Death Penalty: Young US Lawyers Halting Executions

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/03/950/

Death Penalty: Young US Lawyers Halting Executions
by Adrianne Appel

BOSTON - Youthful idealism and perseverance are helping to win the day against the U.S. conservative establishment and its huge law enforcement resources in the life and death legal struggle to halt execution by lethal injection — and with that the final end to the death penalty in the country.”

Young, low-paid attorneys are involved. They are very dedicated,” Deborah Denno, professor of law at Fordham University and an expert on death penalty issues, told IPS. They were a “big force” for change. 0503 04

The lawyers — some fresh out of university — were helping to successfully convince one court after another that death by lethal injection might not actually be as painless as everyone supposed. That possibility raised the question whether a sentence to death by lethal injection was legal.

Lethal injections were first used for state killings in Texas in 1982. They were then quickly adopted by most other U.S. states as a more humane execution method than the electric chair or gas chambre. Thirty-eight of the 50 U.S. states still maintain the death penalty. All but one of these can legally use lethal injections.

Nine hundred and one people have so far been executed in this way in the U.S, according to the Washington-based Death Penalty Information Centre. There were 53 executions in the U.S. last year, 52 of which were conducted by lethal injection. So far this year there have been 15 executions in the U.S. — all by lethal injection.

more...

[acmavm]

1. Nebraska Supreme Court blocks Moore's execution

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LINCOLN - The electric chair must first go on trial before Carey Dean Moore or any of the nine other men on Nebraska's death row are executed.

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http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2798&u_sid=2376698

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Hell, here in the armpit of the country we're not even civilized enough for lethal injections. WE like to fry people still.

[dsweet]

2. It's a medical procedure performed by the unqualified.

From here:

Medical ethics preclude doctors from participating in executions. However, a doctor will certify the inmate is dead. This lack of medical participation can be problematic because often injections are performed by inexperienced technicians or orderlies. If a member of the execution team injects the drugs into a muscle instead of a vein, or if the needle becomes clogged, extreme pain can result. Many prisoners have damaged veins resulting from intravenous drug use and it is sometimes difficult to find a usable vein, resulting in long delays while the inmate remains strapped to the gurney. (Ecenbarger, 1994 and Weisberg, 1991)

[stompk]

3. I have always been for the death penalty

however, as many people as have been freed just this year, by DNA evidence, I am rapidly becoming anti-death-penalty. Who knows that technology we could have in a few years that could free more innocent people ?

that said, if you killed someone on camera, with 3-4 physical witnesses, why should we spend millions of dollars over 50 years "storing" you. That said, lethal injection may not be perfect, but it beats the snot out of the electric chair or hanging.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Drugs which paralyze the condemned, keep him from shrieking, invisible pain,

known only to him, suffering another can't see, which goes on interminably, as it may seem to the prisoner, may be just as horrific to him as the flames were which blazed up and danced high in the air above the head of one of Florida's last electric chair occupants, Tiny Davis.

People who have never been caught in a crime, and have never been sent through the justice system seem to relish the thought of others meeting unbearable suffering at the hands of an executioner. I'll bet it would devastate them if they learned this country had joined the rest of the developed nations and put aside the death penalty.

[dsweet]

4. Imprisonment is cheaper

From here:

Capital punishment in California, as in every other state, is more expensive than a life imprisonment sentence without the opportunity of parole. These costs are not the result of frivolous appeals but rather the result of Constitutionally mandated safeguards...