November 7
TEXAS:
Death sentence for sex offender who killed prison officer
A convicted sex offender found guilty of killing a female corrections officer
in Texas has been sentenced to death.
A Jones County jury on Tuesday ordered the death penalty for 24-year-old
Dillion Compton.
Compton was convicted of capital murder Oct. 15 in the July 2016 slaying of
guard Mari Johnson, whose beaten body was found in a storage unit at the
Robertson prison in Abilene.
The killing occurred while Compton was incarcerated for aggravated sexual
assault of a child in a 2010 attack on a Dallas County girl.
Prosecutors say Johnson suffered blunt force trauma and a crushed throat.
Compton was found with scratches on his face and his skin underneath Johnson's
fingernails.
Compton's defense attorney said Compton and Johnson had a sexual relationship.
(source: Associated Press)
USA:
The Kafkaesque Machinery of the Death Penalty in America
Capital punishment is losing support in the United States, but what about on
the Supreme Court?
The Supreme Court, its conservative majority in place for years, no longer
debates whether state-imposed death is morally right or constitutionally valid.
Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation last month all but guarantees this will
remain true for another generation, despite Justice Stephen Breyer’s best
efforts. Since the court doesn’t weigh the substance of the death penalty, it
instead focuses on the aesthetics of the system it oversees.
These aesthetics are vital to maintaining public support for the system.
American capital punishment is ritualized, with a carefully orchestrated set of
appeals that often culminates in a last-minute denial from the Supreme Court.
It’s also theatrical: Executions are choreographed to produce a quiet spectacle
for an audience of witnesses, who then convey what they see to the wider world.
Justice Harry Blackmun, concluding in 1994 that the system no longer met
constitutional standards, described it as “the machinery of death.”
The court’s docket this term shows how much that machinery has deteriorated
since then, and raises questions about how long the justices can uphold capital
punishment while Americans increasingly lose faith in it.
The court first heard oral arguments on Tuesday in Bucklew v. Precythe, an
unusual lethal-injection case. A Missouri jury sentenced Russell Bucklew to
death in 1998 for murdering a man he found with his ex-girlfriend, whom Bucklew
then kidnapped and raped. Bucklew does not challenge the validity of his
sentence or any of the procedural aspects surrounding it. Instead, he’s
challenging the manner in which Missouri seeks to end his life.
Bucklew suffers from a gruesome condition known as cavernous hemangioma, which
creates malformations in some of the body’s blood vessels. Over time, those
malformations swell and fill with blood until they form benign tumors. The rare
condition can manifest anywhere on the body. Bucklew’s case is even more
unusual because it primarily affects his mouth and throat. His uvula is covered
in blood-filled tumors that make it harder to eat, breathe, and sleep. There is
no cure for the condition, and it will progressively worsen for as long as he
lives.
Missouri plans to execute him using the sedative pentobarbital. Bucklew
contends that his medical condition raises the likelihood that the lethal
injection will go awry. In his brief for the court, his lawyers warned that
“the violence of his choking as he slips into unconsciousness will likely cause
his tumors to rupture and lead him to aspirate his own blood.” To prevent this,
Bucklew asks to be put to death by lethal gas, specifically by asphyxiating him
with nitrogen.
State officials oppose Bucklew’s request on both substantive and procedural
grounds. Neither Missouri nor any other state has performed a nitrogen
asphyxiation, the state argues, so it does not count as a “known and available”
procedure under the Supreme Court’s precedents. Bucklew argues that all he has
to do under those precedents is demonstrate that alternative methods exist.
“How a state implements those other options ... are ultimately up to the
state,” he told the court. “An inmate need not specify every last step the
state should take along the path to killing him.”
Since the 2008 case Baze v. Rees, the court has favored a state’s desire to
perform executions over concerns that its methods may be cruel and unusual. “We
begin with the principle ... that capital punishment is constitutional,” Chief
Justice John Roberts wrote for the plurality. “It necessarily follows that
there must be a means of carrying it out.” That logic isn’t airtight, to say
the least. But it’s the law of the land. The court’s conservative justices took
it even further in Glossip v. Gross in 2015. In a 5-4 decision, they gave
Oklahoma the green light after the state botched 2 executions, and set a high
legal threshold for future challenges to execution methods.
On Tuesday, court-watchers noted a potential change in tone from Roberts, and
tough questioning of Missouri’s lawyer by Kavanaugh. “Chief Justice John
Roberts asked serious, carefully considered questions about particular
execution procedures, the court’s precedents, and the ramifications of those
precedents,” Chris Geidner, BuzzFeed News’ legal editor, reported on Twitter.
While Bucklew is challenging how he will leave death row, Curtis Flowers is
challenging how he arrived there. His case, Flowers v. Mississippi, has a
gobsmacking procedural history even by the standards of death penalty
prosecutions. Local prosecutors have put him on trial six times to convict him
for the murders of 4 people at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi, in
1996. The first 3 trials led to convictions but were overturned on appeal
because local district attorney Doug Evans had gone to extraordinary lengths to
keep black Mississippians off the jury. Jurors failed to reach a unanimous
verdict during his 4th and 5th trials. The 6th trial saw Flowers, who is black,
convicted of all 4 murders.
Flowers argues that prosecutors also relied on racially discriminatory
practices during his sixth trial. Evans allowed a single black juror and a
single black alternate juror during the jury selection process, and struck the
rest. This tactic mirrored Evans’s past efforts to craft disproportionately
white juries; the Mississippi Supreme Court even admonished him after Flowers’s
3rd trial for demonstrating “as strong a prima facie case of racial
discrimination as [it had] ever seen.” This time, however, the court upheld
Flowers’s death sentence in a sharply divided decision.
Four justices on the Mississippi Supreme Court dissented from the court’s
ruling, including Justice Leslie King. Although 42 % of the panel of
prospective jurors were African Americans, he noted, “the jury that convicted
and sentenced Flowers consisted of 8 % African Americans.” King also pointed
out that Evans asked black prospective jurors 3 times as many questions as
their white counterparts, and that his questions for white jurors were
perfunctory re-phrasings of those already asked by the trial judge. “Because of
that failure, I cannot conclude that Flowers received a fair trial, nor can I
conclude that prospective jurors were not subjected to impermissible
discrimination,” King wrote.
When it took Flowers’s case last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to
consider whether the Mississippi Supreme Court properly applied precedents that
forbid racial discrimination in jury selection. But there are also serious
doubts that Flowers is guilty of the crime for which he has been repeatedly
prosecuted. Local civil-rights groups, including the Magnolia Bar Association
and the Innocence Project New Orleans, told the Supreme Court that Flowers’s
case was “built on faulty eyewitnesses, improper forensics, and false
confessions from untruthful informants.” They noted that Evans, the prosecutor
who sought to craft all-white juries to convict Flowers, had attended meetings
organized by the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist group
that opposes “all efforts to mix the races of mankind.” Though the justices
will not be technically considering whether Flowers is innocent or guilty, this
background may make them more receptive to his case’s procedural flaws.
Bucklew and Flowers’s cases ultimately are about whether, and how, their lives
will be ended by the government. But they also raise deeper issues with the
death penalty. Is it administered in a needlessly cruel way when it risks
forcing a man to drown in his own blood? Is it handed out by a local criminal
justice system that appears inextricably driven by racism? The justices will
have to wrestle with the age-old challenge of maintaining public confidence in
American capital punishment. What they may ultimately find is that the system
does not deserve it.
(source: Matt Ford is a staff writer at The New Republic----newrepublic.com)
****************
Supreme Court troubled by planned use of lethal injection to execute prisoner
with rare condition
3 years after narrowly upholding lethal injection in executions, the Supreme
Court appeared troubled Tuesday that it could cause "gruesome and brutal pain"
for a Missouri prisoner with a rare medical condition.
Despite two lower court rulings upholding the state's plan to execute convicted
murderer Russell Bucklew by lethal injection, a slim majority of justices
seemed likely to send the case back for further review, including consideration
of alternate methods.
Such a decision would expose a potential problem with the high court's 2008 and
2015 decisions upholding lethal injection. In the latter case from Oklahoma,
the court's conservative justices ruled that the method must be shown to be
riskier than a known alternative.
Bucklew, 50, has proposed the use of nitrogen gas, a method that has not been
tested in any state, rather than those used in recent years: electrocution in
Tennessee and firing squad in Utah. The state argues its 1-drug lethal
injection is safer.
"Are you saying even if the method creates gruesome and brutal pain, you can
still do it because there's no alternative?" new Associate Justice Brett
Kavanaugh, who may hold the deciding vote, asked State Solicitor D. John Sauer.
"Is there any limit on that?"
Bucklew was convicted of murder, rape and kidnapping in 1996 and has not
challenged his conviction or death sentence. Instead, he claims that a rare and
incurable condition that causes blood-filled tumors in his throat, neck and
face creates the risk of extreme pain and suffocation.
Missouri convicted murderer Russell Bucklew is fighting for the right to be
executed by lethal gas, rather than lethal injection.
The high court blocked his execution twice before, first in 2014 following a
series of botched lethal injections in other states, and again last March. The
most recent action was by a 5-4 vote, with Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy
siding with the court's four liberals.
Kavanaugh succeeded Kennedy last month following a contentious confirmation
battle that he won 50-48. It was not a surprise that on Tuesday, both lawyers
continuously pitched their arguments in his direction.
The Supreme Court ruled 5-4 in 2015 that Oklahoma could use a more
controversial, three-drug lethal injection protocol because challengers had not
proven it would not mask excessive pain and had not identified a better
alternative. That decision, written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, prompted
Associate Justices Stephen Breyer and Ruth Bader Ginsburg to suggest that
capital punishment itself might be unconstitutional.
Hello! We’ve got complete midterm election coverage right here. Let’s begin!
"While most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good
fortune," Alito wrote in 2015. "Holding that the Eighth Amendment demands the
elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death
penalty altogether."
During Tuesday's oral argument, Alito appeared most dissatisfied with Bucklew's
challenge. Told by his attorney, Robert Hochman, that nitrogen gas would be a
quicker death than lethal injection, Alito said, "What are the numbers? And
where does that come from?"
Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concern that Bucklew's chosen alternative
has never been used, even though several states authorize it.
"Things can go wrong regardless of the method of execution," he said. "And it
seems to me that if you have a method that no state has ever used, that that
danger is magnified."
In the 2015 case, Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote the principal dissent
for the four more liberal justices, charging that the ruling "leaves
petitioners exposed to what may well be the chemical equivalent of being burned
at the stake."
On Tuesday, Breyer raised both that specter and the feeling of being "drowned
to death slowly over a period of time." He asked whether Missouri was arguing
such pain and suffering should be allowed.
"The Constitution would rule out burning at the stake, absolutely," Sauer said.
(source: USA Today)
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