UK bans export of lethal drugs; death penalty supporters call for firing squads



Does the firing squad have the eXecution-factor?





  As a British citizen, and one currently studying the death penalty in Higher RMPS, I know that not everyone in my country agrees with me about the death penalty: that we're better off without it in the UK, and that, as a nation which opposes the death penalty, we shouldn't be helping other countries carry out executions by exporting drugs for them to use in lethal injections. Many a debate in class boils down to someone getting angry and shouting that we should just shoot all our criminals and be done with it.

Death penalty supporters in the US apparently have the same opinion.

On Friday, the UK ban on the export of sodium thiopental and other lethal-injection drugs came into force. This, of course, is a set back for supporters of the death penalty in the US: how will they commit legalised murder now? Or is it a set back? Within hours of the ban coming into force, a leading death penalty advocate in California called for the reintroduction of the gas chamber, calling it the "obvious solution". To me, the obvious solution is, just off the top of my head, a nation-wide moratorium on executions, but that's just me.

It's not just one person though; in New York, a prominent law professor called for the widespread use of firing squads, saying that it is a form of capital punishment which "doesn't pretend to be something else." I agree that capital punishment shouldn't pretend to be something it isn't, but I believe that what it is is immoral and dangerous, putting innocent lives at risk without any hope of being able to rectify mistakes. And that applies to the firing squad too.

In the face of serious shortages of drugs used in lethal injections, some states have already adopted a new drug protocol and others are beginning the switch. But there's never going to be a perfect solution, whether we pump our criminals full of drugs, shoot 'em, gas 'em, or simply eliminate the technical stuff and throttle them ourselves on the courtroom floor. Surely this is evident in the century-spanning struggle to find a perfect method: the gas chamber replaced hanging, the electric chair replaced the gas chamber, lethal injection replaced the electric chair, and now we're trying to replace that is well. It just goes on and on and on, and we're never going to find that method which is just right because it's not the method that's the problem, it's the system as a whole. The death penalty is a flawed concept; it's not necessary.

So maybe instead of searching for the next big trend in prisoner-execution, we should be looking for alternatives to the death penalty itself, not the method by which it is carried out.

Texas Executes Carry Kerr; South Carolina Executes Jeffrey Motts

Two executions in the United States last week.

On Tuesday May 3rd, Texas executed Carry Kerr (46). It was the state's first execution using a new three-drug cocktail, using pentobarbital instead of sodium thiopental. Kerr was sentenced to death for the rape and murder of a 34-year old woman in 2001. In his last statement, he proclaimed his innocence before asking his friends to find the person he claimed committed the crime, saying: "Check that DNA. Check Scott."
Kerr is the 3rd inmate to be executed in Texas this year, and the 467th in the state since they resumed executions in 1982.

On Friday May 6th, South Carolina executed Jeffrey Motts (36). Mott's execution also used the sedative pentobarbital in the place of sodium thiopental. He was sentenced to death for the 2005 murder of his cellmate at a state prison in Greenville County, where he was serving a life sentence for killing 2 elderly people during a robbery in 1995. Motts abandoned his appeals and volunteered for the death chamber. In a final statement read by his attorney before he died, Motts apologized to the victims' families, his own families, and anyone he hurt along the way. In his last statement, he also mentioned his drug addiction, saying he wanted to warn kids of the dangers of drugs.
Motts is the 1st inmate to be executed in South Carolina this year.

URGENT APPEAL for Troy Davis

Georgia death row inmate Troy Davis is facing the possibility of his fourth execution date in four years after the US Supreme Court dismissed his appeal on 28 March. Doubts persist about his guilt in the crime for which he was sentenced to death two decades ago.


Troy Davis was sentenced to death in 1991 for the murder of police officer Mark Allen MacPhail in Savannah, Georgia in 1989. No physical evidence directly links Davis to the murder – no murder weapon was ever found. The case against Davis primarily rested on witness testimony. Since his trial, seven of nine key witnesses have recanted or changed their testimony, some alleging police coercion.

In 2009, the US Supreme Court ordered a federal evidentiary hearing to review Troy Davis’ innocence claim.

At the hearing in June 2010, US District Court Judge William Moore addressed not whether the state could demonstrate a watertight case against Troy Davis, but whether Davis could show “by clear and convincing evidence that no reasonable juror would have convicted him in the light of the new evidence” that had emerged since his 1991 murder trial. Under this “extraordinarily high” standard, Judge Moore wrote, “Mr Davis is not innocent”. Elsewhere in his ruling, however, he acknowledged that the new evidence presented by Troy Davis cast “some additional, minimal” doubt on his conviction, and that the state’s case was not “ironclad”. In 1991, the jury had found Troy Davis guilty “beyond a reasonable doubt,” Judge Moore noted, “but not to a mathematical certainty”.

On 28 March, the US Supreme Court refused to take the Davis case, clearing the way for Georgia to set an execution date. Troy Davis was less than 24 hours from execution in 2007 when the Georgia Board of Pardons and Paroles issued a stay. The Board said in 2007 that it would not allow an execution to go ahead “unless and until its members are convinced that there is no doubt as to the guilt of the accused”. Since then Troy Davis has faced two more execution dates, both in 2008, which were stayed by the courts.
Since 2007, three states in the USA have legislated to abolish the death penalty. When signing the abolitionist bills into law the three state governors all pointed to the risk of irrevocable error as a reason to support abolition. Since Troy Davis has been on death row, more than 90 prisoners have been released from death rows around the country on grounds of innocence. In each case, at trial the defendant had been found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.


For more information about Troy Davis case, see here and here from Amnesty International.


RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:

-Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Troy Davis was sentenced to death;
-Noting that doubts persist in the case even after the federal evidentiary hearing in 2010;
-Pointing out that the Board acts as a failsafe against irreversible error, and recalling its statement in 2007 that it would not allow any execution to proceed where there was any doubt about the guilt of the prisoner;
-Pointing to the substantial evidence of the fallibility of the capital justice system;
-Calling on the Board to grant clemency and to commute the death sentence of Troy Davis.

APPEALS TO:

State Board of Pardons and Paroles
2 Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive, SE
Suite 458, Balcony Level, East Tower
Atlanta, Georgia 30334-4909, USA

Salutation: Dear Board members

You can email us for more information about Troy Davis or advice on what you can do to help.
I also have some statistics about the reliability of witness testimony from studying psychology this year, which we might be able to quote to back up our arguments.

UK Bans Export of 3 More Lethal Injection Drugs To US

The Department for Business in the UK is introducing controls on the export of drugs to the US which are used in lethal injections.

The government will put in measures to prevent the export to the US of three drugs used in executions, following the previous emergency export control of sodium thiopental - the drug used to anaesthetise the condemned inmate in a lethal injection - which prisons in the US were buying from the UK to due to shortages of the drug.

The UK government now intends to control the export to the US of these drugs:
1. Pancuronium bromide - muscle relaxant which is the second drug in the three-drug sequence used by many states, and causes paralysis of the condemned inmate.
2. Potassium chloride - the third drug in the three-drug sequence, which stops the heart of the condemned inmate.
3. Sodium pentobarbital - this drug is often used to put down animals, but has recently been used in a number of executions in the US due to dwindling supplies of sodium thiopental.

The US are now turning to a Danish company, Lundbeck, for the drugs they need to carry out executions.

As a British citizen, I'm personally very glad to hear that my country has decided not to assist the US in committing legal murder. The UK fully abolished the death penalty in 1998, although the last execution was in 1964. The UK does not the support the death penalty, and as such we shouldn't be helping other countries to carry out executions. This is a positive step in the right direction, and will hopefully inspire other countries carrying out exports to the US of lethal drugs to do the same.

Reprimand For Texas Psychologist Who Approved Defendants For Execution

Psychologist Dr. George Denkowski was recently reprimanded and fined by the Texas State Board of Examiners of Psychologists. The psychologist had examined a number of death row inmates for intellecutal disabilities and found 16 to be suitable for execution, two of whom were subsequently put to death.

"There’s absolutely no scientific basis to his procedure,” said Marc J. Tassé, director of the Ohio State University Nisonger Center and an expert in developmental disabilities.


The unscientific methods used by Denkowski have been criticised by others in the field, and he has agreed not to conduct intellecutal disability evaluations in future criminal cases, on top of a $5,500 fine as part of a settlement.

Sorry for unexplained silence from us + no more death penalty in Illinois!

I want to apologise for my sudden and unexplained silence - my computer got a virus and is away getting fixed, and in the small amounts of computer time I've managed to glean in its absence, I haven't had time to update this blog at all and a LOT has happened in the last couple of weeks. As soon as I get my computer back, I'm sure I'll have to catch up on everything I've missed but for now I'm just going to focus on the thing we've all been waiting for: the abolition of the death penalty in Illinois!

Yes, Governor Pat Quinn signed into law a historic ban on the death penalty in Illinois on March 9th, as well as commuting the sentences of 15 death row inmates to life without parole. 

In his signing statement, Quinn wrote: "For me, this was a difficult decision, quite literally the choice between life and death. This was not a decision to be made lightly, or a decision that I can to without deep personal reflection."

Quinn also wrote that he saw abolition as the right choice due to the irreparably imperfect system.

In 2000, former governor George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions after it was discovered that 13 men on death row in the state had been wrongly convicted. There has not been an execution since. 

The ban takes effect on July 1st.

URGENT APPEAL FOR JOHNNIE BASTON

Johnnie Baston, a 35-year-old African American man, is scheduled to be executed in Ohio on March 10th. He was sentenced to death for a murder committed during a robbery in 1994.

Baston was arrested after police recieved information that he was involved in the robbery of a retail store in Toledo, Ohio, during the course of which Chong Hoon Mah was fatally shot. Baston told police he had participated in the robbery with an accomplice called 'Ray', a high-ranking gang member, who was the gunman. When the police could not locate 'Ray', they believed Baston must have acted alone. He pled not guilty, and was sentenced to death in 1995 when he was just over 20-years-old, and has been on death row for 16 years.

Baston had a difficult childhood. After being abandoned by his mother soon after his birth, he suffered physical abuse and neglect at the hands of his father, and was adopted by an aunt. At a clemency hearing before the Ohio Adult Parole Authority earlier in the month, she said his parental abandonment had led to severe behavioural problems in his teenage years. She threw him out of the house a week before the crime.

The Mah family are opposed to the execution because of their respect for human life. The family were opposed to the death penalty during the trial as well. Last month, Chong Mah's son signed a statement that "my family and I are opposed to Mr Baston being executed".

You can read more about the case here.


RECOMMENDED ACTION: Please send appeals to arrive as quickly as possible:
- Acknowledging the seriousness of the crime for which Johnnie Baston was sentenced to death;
- Calling on the governor to commute the death sentence and to work to lead Ohio away from the death penalty.

APPEALS TO:
Governor of Ohio
Governor John Kasich
Riffe Center, 30th Floor, 77 South High Street
Columbus, Oh 43215-6117,
USA
Fax: 1 614 466 9354
Email: http://governor.ohio.gov/ShareYourIdeas.aspx
Salutation: Dear Governor


PLEASE SEND APPEALS IMMEDIATELY.

You can email us at deathwatchstardoll@hotmail.co.uk if you want to know more.