May 28
NEW HAMPSHIRE:
Death penalty's meaning: Its end would diminish our state
Doing away with the death penalty in New Hampshire, which now seems likely, is
a step that is likely never to be reversed. It is unfortunate, because doing
away with something that has been more about its symbolism than its actual use
is likely to have unintended and dangerous consequences.
The message it sends to New Hampshire and its law enforcement community is a
terrible one. The men and women who are our peace officers go to work every day
or night knowing that this may be their last on this earth.
It is not so much that an individual policeman’s life is worth more than that
of any other individual. The point of largely restricting and reserving the
ultimate penalty for those who would kill a police officer is to say that the
police profession itself is so important to the public’s safety and security
that we, the people of New Hampshire, endorse this means of punishment.
Even if the “deterrent’’ factor in the death penalty is limited to the
cop-killer being executed, and we don’t believe it is, it is worth it. But the
greater point is to tell one and all that, here in New Hampshire, we place a
special value on those who risk their lives as part of their job for us.
The state Senate will vote soon on whether to do away with the death penalty.
If you care about those who protected your safety in your state and community,
please let your state senator know that now.
(source: Editorial, Union Leader)
FLORIDA:
Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala announces she will not seek
re-election
Orange-Osceola State Attorney Aramis Ayala announced in a video posted to
Facebook Tuesday that she will not be seeking re-election.
Ayala cited her personal views of Florida’s death penalty law in the
announcement.
“It became abundantly clear to me that death penalty law in the state of
Florida is in direct conflict with my view and vision for the administration of
justice,” Ayala said.
Ayala announced in March 2017 that her office would no longer seek the death
penalty in any case, a decision that made national headlines.
Gov. Rick Scott reassigned her death penalty-eligible cases to State Attorney
Brad King. The governor's move was upheld by the state supreme court.
The court said Ayala was wrong to have a blanket policy of not seeking the
death penalty.
Following the court’s decision Ayala announced that she would begin seeking the
death penalty in future cases if it was unanimously recommended by a panel of
her assistant prosecutors.
The most high-profile case transferred to King was the prosecution of Markeith
Loyd.
Ayala said she's proud to have helped "raise the standard of prosecutorial
responsibility."
She defeated incumbent state attorney Jeff Ashton in 2016.
(source: WESH news)
ALABAMA----impending execution
Alabama prepares to execute second man in 2 weeks
Alabama on Thursday plans to execute the 2nd man in 2 weeks by lethal
injection. Nearly two months after his 1st execution attempt was called off at
the last minute, Christopher Lee Price is scheduled to die on Thursday at
Holman prison in Atmore. Price was sentenced to death for the 1991 murder of
Fayette County preacher Bill Lynn.
The state originally planned to kill Price on April 11, but he received a
last-minute stay of execution from federal and appellate courts.
While Alabama appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court to lift the stay, the court
did not issue an opinion before midnight, when Price's death warrant expired.
Price had argued Alabama's lethal injection protocol has "botched" previous
executions and could cause unconstitutional pain and suffering. Price instead
asked to opt for death by nitrogen gas, a method Alabama approved last year but
has yet to develop protocol for carrying out. The state argued Price failed to
opt in for the nitrogen method in 2018 in accordance to a state statute, though
his lawyer alleged he wasn't properly notified about the opt-in period.
Before his planned execution in April, Price requested to be married. He and
his fiancée were married in the Holman Correctional Facility yard on April 10.
Price was 19 when he and a friend approached Lynn outside of his Bazemore home
3 days before Christmas. The 2 attacked Lynn while he was checking on the power
box. Lynn's wife, Bessie, later testified that the 2 assailants then beat her
before stealing jewelry and money from their home.
Bill Lynn, who prosecutors say was cut or stabbed 38 times with a sword and
dagger, died at a hospital approximately 45 minutes after the attack.
Prison officials said on April 11 that Bessie Lynn was prepared to witness
Price's execution, along with Bill Lynn's 2 daughters, 2 grandsons and a
nephew.
A Fayette County jury in 1993 sentenced Price to death by a vote of 10-2. Price
later tried to contest his sentence, alleging his original trial attorney was
unprepared for the penalty phase of his trial. Price argued the lawyer failed
to offer evidence that the then-teenager was psychologically traumatized
following years of physical and sexual abuse at the hands of his mother's
boyfriends. The Supreme Court declined to review his case in 2013.
Price's scheduled execution is the state's 2nd in May. On May 16, Alabama
killed Michael Brandon Samra, who was convicted for his role in a quadruple
homicide.
Alabama in February executed Domineque Ray after an 11th-hour U.S. Supreme
Court ruling vacated a stay of execution pending a religious rights claim. The
court ruled by a narrow majority Ray had waited too late to bring the issue to
light.
Ray, a Muslim, had argued Alabama's practice of including a Christian prison
chaplain in the execution chamber was in violation of the First Amendment. Ray
sought to have his imam present in the death chamber at the time of his death,
but the state said it would allow only trained prison employees in the chamber.
In subsequent court filings, Alabama now says it has altered its execution
protocol to exclude any religious leader, including the Holman prison chaplain,
from the death chamber.
Ray's execution and the last-minute delay in Price's scheduled April execution,
along with a handful of cases in other states, have highlighted tensions on the
nation's highest court. On May 13, the court issued an unprecedented trove of
documents, which The Associated Press deemed "internal squabbling" over the
death penalty.
(sources: Monntgomery Advertiser & Associated Press)
*****************
Alabama set to execute Price for 1991 death of pastor
Alabama is scheduled to execute Christopher Lee Price this week for his part in
a 1991 sword-and-dagger slaying of a pastor in Fayette County.
Thursday's execution has been at the center of unusually public squabbling at
the Supreme Court over capital punishment.
Court has set a new execution date for Price on May 30. Price, 46, was
convicted in the 1991 robbery and slaying of Fayette County minister Bill Lynn.
Lynn was killed with a sword and knife just days before Christmas in 1991,
while he was wrapping presents for his grandchildren. He had over 30
inches-deep stab wounds and one of his arms was nearly severed. His wife,
Bessie Lynn, was injured in the attack but survived.
A federal judge stayed Price's execution in April after he raised challenges to
the state's lethal injection procedure. The Supreme Court fractured 5-4 along
liberal-conservative lines to overrule those orders and allow his execution to
go forward, but not before the midnight death warrant expired.
Justice Stephen Breyer admonished court conservatives for overruling 2 lower
court stays "in the middle of the night."
Justice Clarence Thomas later wrote a 14-page response saying there was
"nothing of substance" to Breyer's claims.
(source: Associated Press)
OHIO:
DeWine, prisons have no documents on Ohio’s new execution protocol
The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has been working for
months on Gov. Mike DeWine’s order to revamp Ohio’s execution protocol. But the
department says it hasn’t generated a single email or other written
communication related to the work.
The governor’s office suggests the lack of such documentation is intentional.
And that has critics accusing the administration of trying to avoid
transparency in an endeavor that in the past has been riddled with problems
carrying out the death penalty and obtaining the drugs to perform executions.
“The execution process across the United States has been plagued by secrecy and
a lack of transparency,” said Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information
Center, a national group that gathers information about how capital punishment
is practiced.
In Ohio, problems go at least as far back as 2014, when Dennis McGuire choked
and gasped for about 10 minutes before dying after being administered a new,
two-drug protocol. That prompted a three-year moratorium as prison officials
came up with a 3-drug protocol that still used midazolam — which has been used
in botched executions in at least 4 states — as the first in the procedure.
Since 2017, Ohio has conducted four more executions and abandoned a fifth when
prison workers couldn’t inject drugs into a man’s veins. Then, earlier this
year, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued a ruling that likened the Ohio
protocol to “waterboarding” and said it “would feel as though fire was being
poured” into a prisoner’s veins.
In response, DeWine postponed one execution and then three more as he ordered
the corrections department to devise a new lethal injection protocol. But as
corrections officials did, they had to contend with accusations that the state
was using subterfuge to obtain earlier execution drugs from manufacturers who
were adamantly opposed to their use in carrying out the death penalty.
Seeking to get an idea of what drugs the state is thinking of using and how it
plans to get them, The Dispatch filed an open records request in April with the
corrections department for all of its internal and external communication
regarding DeWine’s order and the development of the new protocol. Hearing
nothing, the paper last week asked about the status of the request. It received
a response the same day.
“After investigation and review of our agency records, we have determined that
we have no responsive records. Thank you for your patience,” spokeswoman Sara
French said in an email.
While it might seem implausible that such a weighty matter as devising a new
death-penalty protocol could be undertaken by a state agency without a single
email or memo being generated, DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney seemed to say that
was by design.
“Gov. DeWine agrees that execution protocol is a very sensitive issue, and that
sensitivity may not be appropriate for general email or common written
correspondence,” Tierney said in an email. “The governor speaks with Director
(Annette) Chambers-Smith regularly, and he will be receiving a full briefing on
this issue soon.
?(The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction) remains focused on
researching a new protocol using drugs that the state of Ohio can actually
obtain.”
Dunham, of the Death Penalty Information Center, said it appears that DeWine
and his administration are trying to keep the public out of the loop.
“What’s clear is that people don’t intentionally structure communications to
avoid putting things in writing unless there’s important information they don’t
want people to know,” he said.
Monica Nieporte, president and executive director of the Ohio News Media
Association, said the state should not try to devise something as important as
a new lethal injection protocol in secret.
“Since it appears that the work done on this issue has largely been done
through verbal conversation and, according to DRC, there is no supporting
documentation that is public record, it makes it very difficult for journalists
or citizens to determine what progress has been made on this topic,” she said
in an email. “Hopefully as their research winds down and they are at the point
of making recommendations, they will be providing some detailed explanations,
including documentation about how they made their conclusions.”
(source: The Columbus Dispatch)
USA:
Maybe our country can learn something from stoning
It’s not easy to find something positive to say about the method of execution
known as stoning, but I’m going to try before this column is finished.
Stoning is in the same category with flogging, torture and slavery, which in a
better world would have been abolished long ago. Alas, these dreadful practices
die hard; they persist, and in some cultures they are resurgent.
Brunei is a tiny nation on the island of Borneo. It is ruled by Sultan Hassanal
Bolkiah, who is fabulously wealthy, thanks to Brunei’s plentiful oil resources.
He lives in a 1,788-room palace and owns a gold-plated Rolls-Royce. Michael
Jackson performed for his 50th birthday.
The sultan serves as the country’s prime minister, foreign minister, finance
minister and defense minister. He is also the chief enforcer of religious
discipline, and he applies a harsh form of conservative Islam on his subjects.
He made news last month for implementing punishments such as amputation and
stoning for homosexuality, theft and adultery.
Stoning is probably the original form of capital punishment, the killing of an
offender by his community with the implements readily at hand. Stoning figures
prominently in Jewish history, but it survives today only in Islamic countries,
where it is legal but generally used only sporadically.
Under Iran’s penal code, for example, a man found guilty of adultery “shall be
buried in a ditch up to near his waist” and a woman “up to near her chest,” and
then they are “stoned to death.” It’s hard to imagine a death more primitive
and brutal.
The law’s language is complicated, subjective and often capricious. For
example, a man who escapes from the ditch goes free if his conviction was based
on his own confession. But if he was convicted based on the testimony of
others, he is forced back into the ditch and is stoned.
Further, Iran’s penal code is extremely specific about what constitutes a sex
act — I’ll spare you the details — but vague about what represents a proper
stone for use in the execution, which “shall not be too large to kill the
convict by 1 or 2 throws and at the same time shall not be too small to be
called a stone.”
Stoning is a savage business that has no place in a civilized culture. But I
said that I was going to say something positive about it. Here is a quirk of
stoning that might be instructive for our nation:
If a person is convicted of adultery based on his confession, the judge who has
applied the law throws the first stone, then others join in. If a person is
convicted based on the testimony of witnesses, the witnesses throw the first
stones, then the judge throws one and then the others.
What’s good about this? Stoning exposes the brutality of capital punishment by
requiring that the death sentence be carried out in a public and participatory
way. The members of the community closest to the case throw the first stones,
and every community member has an opportunity to witness and be a part of the
killing.
In our culture, we’ve gone to great lengths to do just the opposite. The last
public hanging was in 1936. Since then, executions have been carried out behind
closed doors, and we’ve found ways to make them considerably less brutal, and
thus more acceptable, than stoning.
Still, support for capital punishment shows signs of waning in our culture.
When they have the option, juries show a preference for life without parole
over death. How would they behave if the law required them to participate in
the execution? And how would the rest of us react if we were required to watch?
Should we bring back stoning? Of course not. But stoning differs from lethal
injection only as a matter of degree. As we practice capital punishment, it is
still brutal, ineffective, capricious and arbitrary. And until we abolish it,
any criticism of stoning in places such as Brunei and Iran rings hollow.
(source: John Crisp, Tribune News Service)
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