Jan. 20
OHIO:
ACLU asks Ohio Gov. John Kasich to halt executions
The American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio is asking Gov. John Kasich to halt
executions.
The ACLU sent a letter to Kasich today asking him to use his executive
authority in light of the questions raised after Thursday's execution of Dennis
McGuire. The state used a new drug cocktail in McGuire's execution by lethal
injection that witnesses say left him clenching his fists and gasping for air
for more than 20 minutes before he died.
Ohio has 5 more executions scheduled for 2014, all that could involve the same
drug combination.
"This is not about Dennis McGuire, his terrible crimes or the crimes of others
who await execution on death row," Christine Link, executive director of the
ACLU of Ohio said in the letter. "It is about our duty as a society that sits
in judgment of those who are convicted of crimes to treat them humanely and
ensure their punishment does not violate the Constitution."
Link noted the Ohio Supreme Court Taskforce on the Administration of the Death
Penalty is expected to finish its recommendations within a few months and
asked, "Is not now the time to step back and pause?"
(source: Akron Beacon Journal Online)
*************
Legislative Democrats push anti-death penalty bills following controversial
execution
In the wake of Dennis McGuire's controversial execution last week, legislative
Democrats are ramping up efforts to halt - or at least modify - the death
penalty in Ohio.
State Sen. Edna Brown, a Toledo Democrat, called for an immediate moratorium on
the death penalty and announced she would introduce legislation to abolish its
practice in the state. Brown sponsored a similar bill in 2011.
In addition, Democratic state Rep. Bob Hagan of Youngstown said in a release
that he's introducing a bill that would require the governor and the state's
prisons chief to be personally present during all future executions.
Both bills come after McGuire, convicted of raping, choking and stabbing a
22-year-old woman in 1989, was the 1st person in the United States to be put to
death using a new and untried lethal-injection cocktail involving midazolam, a
sedative, and hydromorphone, a morphine derivative.
McGuire made several loud snorting sounds during his execution last Thursday,
which took more than 15 minutes and was one of the longest executions since
Ohio resumed using capital punishment in 1999.
Brown said in a release that the circumstances of McGuire's death were
appalling.
"This flawed execution reinforces my belief that the death penalty is an
outdated method of punishment that has no place in civilized society," she
said.
In addition, an already-introduced House bill to abolish the death penalty will
come before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday.
House Bill 385 would substitute capital punishment with life imprisonment, with
parole options after 20 or 30 years for some of those who plead guilty to or
are convicted of aggravated murder.
Cleveland-area Democratic Reps. Dan Ramos of Lorain and Nickie Antonio of
Lakewood introduced the legislation last month.
Ramos and Antonio have cited reasons such as DNA evidence testing and racial
disparities in sentencing as reasons to abolish capital punishment.
All 3 Democratic bills face an uphill climb in the Ohio General Assembly, as
Republicans have significant majorities in both the House and Senate.
Ohio turned to the new drug cocktail last fall after the European manufacturers
of the state's previous execution drug, pentobarbital, blocked further sales,
citing European Union law and claiming the drug isn't meant to be used to kill
people.
McGuire's children, Amber and Dennis Ray McGuire, are planning to file a suit
in federal court this week claiming that their father's death was
unconstitutionally cruel and unusual, according to their attorney, Jon Paul
Rion.
The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction will now conduct a review of
Ohio'??s death penalty procedures, as is standard policy after every execution,
according to department spokeswoman JoEllen Smith.
Smith said she wasn't sure when that review would be completed, though she
anticipated it would be done by March 19, when Gregory Lott of Cleveland is
scheduled to become the next death row inmate to be executed.
Lott, convicted in 1987 of robbing and murdering an 82-year-old East Cleveland
man, is also planning to file a federal lawsuit challenging the use of Ohio's
new lethal-injection drugs, his attorney said last week.
(source: cleveland.com)
KENTUCKY:
Ky high court to hear death penalty appeal in Bullitt case
The Kentucky Supreme Court is set to hear an appeal in the long-running case of
an escaped inmate from an Oklahoma prison facing a death sentence in the
slaying of a Kentucky distillery worker.
The justices will hear the case of 56-year-old Michael Dale St. Clair on Feb.
13 in Frankfort. St. Clair is appealing the conviction and sentence out of
Bullitt County in the 1991 shooting death of Francis "Frank" Brady of
Bardstown.
St. Clair has also been sentenced to death in Hardin County on a charge of
capital kidnapping stemming from Brady's disappearance from a rest stop along
Interstate 65.
Prosecutors said Brady and another escaped inmate, Dennis Gene Reese, were on a
multi-state crime spree when they kidnapped Brady to steal his truck and later
killed him near Lebanon Junction.
Reese and St. Clair had broken out of the county jail in Durant, Okla., on
Sept. 19, 1991. At the time, St. Clair was serving 4 life sentences for murder
and Reese was awaiting trial on charges of strangling and beating a woman to
death.
The 2 men are also charged in New Mexico with the 1991 kidnapping and shooting
death of 22-year-old Timothy Keeling of Denver.
Prosecutors say St. Clair and Reese posed as buyers interested in purchasing
Keeling's truck, then kidnapped him. Reese drove as Keeling sat next to him and
St. Clair held a .357 magnum revolver in the passenger seat. They stopped near
Clayton, N.M., a small crossroads town, where prosecutors say St. Clair ordered
Keeling out of the truck and shot him.
St. Clair's case has bounced around Kentucky???s legal system for two decades.
He has been tried three times in Hardin County.
(source: Courier-Journal)
MISSOURI:
Missouri Death-Row Inmate: State Improperly Stored Drug
Missouri's prison system is improperly storing expired doses of a new lethal
injection drug provided by an Oklahoma pharmacy not licensed to do business in
Missouri, attorneys for a death row inmate facing execution this month said in
a complaint filed Friday.
Attorneys for Herbert Smulls have asked the Oklahoma State Board of Pharmacy to
recall an "expired, unsafe" batch of the sedative pentobarbital provided to
Missouri by an unidentified Oklahoma compounding pharmacy. The complaint says
the pharmacy gave erroneous instructions to store the drug at room temperature,
a violation of accepted pharmaceutical standards.
Defense attorney Cheryl Pilate said David Dormire, a top Missouri Department of
Corrections official who oversees its 21 prisons, testified in a Wednesday
deposition that he is keeping the compounded pentobarbital in his office until
Smull's scheduled Jan. 29 execution. Industry standards say such drugs should
only be used within 24 to 48 hours when kept at room temperature, Pilate said.
Smulls was convicted of killing a St. Louis County jeweler in 1991.
"They are dangerously indifferent to widely recognized and accepted standards
for the proper storage of compounded drugs," Pilate said.
Department director George Lombardi and a spokesman for the Missouri Department
Corrections did not immediately respond to interview requests. Calls to the
Oklahoma regulatory agency were directed to a compliance officer who is out of
the office until next week.
Missouri switched to its one-drug execution method late last year and has since
killed 2 inmates. The complaint filed Friday includes Missouri state records
showing the pentobarbital given to both inmates had expired 8 to 10 days
earlier.
The compounding pharmacy's identity is blacked out of the documents obtained by
Smulls' attorney under state public records laws and through legal proceedings.
Missouri says the pharmacy is a member of the execution team protected under
state privacy laws. Other states have taken similar positions, in part because
of backlash against the drug makers by anti-death penalty advocates.
Missouri and other states had used a 3-drug execution method for decades, but
pharmaceutical companies recently stopped selling those drugs to prisons.
Several states now get their execution drugs from compounding pharmacies, which
custom mix drugs for individual clients. Unlike typical pharmaceutical firms,
compounding pharmacies are not regulated by the U.S. Food and Drug
Administration, though they are subject to state regulations.
Missouri's rocky efforts to renew capital punishment continue to be
scrutinized. A Democratic state lawmaker says he plans to file legislation to
place a one-year moratorium on executions and create an oversight commission to
further study the state's use of capital punishment. The Republican state
auditor last week announced a new review of the Missouri Department of
Corrections, though officials emphasized it was not triggered by recent
developments.
In Ohio, the Thursday execution of Dennis McGuire took nearly 30 minutes as he
gasped and struggled for breath during a 10-minute stretch. That execution also
relied on a new drug protocol - intravenous doses of the sedative midazolam and
the painkiller hydromorphone - being used for the 1st time after the state's
supply of pentobarbital ran out.
(source: Associated Press)
***************
Thomson: death penalty's repeal not expected
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the resumption of the death penalty in
Missouri.
Now, some lawmakers are calling on the state to halt executions, or repeal
capital punishment again. Some of the protests center around the type of drug
used in lethal injections of death row inmates. Missouri State Representative
Mike Thomson tells KMA News the call to eliminate the death penalty is heard
every year--but doesn't get very far.
"There's always a few groups that not only want to halt these, or slow them
down, but cut the death penalty out completely," said Thomson. "That is a
debate we have down here, maybe not on the floor. But ever since I've been
here, every year, someone wants to bring that back up."
The Maryville Republican believes efforts to repeal the death penalty won't go
far this year, either. Thomson says it's more likely legislators will consider
changes in Missouri's mandatory sentencing laws. Many lawmakers believe the
state needs to consider alternative forms of sentencing for prisoners facing
less serious offenses, in order to ease prison overcrowding.
"We look at that about every year," he said. "Sometimes they move, sometimes
they don't. There are people who don't feel like those who get minor drug
charges, for example, ought to be in prison. There ought to be some other type
of retribution for them.
"I would say, yes, that will be brought up this year," Thomson said. "There
will be some type of debate on that. Where it goes, I don't know."
Sentencing reform is a major issue in the Nebraska Legislature this year.
(source: KMA News)
USA:
King's 1st fight was against the death penalty
Bus segregation was not the 1st issue that grabbed the attention of Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. when the young pastor moved to Montgomery, Ala., in 1954. His
1st campaign in his new home focused on a sentence of death for Jeremiah
Reeves, a 16-year-old black boy convicted of raping a white woman. Reeves had
confessed under duress, but later recanted, a claim widely believed in the
black community. Dr. King joined the NAACP's efforts to save Reeves' life.
"In the years that (Reeves) sat in jail," Dr. King wrote in "Stride Toward
Freedom," his book about the Montgomery movement, "several white men in Alabama
had also been charged with rape; but their accusers were Negro girls. They were
seldom arrested; if arrested, they were soon released by the grand jury; none
was ever brought to trial."
Reeves was found guilty by an all-white jury and put to death on March 28,
1958.
Such gerrymandered justice was a well-established fact of life in the South,
going back to the days of slavery when blacks were commonly executed or lynched
for crimes that drew less harsh punishment - or none - when committed by
whites. This discriminatory pattern continued after emancipation, as Stuart
Banner documents in his book "The Death Penalty: An American History."
"In the 1st half of the (20th) century," he writes, "the southern states
punished many crimes by death only if they were committed by blacks, in the 2nd
half of the century they accomplished the same result by delegating to
all-white juries the discretion to choose capital or noncapital punishment."
Sadly, the role played by race in decisions about the death penalty persists.
According to the D.C.-based Death Penalty Information Center, recent studies
"add to an overwhelming body of evidence that race plays a decisive role in the
question of who lives and dies by execution in this country. Racial effects
have been shown not just in isolated instances, but in virtually every state
for which disparities have been estimated and over an extensive period of
time."
New Hampshire is a case in point.
Michael Addison was charged with capital murder for killing Michael Briggs, a
police officer, in 2006.
John Brooks was charged with capital murder for hiring 3 men to assist him in
killing Jack Reid, a handyman, in 2005.
The trials took place in adjacent counties in 2008.
Addison, a poor black man with a prior criminal record, was found guilty and
sentenced to death.
Brooks, a white millionaire businessman, was found guilty but spared the death
penalty.
Monica Foster, Brooks' attorney, said of her client after the sentence was
announced: "He's not the kind of people juries routinely kill."
Racial disparities in the use of the death penalty have been a focus of
scholarly research for decades. According to the authors of a 2013 study, "The
most consistent and robust finding in this literature is that even after
controlling for dozens and sometimes hundreds of case-related variables,
Americans who murder whites are more likely to receive a death sentence than
those who murder blacks."
In a study of 445 jury-eligible people across 6 states which most actively
impose the death penalty, these researchers found jurors associate white lives
with "worth" or "value" and black lives with "worthless" or "expendable." That
ought to be a wake-up call for anyone interested in the fairness of our
judicial system.
As for Dr. King, it is worth noting that his comments on Jeremiah Reeves did
not directly reject capital punishment, just "the unequal justice of Southern
courts." As King matured into the leader we honor today, his critique of
injustice deepened and blended with a prescription for change.
"Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that," he famously said.
Dr. King told the world on the day he received the Nobel Peace Prize, "Man must
evolve for all human conflict a method which rejects revenge, aggression and
retaliation."
The realization of King's vision is far off. Abolition of the death penalty
would be an excellent step in the right direction.
(source: Arnie Alpert is New Hampshire director for the American Friends
Service Committee and serves on the board of the N.H. Coalition to Abolish the
Death Penalty----Sentinel Source)
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