April 20
TEXAS----impending execution re-set
Railcar killer to undergo psychiatric testing
The scheduled execution next month of Angel Maturino Resendiz, a serial
killer who admitted to at least 9 brutal murders during his
cross-continent boxcar journeys, has been postponed to allow further
psychiatric testing, Harris County Assistant District Attorney Roe Wilson
said Wednesday.
Maturino Resendiz, 45, was set to die May 10 for the Dec. 17, 1998,
rape-murder of Houston's Dr. Claudia Benton.
The execution was reset for June 27. Wilson said the execution was delayed
to allow for a psychiatric examination.
(source: Houston Chronicle)
TENNESSEE:
Medical experts file brief against execution drug----Appeal studied by
U.S. Supreme Court for convicted killer
The state's lethal injection procedure should be declared unconstitutional
because it uses a drug that could result in a "torturous" execution, a
group of 17 Tennessee medical professionals say in a brief yesterday to
the U.S. Supreme Court intended to help a death row inmate.
Among them are several prominent members of the medical community,
including Vanderbilt University School of Medicine's Dr. Naji Abumrad,
chairman of the Department of Surgery, and Alan Cherrington, chairman of
the Department of Molecular Physiology and Biophysics. Also participating
was Dr. John Sergent, vice chairman for education in the Department of
Medicine at Vanderbilt University.
The friend-of-the-court brief supports the case of Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman,
who says that the execution protocol is unconstitutional for its use of a
drug called Pavulon and the risk that it will result in inhumane pain and
suffering.
Pavulon paralyzes inmates to the point that they cannot express the pain
they feel, defense attorneys said.
Tennessee law bans veterinarians from using the drug as an euthanasia
agent in animals, said Bradley MacLean, one of Abdur'Rahman's lawyers.
The doctors who participated in the brief criticized Tennessee's protocol
for lacking any safeguards against a "torturous" death, MacLean said.
The anesthetic used is unstable, the individuals who administer the drugs
lack training, and there is no way to monitor the effectiveness of the
anesthesia, MacLean said.
Also yesterday, the state filed its brief opposing the death row inmate's
Supreme Court petition.
The state brief says state courts have rightly concluded that the protocol
does not inflict cruel and unusual punishment and that it is consistent
with protocols used in other states and by the federal government.
The high court is expected to decide whether to take up the case next
month or in June, MacLean said.
No execution date has been set in Abdur'Rahman's case.
(source: The Tennessean)
USA:
"Appropriate Medical Care" and the Paradox of Sanitized Execution Doctors
and Lethal Injection
In a recent ruling, Judge Malcolm Howard of the Federal District Court in
Greenville, North Carolina, determined that the execution by lethal
injection of Willie Brown Jr. may not proceed unless appropriate medical
supervision of the process can be ensured. This ruling followed upon the
presentation of evidence that all too often executioners without medical
training do a poor job of administering the cocktail of chemicals
required, and that as a consequence the prisoner often suffers needlessly.
North Carolina prison officials have been ordered to tell the court by
this week how they will comply with its order requiring medically trained
personnel to ensure that Brown is unconscious during his execution,
currently scheduled for April 21. The officials have been asked a question
they cannot possibly answer, and we can only hope that their conundrum
will lead to a stay of execution for the prisoner.
As Adam Liptak reported recently in the New York Times ("Judges Set
Hurdles for Lethal Injection," April 12, 2006), increasingly the drug
protocol used nationwide since the 1970s --originally devised by the
Oklahoma Department of Corrections in consultation with the state medical
examiner-- is being denounced by critics as too complex and as medically
unjustifiable.
The first drug administered in this procedure is the barbiturate sodium
thiopental. As Liptak reports, "properly administered... it is sufficient
to render an inmate unconscious for many hours, if not to kill him."
(Sodium thiopental, it is interesting to note, is the sole drug
administered in the routine euthanization of pets and farm animals.)
The second drug is pancuronium bromide which, if administered by itself,
would bring about paralysis without unconsciousness. If the prisoner
suffers after this drug is injected, his anguish can generally not be
detected by external observers since he is unable to move and thus unable
to register pain. The bromide thus serves to obscure from view the effect
of the third and final drug, potassium chloride, which causes the heart to
stop beating but also causes unimaginable pain while travelling through
the veins.
If the first drug is administered correctly, it is sufficient to render
the prisoner fully unconscious and to cancel out the painful effects of
the two drugs to follow. But poorly trained prison staff often choose the
wrong spot on the prisoner's body to inject the barbiturate, resulting in
inadequate distribution throughout his system.
Why not, then, include well-trained medical personnel in the procedure?
The American Medical Association's ethics code explicitly forbids
physicians to prescribe the drugs to be used in execution, to select
intravenous sites, to administer the drugs, and to pronounce death. As
Liptak reports, the code is not legally binding, and anonymous
participation by doctors is not uncommon. Collusion by doctors in earlier
stage of the process is also a well-known fact, from the various experts
who spoke in favor of the guillotine in the 1790s to the Oklahoma state
medical examiner's oversight of the recipe for lethal injection in the
1970s.
It is not clear whether Judge Howard was aware of the AMA's code of ethics
when he ordered that the execution of Willie Brown Jr. could not proceed
without the guarantee of supervision by personnel capable of "providing
appropriate medical care" should Mr. Brown wake up. The judge did not say
that the personnel had to be licensed physicians, but clearly the only
other possibility would be to invite unlicensed individuals purporting to
be medical experts. This would be to condone medical fraud, a felony in
all 50 states.
If the personnel are licensed physicians, though, the problem of course is
that the "appropriate medical care" they provide could only consist in
taking measures to promote the continuation of Mr. Brown's life. Such is
the reasoning, in any case, behind many legal defeats of
physician-assisted suicide over the years. For instance the Ninth Circuit
Court of Appeals argued in 1997 that the government has legitimate
interests in prohibiting such assistance since it is already obligated to
"protect... the medical profession's integrity and ethics and maintain...
physicians' role as their patients' healers."
While the individual physician who assists at an execution may only be
violating a code of ethics, and not breaking a law, it is clear that a
state that refuses to legalize physician-assisted suicide in part on the
grounds that this would destroy the integrity and ethics of medicine
cannot in turn legally require the participation of a physician in an
execution. Execution is something that can only be carried out beyond the
bounds of proper medical practice. To implicate physicians is to ask them
to cease to live up to standards of conduct that the state otherwise
expects them to meet.
This issue has only come up recently because lethal injection, unlike
firing squads and electrocution, simulates medical procedure. But what is
happening here is no more "medical" than a shantytown abortion, and if a
clumsy prison guard botches the job and the inmate writhes in agony for
some minutes, this is not so much a glitch in an otherwise orderly medical
procedure as a reminder that to execute is, and always has been, to do
harm, and it thus excludes anyone bound by the Hippocratic Oath. Ever the
development of the Guillotine, pseudo-humanists have been trying to make
killing something other than it can ever possibly be, and more than 200
years later the paradox and futility of this effort is not a bit less
glaring.
The state has only 2 options: either to stop feigning humanism, or to stop
executing people. Judge Howard's refusal to permit a lethal injection to
proceed without medical participation, and his simultaneous inability to
arrange for this participation, reveals the worsening paralysis of a
system that tries to play both options at once.
And the worse, the better. Capital punishment in America will eventually
collapse under the weight of such paradoxes-- unless of course those
people have their way who openly see execution as a fitting occasion to
inflict harm and thereby to exact revenge. This is the principle of
capital punishment under Shariah law, and under the absolute monarchies of
early modern Europe, where men were flayed in public squares, or torn to
pieces by horses made to run in opposite directions. An awesome spectacle,
to be sure, but one that does not fit well with our constitutional
opposition to cruel and unusual punishment.
(source: Counterpunch)
NORTH CAROLINA:
'Infinitesimal' chance of pain at execution----N.C. official responds to
appeal for man scheduled to die Friday
North Carolina's execution protocol provides safeguards that "diminish to
infinitesimal" the chance that an inmate would remain conscious and in
pain while being put to death, state lawyers said in a court filing
Wednesday.
The assertion came in a response to an appeal filed by lawyers for Willie
Brown Jr. with the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va.
Brown was moved Wednesday to Central Prison's death watch area, a small
cell block across the hall from the chamber where he is scheduled to be
executed by injection at 2 a.m. Friday. He was sentenced to death for the
1983 slaying of a woman during a convenience store robbery in Martin
County.
The state also responded Wednesday to an appeal pending before the U.S.
Supreme Court. That appeal, filed Monday, argued Brown was poorly
represented by his trial lawyer and that the judge gave erroneous
instructions to the jury.
Brown's appeal to the Virginia court, also filed Monday, argued there's a
chance he could be awake and suffer pain during his execution.
His lawyers contend that the state's plan to require that a doctor and a
nurse observe a brain wave monitor was insufficient. The defense also
questioned the medical team's credentials.
The response by Special Deputy Attorney General Thomas Pittman said prior
testimony shows "that the likelihood of (Brown) experiencing any pain
during the execution is remote to nonexistent."
U.S. District Court Judge Malcolm Howard has refused to issue a stay for
Brown, saying Monday that the state had taken sufficient precautions to
ensure that Brown would remain asleep during his execution.
Pittman's response said the state bought a monitor specifically to measure
consciousness and is prepared to administer additional doses of sodium
pentothal if the machine indicates he is not fully asleep.
"These further safeguards diminish to infinitesimal the probability of
(Brown's) being conscious" upon receiving the standard dose of the lethal
drug combination, Pittman wrote.
The appeal before the Supreme Court argued that the trial judge erred in
telling jury members that they could not consider mitigating factors in
deciding on a sentence unless they agreed unanimously.
(source: Associated Press)
VIRGINIA:
Families of 9/11 Victims Testify for Moussaoui----His defense hopes some
relatives' messages of healing will soften the jury deciding his fate.
Defense attorneys for Zacarias Moussaoui on Wednesday presented their own
group of Sept. 11 victims, whose message of forgiveness was strikingly
different from what had been heard in the courtroom so far.
None of the half-dozen defense witnesses - parents who lost children, a
wife missing her husband, a son without a father - was asked whether the
jury should spare the life of the admitted Al Qaeda terrorist. They spoke
instead of the changes in their lives over the last 4 1/2 years and their
refusal to, as one put it, "get caught up in a whirlpool of frustration
and sadness and anger."
Whereas family members testifying for the government had described broken
lives and monumental despair, those called by the defense said they were
finding ways to move past their grief.
The prosecution's witnesses had told of children failing at school and of
parents so traumatized that they still could not leave their homes. The
defense witnesses said they had joined support groups to understand
radical Islam and were reaching out for other ways to end mistrust between
2 cultures.
About 40 relatives of the dead had taken the stand for the prosecution;
most broke into tears. Some sobbed.
None of the 6 who testified Wednesday for the defense cried, although a
man whose father had died nearly lost his composure when he said he and
his father had luckily mended their estranged relationship before that
fateful day.
"I realize now how precious life is," said Anthony Aversano, whose father,
Louis, was killed in the World Trade Center. "How I fight the terror in me
today is to live my life well."
Moussaoui pleaded guilty to capital murder last year. Although he was in
jail for a visa violation on Sept. 11, the jury determined in the first
part of his sentencing trial that he was eligible for the death penalty,
because if he had told FBI agents about the plot, they could have acted to
halt the attacks, which killed nearly 3,000 people.
Using Sept. 11 victims was a gamble for the defense, since it meant again
exposing the jury to the horrors of that morning - but the nine male and
three female jurors showed little emotion. Their verdict of death or life
in prison could come next week.
Marilynn Rosenthal of Ann Arbor, Mich., said she was coping by researching
a book about Al Qaeda and the kind of man who would pilot the plane that
crashed into the World Trade Center, killing her son, Josh.
"We all have a very strong feeling that we are not going to get caught up
in a whirlpool of frustration and sadness and anger," she said. "Everyone
in the family wants something good and positive to come out of what
happened to Josh, and to all the sons and daughters, and to our country."
Robin Theurkauf's husband, Tom, also was killed at the World Trade Center.
She quickly went back to work as a teacher, and their 3 sons are adjusting
well in school. But she made it clear that their father was never coming
back, something many of the prosecution witnesses indicated that they were
unable to explain to their children.
"I didn't want them to have any glimmer of hope," she said. "We made quite
sure of that.. We are healing ourselves in our own house."
She has begun taking divinity classes at Yale University, near her home in
Connecticut. "We are all sinners and broken people," she said. "On the
other hand, we are all children of God."
Patricia Perry of Long Island, N.Y., was proud of the bravery of her son,
John, an off-duty New York City police officer last seen with a colleague
directing those fleeing from the burning towers.
"They didn't want them to be frightened," she said. "And they were not in
great fear for their own lives - until the towers came down."
All life is special, she said, adding: "We were most blessed he was our
son."
Orlando Rodriguez teaches criminology in White Plains, N.Y. Since the
death of his son, Greg, in the World Trade Center, he has started a new
class on the roots of terrorism. Through his students, he said, he is
tempering his grief.
He also is trying to adopt his son's outlook on life: "He always had a
capacity to look at people as human beings, regardless of their faults."
And Donald Bane, an Episcopal priest who lives near Dover, Del., responded
to the death of his son, Michael, in the World Trade Center by taking
classes in Muslim-Christian culture.
"That gave me some feeling of release, instead of just nurturing anger -
of doing something that will help this not happen again," he said.
They miss Michael greatly, Bane said, but know that his grit and optimism
live on: On the day he died, his stepmother had a vision of him walking
down a flight of stairs, looking back at her.
"He said," Bane told the jurors, "he would be all right."
(source: Los Angeles Times)
[Deathpenalty] death penalty news----TEXAS, TENN., USA, N.C., VA.
Rick Halperin Thu, 20 Apr 2006 10:06:28 -0500 (Central Daylight Time)
