Category: Death Penalty

Florida’s Single-Juror-Veto Law Defeats Justice in Parkland Case

by · Oct 13, 2022 2:45 pm

For the sentencing phase of capital cases, some states have true unanimous verdict laws. The jury must deliberate until it is unanimous one way or the other, just as they do in the guilt phase. If they are truly hung, the penalty trial is done over before another jury. California and Arizona have true unanimity laws.

Unfortunately, when Florida rewrote its sentencing law in the wake of a Supreme Court decision throwing out the old one, the Legislature unwisely chose a single-juror-veto law. In this system, if the jury votes 11-1 for the death penalty, the view of the one prevails over the view of the eleven, and the defendant gets a life sentence. That system introduces needless arbitrariness into sentencing, as the luck of getting one juror who has hard-core anti-death-penalty views (and possibly lied on voir dire) or who is willing to accept claimed mitigation that most people reject will result in a life sentence for one defendant under circumstances where others will be sentenced to death. Continue reading . . .

Murderer Who Won SCOTUS Spiritual Advisor Ruling Faces Execution

by · Oct 5, 2022 2:00 pm

A Texas man convicted of the 2004 robbery and murder of a Corpus Christi store clerk is scheduled to be executed today.  John Ramirez won a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last March requiring states to accommodate condemned murderers’ requests to have their faith leaders pray and hold their hands in the execution chamber.  The Associated Press reports that the Texas Board of Pardons unanimously declined to commute Ramirez’s death sentence on Monday.  During a three-day drug binge, Ramirez and two female accomplices were looking for someone to rob in order to buy more drugs.  They spotted store clerk Pablo Castro emptying garbage in a convenience store parking lot and attacked him.  Ramirez stabbed Castro 29 times, then took $1.25 from the dead man’s pocket.  Nearby witnesses saw the entire incident.  Later, Ramirez held a knife to the throat of a young mother at a drive through and stole her purse and tried to rob anther woman at another drive through, who managed to escape.  CJLF filed argument in Ramirez v. Collier, urging the court to restrict civil lawsuits of this kind unless the plaintiff can show great and immediate, irreparable injury.  The Foundation’s brief is available here.  Update:  Ramirez was pronounced dead at 6:41 PM Wednesday night.

A Report and a Critique on Nitrogen Hypoxia Executions

by · Sep 28, 2022 10:19 am

Scientific American has this report by Dana Smith on execution via nitrogen hypoxia. Dudley Sharp has this critique of the article. As Mr. Sharp notes, all of the people interviewed by Ms. Smith for the article are opponents of the death penalty. As is standard practice in journalism now, opponents of the death penalty are not identified as such. The Death Penalty Information Center’s misleading self-identification is repeated uncritically in the article: “a national nonprofit that provides information and analysis on death penalty issues.” This Soros-funded organization filters and colors the information it provides to support only anti-death-penalty arguments, but you would never know that from the way it is routinely identified in the press.

Some of the comments are misleading and some border on silly. Among the latter, an anesthesiologist criticizes the coining of a new term, “nitrogen hypoxia,” as “a made-up two-word expression meant to sound like you’re on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.” For the record, I am a Star Trek fan of long standing, and the term never once made me think of the Enterprise. There is absolutely nothing wrong with coining a new term for a new procedure or invention. “Television” is a made-up word unknown in the nineteenth century. “Smart phone” is a more recent coined term for a more recent invention. Anything wrong with either of those? Continue reading . . .

USDOJ Seeks Comments on Pentobarbital

by · Sep 26, 2022 11:27 am

The U.S. Department of Justice has published this notice in the Federal Register, asking for comments about the use of pentobarbital in executions.

This may be another step in the game of execution whack-a-mole. When the gas chamber and electrocution were the common methods of execution, they were attacked with an argument that the pain inherent in those methods was unnecessary because the three-drug lethal injection method was painless. When that method was widely adopted, it was attacked with an argument that the single-drug barbiturate method presented far less risk of pain. When that method was widely adopted, some experts crawled out of the woodwork to claim that it presents an unacceptable risk of painful pulmonary edema. Continue reading . . .

Federal Appeals Court Overturns Murderer’s Death Sentence

by · Aug 1, 2022 3:37 pm

A divided panel of the Fourth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has overturned the death sentence of a South Carolina man who murdered four people in two states.  Associated Press writer Jeffery Collins reports that in its July 26 ruling the Appeals court concluded that the judge in Quincy Allen’s 2005 sentencing hearing had excluded, ignored or overlooked the murderer’s “serious mental illness history of childhood abuse” which the court believes had a “substantial and injurious effect or influence on the outcome of the sentencing proceeding.”   The ruling came a week before a judge hears a lawsuit brought by several other condemned South Carolina murderers who argue that the electric chair and the firing squad, utilized by the state, amounts to cruel and unusual punishment.  The state has been forced to use these execution methods because anti-death penalty groups, including the European Union, have pressured drug manufacturers not to sell the state lethal injection drugs.

Continue reading . . .

SCOTUS’ Last Death Penalty Abolitionist Says Goodbye

by · Jun 30, 2022 8:37 pm

Over the history of the Supreme Court, only a very few justices opposed the death penalty in all circumstances:  Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun, Stevens, Ginsburg and Breyer.  Today, the last remaining member of that group, Justice Breyer, retired, leaving the Court without a single categorical opponent of the death penalty for the first time in decades.  I believe we now have the most pro-DP Court of my lifetime.

Justice Breyer was pretty much a down-the-line liberal on criminal justice issues, but is a modest and friendly man with a wicked sense of humor, and never had the driven and angry edge to him that many abolitionists do.  It remains to be seen whether his replacement, Justice Brown Jackson, will match his intellect and fair-minded outlook.  We can hope, and we wish her the best as she begins her tenure on the Court.

 

Alabama Set to Execute Murderer

by · Jun 24, 2022 10:26 am

An Alabama man who murdered his ex girlfriend in 1994, is scheduled for execution by lethal injection on July 28.  Ivana Hrynkiw of the Birmingham News reports that Joe Nathan James, Jr.  was convicted and sentenced to death in 1999 for capital murder during the commission of burglary.   James had dated Faith Hall in the early 1990s but the relationship was volatile and Hall broke up with him.  For the next several years James would stalk Hall, showing up at her home and threatening to kill her.  On the day of the murder, James forced his way in to an apartment Hall was visiting, demanded information about a man she was seeing, and shot her three times when she attempted to escape.  After shooting Hall in the stomach and chest, he shot her in the head as she lay on the floor.  On appeal James’ claim of ineffective assistance of counsel was denied by several courts.  In 2020 the Eleventh Circuit upheld his conviction and sentence, and the U.S. Supreme Court declined review.

Delay and Failure to Accept Responsibility For It

by · May 24, 2022 1:51 pm

Along with the two Arizona capital cases decided yesterday (see this post), the Supreme Court turned down another, the case of one of the longest-term residents of death row.

Justice Breyer penned another of his opinions lamenting how awful it is for these murderers to have death sentences hanging over their heads so long. And once again he failed to acknowledge how much the Supreme Court itself is at fault for this situation. Continue reading . . .

Where Is Joe Biden on the Buffalo Massacre?

by · May 23, 2022 12:09 pm

President Biden has had all manner of things to say about the mass murder in Buffalo by a white supremacist, but nothing to say about the only legal punishment we have that even remotely fits a crime of that nature  —  the death penalty.

Now maybe it’s that Biden ran on a platform of abolishing capital punishment  —  the first candidate of a major party to do so, and in the face of the contrary views held by his former boss, President Barack Obama, and (get this) of himself:  Biden had been an unambiguous supporter of the death penalty for years, but when the mainstream of the Democratic Party drifted into abolitionism, he had neither the energy nor the principle to put up a fight.

That now seems like a manifestly foolish decision, as I explain in my Substack entry this  morning, here, and my guess is he’ll have to backtrack.

Supreme Court Declines Case of Missouri Murderer

by · May 2, 2022 2:32 pm

Update (5/4): The execution was carried out on the evening of May 3, CBS/AP report.

The U.S. Supreme Court today declined to review, again, the capital sentence of Missouri murderer Carman Deck, whose long-overdue execution is scheduled for tomorrow.

Deck and an accomplice planned to burglarize the home of an elderly couple, James and Zelma Long. They knocked on the door and pretended to need directions. After the Longs admitted them into their home, Deck pulled a gun and demanded their valuables. Even though they complied with his demands, he shot and killed both of them.

Deck had to be sentenced three times. The first sentencing was marred by an error of his own attorney, failing to object to the fact that a portion of the jury instructions was missing. The second sentencing was conducted in accordance with all the rules in effect at the time, which severely limited the shackling of defendants in the guilt phase of the trial. The rationale of that precedent was that shackling impaired the presumption of innocence, making it obviously inapplicable to the penalty trial. The U.S. Supreme Court took his case up and extended its precedent into the penalty phase, moving the goalposts after the trial. Continue reading . . .