wrote in 1957 in an influential essay.

France’s last execution now dates back almost 40 years. In Eastern Europe, the death penalty was abolished after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

An international AP poll in 2007 found that about 70 percent of those surveyed in the U.S. favor the death penalty for people convicted of murder. In Germany, Italy and Spain only about 30 percent did so.

Overall, experts say Europe’s judicial system is more oriented toward rehabilitation, not punishment. That is also reflected in drastically lower incarceration rates: Across the EU, about 130 people per 100,000 inhabitants are behind bars compared to 920 in the U.S, according to EU and U.S. Justice Department figures.

The death penalty has been abolished or suspended in all developed economies, except for the U.S. and Japan. Execution rankings have routinely shown the U.S. in the unusual company of China, Iran, Saudi-Arabia, Iraq and Pakistan.

Vietnam has faced a similar dilemma to the United States, finding it difficult to import execution drugs from Europe since it switched from firing squads to lethal injection in 2011 on humanitarian grounds.

The anti-capital punishment camp has also gained ground in the U.S.

The number of U.S. executions has declined in recent years — from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year. Some states have abolished the death penalty, and those that carry on find executions increasingly difficult to conduct because of the drug scarcity and doubts about how well they work.

Public support for capital punishment also appears to be retreating. Last year, 60 percent of Americans polled said they favor the death penalty for convicted murderers, the lowest level measured since 1972, according to Gallup.

To counter the drug shortages lawmakers in some death penalty states — Missouri, Virginia and Wyoming — are now considering bringing back execution methods such as firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

There are still about 3,000 inmates on death row.

AP writers Melinda Deslatte in Baton Rouge, La., and Andrew Welsh-Huggins in Columbus, Ohio, contributed to this report.

Source: The Associated Press, Juergen Baetz (http://www.twitter.com/jbaetz), Feb 18, 2014

US considers reviving old-fashioned executions

Utah's contraption for executions by firing squad

Most states abandoned those execution methods a generation ago

St Louis: With lethal-injection drugs in short supply and new questions looming about their effectiveness, lawmakers in some death penalty states are considering bringing back relics of a more gruesome past: firing squads, electrocutions and gas chambers.

Most states abandoned those execution methods more than a generation ago in a bid to make capital punishment more palatable to the public and to a judicial system worried about inflicting cruel and unusual punishments that violate the Constitution.

But to some elected officials, the drug shortages and recent legal challenges are beginning to make lethal injection seem too vulnerable to complications.

“This isn’t an attempt to time-warp back into the 1850s or the wild, wild West or anything like that,” said Missouri state Rep Rick Brattin, who this month proposed making firing squads an option for executions. “It’s just that I foresee a problem, and I’m trying to come up with a solution that will be the most humane yet most economical for our state.”

Brattin, a Republican, said questions about the injection drugs are sure to end up in court, delaying executions and forcing states to examine alternatives. It’s not fair, he said, for relatives of murder victims to wait years, even decades, to see justice served while lawmakers and judges debate execution methods.

Like Brattin, a Wyoming lawmaker this month offered a bill allowing the firing squad. Missouri’s attorney general and a state lawmaker have raised the notion of rebuilding the state’s gas chamber. And a Virginia lawmaker wants to make electrocution an option if lethal-injection drugs aren’t available.

If adopted, those measures could return states to the more harrowing imagery of previous decades, when inmates were hanged, electrocuted or shot to death by marksmen.

States began moving to lethal injection in the 1980s in the belief that powerful sedatives and heart-stopping drugs would replace the violent spectacles with a more clinical affair while limiting, if not eliminating, an inmate’s pain.

The total number of US executions has declined in recent years — from a peak of 98 in 1999 to 39 last year. Some states have turned away from the death penalty entirely. Many have cases tied up in court. And those that carry on with executions find them increasingly difficult to conduct because of the scarcity of drugs and doubts about how well they work.

In recent years, European drug makers have stopped selling the lethal chemicals to prisons because they do not want their products used to kill.

At least two recent executions are also raising concerns about the drugs’ effectiveness. Last week, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die by injection, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney with his mouth opening and closing. And on Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson’s final words were, “I feel my whole body burning.”

Missouri threw out its three-drug lethal injection procedure after it could no longer obtain the drugs. State officials altered the method in 2012 to use propofol, which was found in the system of pop star Michael Jackson after he died of an overdose in 2009.

Oregon Gas Chamber

The anti-death penalty European Union threatened to impose export limits on propofol if it were used in an execution, jeopardizing the supply of a common anesthetic needed by hospitals across the nation. In October, Gov Jay Nixon stayed the execution of serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin and ordered the Missouri Department of Corrections to find a new drug.

Days later, the state announced it had switched to a form of pentobarbital made by a compounding pharmacy. Like other states, Missouri has refused to divulge where the drug comes from or who makes it.

Missouri has carried out two executions using pentobarbital - Franklin in November and Allen Nicklasson in December. Neither inmate showed outward signs of suffering, but the secrecy of the process resulted in a lawsuit and a legislative inquiry.

Michael Campbell, assistant professor of criminal justice at the University of Missouri-St Louis, said some lawmakers simply don’t believe convicted murderers deserve any mercy.

“Many of these politicians are trying to tap into a more populist theme that those who do terrible things deserve to have terrible things happen to them,” Campbell said.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Centre in Washington, D.C., cautioned that there could be a backlash.

“These ideas would jeopardize the death penalty because, I think, the public reaction would be revulsion, at least from many quarters,” Dieter said.

Some states already provide alternatives to lethal injection. Condemned prisoners may choose the electric chair in eight states: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia. An inmate named Robert Gleason Jr was the most recent to die by electrocution, in Virginia in January 2013.

Arizona, Missouri and Wyoming allow for gas-chamber executions. Missouri no longer has a gas chamber, but Attorney General Chris Koster, a Democrat, and Missouri state Sen. Kurt Schaefer, a Republican, last year suggested possibility rebuilding one. So far, there is no bill to do so.

Delaware, New Hampshire and Washington state still allow inmates to choose hanging. The last hanging in the US was Billy Bailey in Delaware in 1996. Two prisoners in Washington state have chosen to be hanged since the 1990s — Westley Allan Dodd in 1993 and Charles Rodman Campbell in 1994.

Firing squads typically consisting of five sharpshooters with rifles, one of which is loaded with a blank so the shooters do not know for sure who fired the fatal bullet. They have been used mostly for military executions.

Since the end of the Civil War, there have been three civilian firing squad executions in the US, all in Utah. Gary Gilmore uttered his famous final words, “Let’s do it” on Jan. 18, 1977, before his execution, which ended what amounted to a 17-year national moratorium on the death penalty. Convicted killers John Albert Taylor in 1996 and Ronnie Lee Gardner in 2010 were also put to death by firing squad.

Utah is phasing out its use, but the firing squad remains an option there for inmates sentenced prior to May 3, 2004.

Oklahoma maintains the firing squad as an option, but only if lethal injection and electrocution are deemed unconstitutional.

In Wyoming, Republican state Sen. Bruce Burns said death by firing squad would be far less expensive than building a gas chamber. Wyoming has only one inmate on death row, 68-year-old convicted killer Dale Wayne Eaton. The state has not executed anyone in 22 years.

Jackson Miller, a Republican in the Virginia House of Delegates, is sponsoring a bill that would allow for electrocution if lethal injection drugs are not available.

Source: The Associated Press, January 28, 2014

Americans Favor The Death Penalty, But Few Want The Executed To Suffer

Most Americans favor the death penalty as a punishment for people convicted of murder, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. But the poll also finds that few people want to inflict unnecessary pain on those who are executed.

According to the poll, 62 percent of Americans favor the death penalty for people who are convicted of murder, while only 26 % are opposed. That support crossed party lines -- 87 % of Republicans, 58 % of independents and 51 % of Democrats said that they were in favor of execution as a punishment for murder.

The survey found that lethal injection is the most favored method of execution among Americans by far, and the only one approved of by at least half of Americans. 54 % of respondents said that they approved of lethal injection as a method of execution, including 44 % of Democrats, 50 % of independents and 79 % of Republicans.

But a significant number of those polled said that just because a prisoner should be put to death doesn't mean he or she needs to suffer.

43 % of respondents said that execution methods should be as quick and painless as possible, while just 11 % wanted them to be as slow and painful as possible, and 8 % weren't sure. Another 38 % weren't asked the question because they said they were opposed to the death penalty, or they weren't sure if they were in favor of it or not.

The poll was conducted after the execution of Dennis McGuire, an Ohio inmate who reportedly gasped for air and took 26 minutes to die after being injected with an untested cocktail of lethal injection drugs last week.

States that allow the death penalty have struggled in recent years to find drug combinations that guarantee a quick and painless death, after European manufacturers cut off supplies to drugs previously used for execution by lethal injection.

If Americans were to come to view lethal injection as too slow and painful, the poll shows little support for other methods that might take its place. No other method of execution, including hanging, gas chambers, the electric chair, firing squads and beheading, received the support of more than 35 percent of Americans in the poll.

Much of that support was clustered among Republicans, of whom 54 % said they would approve of the electric chair and 51 % said they would approve of gas chambers as a method of execution. Among Democrats and independents, no alternative method of execution received more than 34 % approval.

The poll also found that for most Americans, life in prison without a chance of parole actually sounds like a worse form of punishment than execution. Asked which of the 2 they personally thought would be worse, only 30 % of respondents said execution, while 52 % said that life in prison with no possibility of parole would be the worse form of punishment.

The HuffPost/YouGov poll was conducted Jan. 18-19 among 1,000 U.S. adults using a sample selected from YouGov's opt-in online panel to match the demographics and other characteristics of the adult U.S. population. Factors considered include age, race, gender, education, employment, income, marital status, number of children, voter registration, time and location of Internet access, interest in politics, religion and church attendance.

Source: Huffington Post, January 26, 2014

Death Penalty News: "Should execution methods be as quick and painless as possible?" 8 % of respondents... weren't sure. My God, what kind of world are we living in?

What Happens to the Death Penalty When Lethal Injection Isn’t Quick and Painless?

San Quentin's brand new death chamber

For decades supporters of the death penalty in America have embraced lethal injection not just as an evolutionary plateau in the method of capital punishment but as a convenient solution to a problem that is both legal and moral. By purporting to ease the suffering of the condemned as he is killed, the procedure is supposed to neutralize concerns that any particular execution is “cruel” under the Eighth Amendment. And by purporting to put the prisoner to deep sleep first before the poison was administered, the practice is supposed to assuage whatever guilt exists in the minds of the executioner, or the administrator, over the intentional taking of life. We hide behind science, in other words, and then pat ourselves on the back for our ingenuity.

But these two pillars of support for lethal injection have always been based on a form of deceit. Making executions tidier does not make the dead any less dead or those who authorize the poison any less culpable for taking life. It is the act of capital punishment itself, not just the manner in which it is carried out, that carries the moral force. And no human development, no magic pill, no sterile syringe, can change that. This profound question is pertinent again, as a practical matter as well as a legal and political one, because recent developments in the practice of lethal injections have raised new doubts about the pain associated with their use. And if lethal injection protocols cause profound suffering the landscape of capital punishment as we know it may change.

Click here to read the full article

Source: The Daily Beast, January 21, 2014

Ohio inmate "not entitled to a pain-free execution"

Ohio's state execution team is finalising plans to dispatch a convicted murderer and rapist on death row using a never-before-tried combination of two drugs which defence lawyers say threatens to leave him writhing in agony from "air hunger" before he loses consciousness and expires.

The way was cleared for the execution of Dennis McGuire, 53, when a federal judge in Columbus ruled on Monday (local time) that concerns about how the new cocktail would work were not enough to issue a stay even as he acknowledged that it amounted nonetheless to a death chamber "experiment" by the state.

Ohio and other death penalty states have been struggling to keep executions going because supplies of pentobarbital traditionally used in a three-drug mix have all passed their sell-by dates thanks to its Danish manufacturer prohibiting its sale to US prison services. The European Union has also threatened to restrict sales of Propofol, a leading anaesthetic used in hospitals, were US death chambers to use it instead.

In Wyoming, state Senator Bruce Burns, a Republican, said he was tabling proposals to replace death by lethal injection with the firing squad in his state because of the drug shortage crisis. Using marksmen to empty death row would be preferable, he said, than the alternative - building a gas chamber.

Controversy is also raging in Oklahoma following what appears to have been the botched execution last week of Michael Lee Wilson based on his last words uttered after the injection process had begun: "I feel my whole body burning." Exactly what went wrong is unclear because the state is not saying.

The two-drug formula that Ohio has turned to - the sedative midazolam followed by the painkiller hydromorphone - was to have been used for the first time late last year on another inmate, Ronald Phillips. His execution was postponed at the last minute because of uncertainty over whether his request that his organs be donated after death could legally be granted.

Thus McGuire, convicted of the 1989 rape and fatal stabbing of Joy Stewart in western Ohio, is now set to be the guinea pig, barring any last-minute stay by the US Supreme Court or state governor.

In court filings earlier, defence lawyers had contended that "McGuire will experience the agony and terror of air hunger as he struggles to breathe for five minutes after defendants intravenously inject him with the execution drugs". They also suggested that because McGuire suffers from severe sleep apnea the risk of his struggling to fill his lungs for air before he passes out will be increased.

In his ruling on Monday, the US district judge Gregory Frost said he saw no convincing evidence of a "substantial risk" that McGuire would suffer the "severe pain" trying to fill his lungs on the death stretcher that would put his execution at odds with the constitutional prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishment".

Almost in the same breath, however, he added that there is "absolutely no question that Ohio's current protocol presents an experiment in lethal injection processes... To pretend otherwise, or that either of the experts or this Court truly knows what the outcome of the experiment will be, would be disingenuous."

In its filings to the judge, the state's Attorney General's office did not deny the combination might cause discomfort but added: "You're not entitled to a pain-free execution".

Both the Governor, John Kasich, and the Ohio Parole Board have already rejected pleas for clemency for McGuire. Separately, his lawyers appealed to the Supreme Court to issue a stay on the grounds that the jury at his trial were insufficiently informed of the severe difficulties of his child hood.

In making his firing squad proposal, Wyoming's Senator said it was partly about money. "Frankly it's one of the cheapest [options] for the state."

Source: The New Zealand Herald, January 15, 2014

Wyoming lawmaker proposes firing squads for execution

CHEYENNE, Wyo. (AP) — A Wyoming lawmaker is pushing to allow use of the firing squad to execute condemned state inmates if constitutional problems or other issues ever prevented the state from using lethal injection.

Sen. Bruce Burns, R-Sheridan, said Monday that state law currently calls for using a gas chamber if lethal injection is unavailable.

"The state of Wyoming doesn't have a gas chamber currently, an operating gas chamber, so the procedure and expense to build one would be impractical to me," said Burns, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee.

"I consider frankly the gas chamber to be cruel and unusual, so I went with firing squad because they also have it in Utah," Burns said. He's introduced the bill for consideration in the legislative session that starts Feb. 10 in Cheyenne.

"One of the reasons I chose firing squad as opposed to any other form of execution is because frankly it's one of the cheapest for the state," Burns said. "The expense of building a gas chamber I think would be prohibitive when you consider how many people would be executed by it, and even the cost of gallows."

Burns said his bill addressed the possibility that the state could have to find a substitute for using lethal injection because a number of states are running short of the chemicals used for lethal injection.

In Missouri, for example, the state auditor is undertaking a probe of the Missouri Department of Corrections over its use of a new death penalty drug. That state for years had used a three-drug blend to perform executions until pharmaceutical companies stopped selling those drugs to prisons.

Missouri has executed two inmates in recent months using the sedative pentobarbital and plans a third execution later this month. The drug comes from a compounding pharmacy in Oklahoma not licensed to do business in Missouri.

The pace of inmate executions is much slower in Wyoming, which has only one inmate on death row and last executed an inmate in 1992.

Inmate Dale Wayne Eaton, 68, is challenging the constitutionality of the death sentence he received in 2004 for the rape and murder of 18-year-old Lisa Marie Kimmell of Billings, Mont. The Wyoming Supreme Court already has upheld Eaton's conviction, but a federal court has put the execution on hold for the past several years while it considers his appeal.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center in Washington, D.C., said Monday he believes Wyoming could face constitutional challenges if it tried to use the firing squad as its only method of execution.

Dieter said Utah has offered inmates the choice of being executed by firing squad but said the state is phasing out the punishment. He said mandating the use of the firing squad if lethal injection were unavailable, as Burns seeks to do, would be a different matter.

"That I think would raise concerns in the federal courts, perhaps the state courts, about whether and unusual, perhaps a cruel and unusual punishment is being inflicted," Dieter said. "I don't know how the ultimate ruling would come down, but I think there be delays as that case got considered and it might even go up to the Supreme Court. This would be unusual. This is not what Utah has done."

Source: Associated Press, January 13, 2014

Tinkering with Ohio's machinery of death: Jack Shuler

On January 16, the state of Ohio will become the first state to use a combination of the sedative midazolam and painkiller hydromorphone when it executes condemned killer Dennis McGuire. Some experts claim the deadly combo could result in seizures, vomiting, spasms, and suffocation. These changes represent the most recent technological advances in the long history of the death penalty. But how far have we really come?

How the drugs are manufactured and what drugs are used does not alter the fact that, as a state, we are using our innovation, our intelligence, our energy, and, quite frankly, our resources to kill a human being.

In the early 19th century, governments throughout Europe and across the United States began adjusting execution protocols to placate critics of the death penalty. To keep people from becoming desensitized to violence, hangings were moved behind prison walls and away from crowds. Ohio followed suit in 1885, and moved hangings behind the walls of the state penitentiary.

In the second half of the 19th century, enlightened hangmen worked on engineering a swifter death. In 1866, an Irish doctor named Samuel Haughton noted that death from hanging comes in three possible ways: from apoplexy, asphyxia or a fractured “vertebral column.” He suggested that a longer, more precise drop would dislocate the hanged person’s neck, a possibly more humane treatment.

Haughton wrote, “It seems to me unworthy to the present state of science to continue a mode of execution which … is extremely clumsy and also painful to the criminal.” His solution took into account the condemned person’s height and weight when determining how far he should drop from the gallows. Haughton claimed this would ensure a hangman’s fracture and thus a swift death.

Perhaps influenced by Haughton’s essay, English hangman William Marwood devised a measuring table in the 1870s that accounted for the height and weight of the condemned when determining the length of rope for an execution. The “Table of Drops” eventually made its way to the United States.

And yet, no matter how precise the drop became, no matter how much the process was perfected, hangmen could never account for the many ways the human body reacts to violence, to trauma, to pain. Necks stretched. Faces contorted. Bowels evacuated. Ropes snapped and the half-dead had to be re-hanged. Drops were too long and people were decapitated.

In 1885, New York Governor David B. Hill remarked that hanging executions were a carryover from the “dark ages” and wondered if modern science could offer a “less barbarous manner” for killing condemned criminals.

Hanging had become fully shameful to the citizen spectator. For many, execution by hanging brought to mind ghastly public spectacles or lynching. It was seen as an archaic punishment, out of step with modern sensibilities. People couldn’t escape the fact that a real, live person was at the end of that rope.

It didn’t take long for the electric chair and the gas chamber to supplant the noose in the United States. In 1889, William Kemmler became the first person to be put to death by electrocution in Auburn, N.Y. Ohio introduced the electric chair eight years later. And in 1924, Gee Jon became the first American to be executed by lethal gas in Carson City, Nev. Not only were these new technologies modern marvels, but gas and electricity were widely believed to kill more quickly, more humanely.

However, both led to horrific deaths — through burning and asphyxiation — that must have traumatized the viewers and tortured the condemned. There was a real, live person sitting on that electric chair; a real, live person inside that gas chamber.

Today, the private, bureaucratic and antiseptic process of lethal injection is a far cry from the ugly spectacle of a public hanging. It is the end result of an apparently progressive history. But is it any better?

We can continue to tinker with the machinery of death, to borrow Justice Harry A. Blackmun’s phrase. We can fool ourselves that we are humanizing this process, that we are executing the worst of the worse. But as with all other manners of executing, the problem with lethal injection is that a real, live person is strapped to that gurney. How far have we really come?

- Op-Ed by Jack Shuler, January 7, 2014 This article was originally published on Cleveland.com. Mr. Shuler is an author, John and Christine Warner Professor and assistant professor of English at Denison University. His forthcoming book is titled “The Noose: A History,” a study of the history of hanging from the Iron Age to today. Also by Jack Shuler on this website: The Other Iranian Execution Stories, October 29, 2013, and The questions Ohio should be asking about the death penalty, November 8, 2013.

Tennessee's death penalty is back on track

Tennessee Death Chamber

(THE TENNESSEAN) Tennessee's barely functioning death penalty is on the verge of revival after state officials finally settled on a new lethal injection drug and scheduled a man to die for the first time in more than a year.

But the state's new method is already running into trouble in other states, thanks to new problems acquiring drugs for executions.

The state hasn't had any drugs to perform lethal injections since its supply of sodium thiopental was seized by federal law enforcement agencies in April 2011 over questions about how it was obtained. It hasn't put anyone to death in nearly four years and hadn't had an execution scheduled since February 2012.

But last month, the state said it had solved its lethal injection drug problem by switching to pentobarbital, an anesthetic most commonly used to euthanize pets. State officials scheduled Nickolus Johnson, convicted of killing a policeman in Bristol in 2004, to die on April 22, 2014, at 7:10 p.m.

That year-and-a-half delay came in part so Tennessee corrections officials could see how the new drug stood up to challenges in states such as Ohio and Texas. State officials also were waiting for a law to keep information about how the state obtained its lethal injection drugs secret from the public.

If Tennessee were to clear those legal hurdles, it would open the door to begin the process of putting Johnson and 78 other convicted murderers to death. The condemned — 78 men and one woman — have been waiting on death row an average of just under 20 years, seven of them for more than three decades.

So far, only Johnson's execution has been scheduled.

"I can tell you we had been considering all options and working to get legislation passed to broaden the confidentiality exemption under the public records act to include a person or entity involved in procuring or providing the chemicals necessary to carry out lethal injection," said Dorinda Carter, spokeswoman for the Tennessee Department of Correction. "The reason for this particular drug is it has been used in other states and upheld in court challenges."

Tennessee hasn't executed a prisoner since Cecil Johnson was put to death by lethal injection Dec. 2, 2009, and it has executed only six people since 1960.

Constitutional concerns

Death penalty states were forced to scramble in 2010 when the main anesthetic used in lethal injections, sodium thiopental, was pulled from the market by its manufacturer over moral concerns about its use in executions. The drug, typically part of a three-drug cocktail, was important to lethal injections because it was supposed to render executions painless to the condemned — the key to overcoming concerns it was "cruel and unusual punishment" and therefore unconstitutional. Last-ditch attempts by several states — including Tennessee — to acquire thiopental from a questionable overseas source were foiled when federal officials seized stocks as having possibly been imported illegally.

In the interim, states began exploring other drugs. Ohio and Texas in 2011 turned to a one-drug method using pentobarbital, a barbituate used in animal euthanasia and in physician-assisted suicides in the Netherlands. But shortly after hearing pentobarbital was being used in executions, Danish manufacturer Lundbeck announced it also would ban the importation of the drug for such purposes.

The supply shortage has forced Ohio and Texas to look at alternative drugs or to compounding pharmacies to make pentobarbital from scratch. Texas earlier this month paid a compounding pharmacy to make pentobarbital, but the company asked for the drugs back when it was outed as a supplier for lethal injection drugs. Texas is now mulling over yet another switch, to propofol, a powerful anesthetic.

Despite problems in those states and others, Tennessee corrections officials are sticking with pentobarbital.

"We are not looking at alternatives at this time," Carter said. "Additionally, I can only say we are confident we will be able to secure the necessary chemicals."

She declined to elaborate on how the state would acquire the drug.

A 'broken' system

The lethal injection drug problems have given many death penalty opponents a break from their frantic efforts to stop executions. It only shows how broken the state's death penalty is, said the Rev. Stacy Rector, executive director of Tennesseans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

"Obviously we feel like the lethal injection debacle is only symptomatic of the larger debacle of the death penalty. Everything about the system is broken," she said. "We've had six executions since 1960 and probably spent millions of dollars to do that."

But the switch to pentobarbital has opponents worried that the state's death penalty is gearing up yet again.

That's a good thing, said Michael Rushford, president of the Sacramento, Calif.-based Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, which supports the death penalty. He said compounding pharmacies could solve the ongoing supply problems.

"I think the compounding approach will probably be the new 'hip' thing to do. That will solve that problem," he said. "This may be the end of this kind of challenge."

If not, he said, states should turn to the gas chamber as a method that would be simpler and less likely to be challenged.

'Waiting for justice'

Johnson, the man condemned to die in April, initially agreed to an interview with The Tennessean but later changed his mind. Johnson ambushed Bristol police officer Mark Vance on Nov. 27, 2004, amid an investigation into a domestic dispute between Johnson and a 17-year-old girl he had gotten pregnant. As Vance went upstairs in the girl's home, Johnson popped out and shot him in the head, killing him.

The officer's mother, Karen Vance, who lives on the Virginia side of Bristol, said she was tired of the delays and appeals.

"It's taken a long time, and we're just waiting for justice," she said. "Then I can finally say I've kind of got closure, once I see him gone."

Source: The Tennessean, October 23, 2013

Food for thought...

"On June 15, 1994, David Lawson was killed by the state of North Carolina for the murder of Wayne Shinn, whom he had shot during a burglary in 1980. It took thirteen minutes for the gas to kill him.

Lawson, wearing only socks and boxer shorts over a diaper, sat in the chair and watched as guards strapped his chest, arms and legs to the chair and hooked up an electrode over his heart. Guards then placed a leather mask over his face. Soon after 2:00 a.m., the cyanide was dropped into the acid and lethal fumes began to rise. Lawson, choking and gasping and straining against the straps, took short breaths and cried out, "I'm human. I am a human being." He pushed up on his feet and kicked his legs. His hands gripped the ends of the armrests. Drool and tears sled from under the mask. A few deep breaths of the gas would have killed him sooner, but David Lawson continued to take short breaths and despite paroxysms of choking continued to cry out until his voice was but a whisper: "I ... am... a human... being."

- Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, The Death of Innocents

Missouri Gov. on Capital Punishment Plan: ‘We Don’t Have A Gas Chamber’

Oregon Gas Chamber

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) – Less than a week after Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster suggested the state may need to reinstate the gas chamber as a form of capital punishment, Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon is hesitant to lend his support to the plan.

During a press conference in St. Louis Tuesday, Nixon was asked about Koster’s suggestion.

“We don’t have a gas chamber,” he said. “I don’t want to get into it. Once again, most of those issues involving it are part and parcel of what is going on in the courts about the various methods and I think it’s best handled by…we’ll just let the judicial branch deal with that.”

Missouri Director of Corrections George Lombardi also refused to weigh in Tuesday.

“I have no comment,” he said. “Period.”

Koster says that Missouri statutes allow two options for executions: lethal injection and death by gas. Koster’s comments come amid his growing frustration over the Missouri Supreme Court’s refusal to set execution dates until lethal injection issues are resolved.

“The Missouri death penalty statute has been, in my opinion, unnecessarily entangled in the courts for over a decade,” Koster told The Associated Press Wednesday.

Source: AP, July 10, 2013

Mississippi on pace to execute more inmates in 2012 than in any single year since 1950s

JACKSON, Miss. — With four execution so far and two scheduled this month, Mississippi is on pace to have more executions in 2012 than it has had in any year since the 1950s.

The last time Mississippi executed more than four inmates in any single year was in 1961, when five died in the gas chamber. There were eight executions in each of the years 1955 and 1956. In those days, inmates were put to death for crimes like armed robbery, rape or murder. Today, the only crime punishable by death in Mississippi is capital murder — a murder that happens during the commission of another felony.

The increase in executions comes as fewer people are being sentenced to death across the country. Some experts say the upward trend in Mississippi isn't likely to last.

Don Cabana, a former Mississippi corrections commissioner and author of the book, "Death At Midnight: The Confessions of an Executioner," said the increase "was absolutely predictable" and has more to do with timing and the pace of appeals than anything else.

"You have a number of people who have been sitting on death row for a long time whose cases kind of simultaneously, or in close proximity, started exhausting their appeals," Cabana said.

Jim Craig, an attorney who has worked on appeals for death row inmates, believes there's more to it than that.

Craig said that seven out of 11 men executed in Mississippi since 2008 were represented on appeal by the Mississippi Office of Capital Post-Conviction Counsel when it was led by attorney Bob Ryan, who took over the office in 2002.

In a 2006 affidavit obtained by The Associated Press, Ryan described a situation in which the office lacked manpower and funding and he sometimes relied on trial summaries when filing appeals in numerous cases. At one point, he was essentially "the sole counsel on 21 cases," he wrote in the affidavit. 

"This is more than just the usual things moving at the usual speed. This is a breakdown in the system of providing lawyers to poor people when the state is trying to execute them," he said.

Click here to read the full article

Source: The Republic, June 10, 2012

California: Robert Alton Harris' execution to be commemorated

California Gas Chamber

When his friend Robert Alton Harris mouthed "Where's Mike?" from the gas chamber, Michael Kroll quickly maneuvered into the restrained prisoner's line of sight to reassure him. It would be the last time the two saw each other.

Moments later, on that early morning on April 21, 1992, a trembling Kroll couldn't bear to watch as Harris writhed with his last breaths of poison gas. For Kroll, one of California's most active opponents of the death penalty, the event marked the death of a friend. For California, it was the first time the state had executed a prisoner in more than two decades.

Now, with the 20-year anniversary of Harris' execution approaching, Kroll and Death Penalty Focus are working to mark the event.

In a series of events called "Requiem for the Death Penalty," the nonprofit as well as other co-sponsors, including the ACLU of Northern California, are showing a documentary on Harris' execution, "Procedure 769," and holding a reading of Kroll's new play, "Just Like a Dog."

Click here to read the full article

Source: SFGate, Christopher Haugh, April 17, 2012

Oregon: Instead of a midnight execution, state plans 7 p.m. death for Gary Haugen

When the state executed Harry Charles Moore in 1997, it chose the eeriest of hours -- just after midnight -- to deliver the lethal combination of drugs to the double murderer.

But if the state executes inmate Gary Haugen on Dec. 6 as planned, the procedure would unfold around 7 p.m.

The timing would help the state Corrections Department coordinate security with other public safety agencies, reduce the impact on employee schedules and limit disruptions to the inmates, said spokeswoman Jeanine Hohn.

The switch is one that several states across the country have made in recent years, trading out the midnight execution times for daytime or evening hours, said John Bessler, an associate law professor at the University of Baltimore and author of "Death in the Dark: Midnight Executions in America."

In some cases, the tradition goes as far back as the 1880s, he said, as states sought to crack down on the "carnival-like atmosphere" that accompanied hangings in the public square.

By bringing the executions inside prison grounds and moving the times to the dead of night, officials were able to limit attendance -- and media attention -- to the executions, he said.

Like other states, Oregon took control of hangings from county sheriffs in 1904 to cut down on the "circus" that developed, said Bill Long, author of "A Tortured History: The Story of Capital Punishment in Oregon." Long, a former Willamette University law professor, opposes the death penalty.

All 60 executions since then except for one -- the 1952 death by cyanide gas of Wayne Leroy Long -- have been held within the Oregon State Penitentiary in Salem. Long died in a special concrete structure built near the prison because the superintendent believed it would have less of a "bad psychological effect" on other inmates, according to accounts at the time. But the state later determined that the penal code required executions to occur within the penitentiary walls.

While Oregon generally hasn't maintained a particular time for executions, its five latest happened shortly after midnight -- including two gas-chamber executions in one night in 1953. Long's execution, for example, started at 7:04 a.m. and he was pronounced dead 13 minutes later. The 1920 hanging of Emmett Bancroft occurred at 8:31a.m. and he was pronounced dead 12 minutes later.

The shift to 7 p.m. has implications other than convenience for the state, Bill Long said.

"They want to look at it like business as usual," he said, by removing "the cover of darkness and (putting) it into the normal course of justice being administered."

He noted that the midnight hour adds to the eeriness of an execution. He recalled former Gov. Mark Hatfield's description of the "ghoulish" red phone that was hooked up in the governor's mansion if the governor wanted to grant a reprieve to LeeRoy Sanford McGahuey in 1962. Hatfield didn't, and the man convicted of murdering a woman and her 22-month-old son became the last person in Oregon to die in the gas chamber.

Despite the change to an earlier time, Haugen's execution still would stand out as an extraordinary event, Long said. The proposed execution would be the 1st in 14 years in Oregon.

Haugen was sentenced to death in 2007 for the killing of an inmate, David Polin, four years earlier. He had been serving a life sentence with the possibility of parole for the beating death of Mary Archer, a Northeast Portland woman who was the mother of his former girlfriend.

"It will really attract a larger vigil than a midnight vigil," Long said. "I think there will be a pretty good crowd out at the penitentiary that night."

Execution costs:

Corrections officials don't have a cost estimate for Gary Haugen's planned execution, but they released figures for the state's 2 executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1984. Both were by lethal injection.

Douglas Franklin Wright, 1996: Sentenced to death for killing 3 homeless men. Total: $196,170. Breakdown: $85,205 for overtime, $89,437 for the attorney general, $4,864 for facility alterations, $16,664 for travel, training, equipment and other expenses.

Harry Charles Moore, 1997: Sentenced to death for murdering his father-in-law and mother-in-law. Total: $57,656. Breakdown: $21,574 for personnel including overtime, $2,891 for office expenses, $3,030 for facilities and maintenance, $539 for medical supplies and services, $3,012 for other supplies and services, $1,557 for staff food, $25,053 for legal costs.

Source: The Oregonian, November 2, 2011

Call for firing squads as UK bans lethal-drug exports

BRITISH efforts to halt the sale of lethal-injection drugs to the US have been seized on by American death-penalty supporters.

They are calling for the method to be scrapped in favour of firing squads or a return to the gas chamber.

Within hours of a British export ban on sodium thiopental and other drugs coming into force on Friday, a leading death-penalty advocate in California said that a modernised gas chamber was "the obvious solution" to a backlog of more than 700 death-row inmates whose fate depended on state approval of a new method of execution.

In New York, a prominent law professor who favours execution as "retributive" justice called for a return to the widespread use of firing squads as a form of capital punishment that "doesn't pretend to be something else".

International pressure on suppliers of the three drugs most commonly used for lethal injections over the past three decades -- sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide and potassium chloride -- has led to a shortage of the drugs in the US and an urgent push by state governments for alternatives.

Only two states have switched to a new drug protocol, leaving 32 others using up supplies or in transition to a new regime, while nearly 3000 death-row cases nationwide languish in legal limbo.

In California, the future of the death penalty will be decided by a judge, who must rule on the legality of a new drug cocktail in which a barbiturate often used for putting down animals could be substituted for sodium thiopental.

However, as judge Jeremy Fogel deliberates, Kent Scheidegger, of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, has offered an alternative: a modernised gas chamber in which cyanide gas is replaced with a neutral gas such as helium.

The effect on a prisoner would be similar to that of hypoxia on a pilot suffering oxygen deprivation at high altitude, Mr Scheidegger said. "It feels like nothing. You just feel kind of woozy," he added. "For anyone thinking longer-term about alternatives to lethal injection, this is the obvious solution."

He blamed a failure to think seriously about a modernised gas chamber on bureaucratic inertia. The method is widely seen as unacceptable because of its echoes of the Holocaust, but Mr Scheidegger wrote recently: "We used the gas chamber when World War II was still fresh in people's minds, and gas as such was not a problem then. It should be less of a problem as that era fades from history."

New York Law School professor Robert Blecker said lethal injection should be abandoned -- not for practical reasons, but because it sanitised a process that should hurt. "It conflates medicine with punishment," he said. "How we kill those we detest should in no way resemble how we kill those we love.

"Firing squad is my preferred method," he said.

Source: The Australian, April 21, 2011 (local time)

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Author tells the story of the crime that sent a 17-year-old to Nevada's death chamber

Between 1864 and 1944, Nevada executed about 50 convicted criminals for capital offenses.

Up to that time, none was as young as Floyd Loveless and none since was as young.

Loveless went to the gas chamber despite legal appeals on his behalf and letters and petitions begging judges, parole board members and Gov. Edward P. Carville for clemency.

Years later, Reno author Janice Oberding latched onto Loveless's story and wrote "Under a Cruel Moon: Floyd Loveless' Story," (Thunder Mountain Productions Press, $16.95 paperback*), an account of the young killer's life and death.

While researching another Nevada murder case, Oberding came across the story of Loveless and his 2-year struggle for a sentence reduction. The offender's youth and the state's determination to apply the death penalty to one so young surprised her.

Oberding slogged through swamps of old news stories in newspapers and on microfiche. One of Loveless's lawyers, who had kept materials relating to the case for years, handed Oberding's sister his case files. She traveled to Indiana for more research.

"I talked once to his stepmother," Oberding said. "She still had a lot of negative things to say" about Loveless.

"It was 40 years, but she put me in contact with his brother," she said.

A tough life

Loveless was an Indiana boy with a tough family life. Early in life, he took to petty crime, ending up in a boys' reformatory. Unhappy with the abusive treatment there, Loveless and another young offender, Dale Cline, escaped and took off for California in a stolen car, stealing and robbing for money.

By the time the duo reached Nevada, they were ready to part ways. In Elko, Loveless stole another car so he could drive on alone to California, but witnesses reported the crime.

By the time Loveless arrived in Carlin, Constable A. H. Berning was waiting for him on U.S. 40. Rather than return to Elko with the constable and risk being sent back to Indiana, Loveless shot Berning twice, drove off with the lawman in his car, then left the car and the constable in the desert.

Lawmen quickly apprehended Loveless; he was tried, convicted and sentenced to death despite being only 15 years old at the time of the crime.

Loveless's fate probably was sealed despite his age because he shot a well-liked lawman in a small town, Oberding said.

"If he had done the same thing in Reno, a different city, he might have gotten life (in prison) ... that happened, and he was an outsider. ... If he had been a local boy, it might have been different. He had all the strikes against him."

Appeals for mercy during the 2 years of hearings and motions and a new trial fell on deaf ears, and the state Supreme Court let the lower court ruling stand. Clergymen, judges, Loveless family members, Nevada prison inmates and others pleaded the young man's case with Gov. Carville and others, but in the end Loveless was executed in Nevada's gas chamber on Sept. 29, 1944 -- the youngest person before or since then to die under a Nevada state death sentence.

A surprise in researching the story, Oberding said, was how many times it seemed Loveless had a chance at having his death sentence commuted.

"You'd think that at the 2nd trial they're going to give him life -- a commutation," she said. "He came so close to having life rather than being executed, but every time, there was something against him. It was a surprise how many legal opportunities came along, but the door was slammed on every one of them."

With a youthful crime record behind him in Indiana, was Loveless a cold-blooded killer? Oberding doubts that was the case. "I think he panicked," she said.

The story of his abusive childhood and what effect those circumstances might have played on his later life: "Probably there were lots of others like him that didn't do what he did," Oberding said. "You pity him like someone who was destined not to have a very long or pleasant life."

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court abolished the death penalty for people younger than 18.

*Commercial link provided for information purposes only.

Source: Reno Gazette-Journal, August 15, 2010

Former warden 'haunted' by executions; Death penalty scars prison staff, he says

2 former prison wardens offered New Hampshire officials another reason to abolish the state's death penalty yesterday: Putting someone to death is irreparably traumatic for the prison staff involved.

"Many colleagues turned to drugs and alcohol from the pain of knowing a man had died at their hands," said Ron McAndrew, who oversaw executions in Florida and now speaks internationally against the death penalty. "And I've been haunted by the men I was asked to execute in the name of the state of Florida."

McAndrew was one of several people to testify before a death penalty study commission created by lawmakers last year to assess whether the state's death penalty law deters crime, targets the right offenses and is better than a sentence of life without parole. Its creation followed the state's prosecution of 2 death penalty cases, one of which resulted in a death sentence, the other a life sentence in prison.

The commission is scheduled to put its conclusions in a report by the end of November.

Yesterday's speakers also included a New York law professor who said he supports the death penalty but not in the case of Michael Addison, who was sentenced to death in 2008 for killing a Manchester police officer. Professor Robert Blecker said people who shoot a police officer while fleeing and being shot at by the police should be given a life sentence without parole instead.

But in the Addison case, no police officers had fired at Addison before he shot and killed Officer Michael Briggs in a Manchester alley. No one on the panel noted that distinction for Blecker to address, and he couldn't be reached after the hearing to say whether that fact would change his opinion.

Perhaps the day's most emotional testimony came from Laura Bonk of Concord, whose mother would have turned 69 yesterday had she not been murdered in Massachusetts in 1989.

"My mother had a clear and strong moral code that guided her life," said Bonk, at times crying. "She opposed the death penalty, and I ask you to repeal it. It would honor me and, most importantly, my mother."

Bonk, who serves on Concord's school board, said her mother and 16-year-old sister were checking in on an elderly woman when the woman's son shot them in Littleton, Mass. Bonk's sister survived. Bonk flew home from Paraguay, where she was serving in the Peace Corps, and assumed the role of caretaker for her 2 sisters.

Waiting a year for the killer's trial was painful enough, Bonk said. Her family would have suffered even more, she said, had the death penalty been an option. The death of the killer wouldn't have helped then, nor did his death from natural causes 3 years ago in prison.

"There is a false belief that death brings closure," Bonk said. "It does not. It does not bring the victim back. It does not solve anything."

McAndrew, the former Florida warden, and Allen Ault, who oversaw executions as a prison warden in Georgia, echoed that sentiment. Ault is now the dean of the College of Justice and Safety at Eastern Kentucky University. Commission members watched a video of his comments and then spoke with him by telephone.

Ault said his experience in Georgia prisons convinced him the death penalty did not deter crime or save taxpayers money. And the method of execution did not change the amount of suffering it caused prison staff who carried out the procedure.

"Lethal injection is certainly more humane than the gas chamber," Ault said. "But execution is gruesome any way you do it." Sometimes members of the public would offer to do the job for him, Ault said.

"I didn't want sadists to do it," he said, adding that no one with a conscience can carry out an execution and feel no regret or pain. "I wanted a human being to do it if we had to do it."

McAndrew described a botched execution where the inmate's flesh began burning. "The executioner asked me if we should continue," McAndrew said. "What a question."

McAndrew said he's gotten calls from distressed executioners and prison staff since he began speaking out against the death penalty. He said some corrections officers have committed suicide because of guilt and regret.

"Being a corrections officer is supposed to be an honorable profession," he said. "The state dishonors us by putting us in this situation. This is premeditated, carefully thought out ceremonial killing."

During his testimony, Blecker, the law professor, said New Hampshire should neither repeal nor leave untouched its death penalty law.

Lawmakers should rewrite it, he said, to make only the "worst of the worst of the worst" eligible for execution. That group, in Blecker's view, includes serial killers, people who rape and kill, those who torture and kill children, and people who kill jurors.

Blecker also supports the death penalty for people who kill someone from law enforcement if they target the person because they are a police officer. But he did not elaborate on what scenarios that would include.

Blecker said he'd eliminate most murder-for-hire killings, except for those who do the killing, and remove additional penalties for substantial planning and meditation before murder. Spontaneously pushing a child into water and watching him or her drown is no less horrible than planning a person's murder for days, he said.

And those defendants who are given life in prison without parole instead should be punished while incarcerated, Blecker said. He toured the state prison yesterday before addressing the commission and said he was angry to see inmates with televisions in their cells and access to gym equipment, pool tables and drama clubs.

"They are not locked in some cage to never see the light of day," he said. Then he pulled out the list of items available for purchase by inmates. It includes sunglasses and sunscreen.

Source: Concord Monitor, August 13, 2010