Tennessee Execution Fails Despite Two Lethal Injections

Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike has been taken to hospital after an attempt to execute her by two lethal injections failed, her lawyer says.

Her legal team filed an emergency motion to halt the convicted murderer's execution as it was happening, saying: "Ms Pike has lost consciousness and still has a heartbeat and is audibly snoring."

One of her attorneys told the BBC that Pike, 50, was now "being provided life-saving measures" in hospital after two syringes of pentobarbital had been administered.

Pike was sentenced to death in 1996 for the murder of 19-year-old Colleen Slemmer. Her execution was the subject of a last-minute legal battle.

Read the rest here.

Lethal injection is a barbaric form of execution. Even when it works, it routinely takes between 30 minutes to an hour. Some executions have taken much longer. And some have simply failed. The British used to be able to carry out their executions in less than a minute from the moment the hangman entered the condemned person's cell. If we must have capital punishment something similar should be the standard here. 

Idaho spent an hour trying to kill someone and gave up. For now.

This is barbarous.

Alabama to try nitrogen gas after botched execution

ATMORE, Ala. — Alabama is poised to use nitrogen gas in a planned execution next month, the first state to attempt such a method, setting the stage for legal challenges as officials across the U.S. examine alternatives amid a shortage of lethal injection drugs.

But while Alabama is intent on using nitrogen hypoxia, in which a person breathes only nitrogen and dies from a lack of oxygen, some details of the protocol remain cloaked in mystery to the public.

Even the inmate who is set to die, Kenneth Eugene Smith, told NBC News this month that he is not privy to an unredacted state protocol describing how the procedure will work. His legal and medical representatives were permitted this month to tour the execution chamber and inspect a mask for breathing the nitrogen, but without Smith...

...Adding to the novelty of his case, Smith, 58, is a rare example of a person surviving a failed execution attempt: A previous plan to put him to death by lethal injection in November 2022 was called off when prison staff was unable to find a suitable vein. This, in addition to mounting scrutiny over the use of the lethal injection in other inmates, set off a pause in executions in Alabama.

Read the rest here.

This is barbaric. The state already tried the kill the man and FAILED. His sentence should have been immediately commuted to life without parole. If you are going to do capital punishment, it should be as quick and painless as reasonably possible. The British had it down to less than a minute from the moment the hangman walked into the condemned man's cell to the trap door being released. Why are we one of only a handful of countries that still routinely executes people, and yet we can't figure out how to kill someone quickly and without torturing them?

Here's a free tip for the people of Alabama. A large caliber pistol with a single bullet is all you really need. If you are obsessed with having some kind of contraption do the deed, the French method also works very well and is about as fast as you can get. 

Or better yet, just abolish capital punishment for all crimes except intentional murder committed after being sentenced to life in prison. 

Virginia is close to abolishing capital punishment

Since taking control of the state Legislature in 2019, Virginia Democrats have enacted a run of progressive laws — on gun control, abortion access and the removal of Confederate monuments. Now Virginia is poised to become the first state in the South to abolish the death penalty, a sign of ascendant liberal political power in a state that has executed more people since the 1970s than any other except Texas.

Read the rest here.

With the exception of intentional murder committed by already life sentenced inmates and a handful of very rare crimes like treason and wartime spying, I am an opponent of capital punishment. So this doesn't particularly bother me. But I must note the hypocrisy of Gov. Northam who bemoans the machinery of death while doing everything in his power to facilitate the legal killing of children by their mothers purely on the basis of their not yet having been born. 

Pope Francis Declares Capital Punishment Inadmissable in All Circumstances

It's all over the news, and the blogosphere. My views on this Pope have been firm for quite some time. Pope Francis is a heretic. And no, I am not referring to the various theological differences dividing Rome from Orthodoxy. He is essentially a liberal Protestant.

I have no idea how serious Catholics, who have been doing contortions to try and reconcile themselves with this papacy, are going to jam this particular square peg into the theological round hole. But I expect most will find a way. What alternative do they have? The Catholic concept of Doctrinal Development has been used to explain some crazy stuff before, but this is going to be on an altogether new level. To accept this is to effectively concede that there is no fundamental article of faith that cannot be revised or in this case, de facto reversed.

[Longtime readers will know that I am generally opposed to capital punishment. But my opposition is not based on Christian morality. It is pragmatic and utilitarian. And I do concede some rare exceptions.]

States seeking new methods for capital punishment

Details here.

This is just idiotic. I'm not a big fan of capital punishment but our obsession with finding new and more scientific ways of killing people has gotten out of hand. Lethal injection is simply barbarous. Any method of execution that can take hours should be dismissed out of hand. If your going to have capital punishment, then just do it and don't be so damned squeamish. Low tech works surprisingly well. A bullet to the back of the head is pretty definitive, and cheap. If you feel the need for something more cutting edge, the French method is also fairly fast and decisive. It might be a tad disturbing to witnesses, but hey they are signing up to see someone killed. Hell, even hanging works surprisingly well. The only reason it got a bad rep here in the US is because we have never had a trained professional class of executioners. Hanging requires some skill and training. But the British had it down to a science. Generally their executions were over within a minute of the hangman entering the condemned man's cell. (The gallows was secretly right next door, literally only steps away.)

Two Men Freed 40 Years After Being Sentenced to Death - Both Innocent

(CLEVELAND) -- On May 25, 1975, Ricky Jackson and Wiley Bridgeman went to jail for a murder they didn’t commit. Sentenced to death on the testimony of a single juvenile witness, the men continued to protest their innocence through years of incarceration.

On Friday, nearly 40 years later, they walked out of prison as free men after the state’s witness in the case admitted that he concocted his testimony under police intimidation.

A case suffused with emotion culminated in exoneration Friday morning, when Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Richard McMonagle formally dismissed all charges against Jackson after a brief hearing. Bridgeman, whose case was heard separately, was exonerated two hours later by Judge David Matia.

The two joined Bridgeman’s younger brother Ronnie, now known as Kwame Ajamu, who was found guilty of the same crime and eventually paroled in 2003.

The three were originally jailed for the 1975 murder of Harry Franks, a Cleveland businessman, after a 12-year-old witness named Edward Vernon told police that he had seen them attack the victim. No physical evidence linked them to the crime scene. Jackson was just 19 years old when he was sentenced to die, Wiley Bridgeman was 20, and Ronnie Bridgeman was 17.

Read the rest here.

Another Horrific Execution

Arizona executed convicted murderer Joseph R. Wood on Wednesday, a lethal injection that lasted for nearly two hours as Wood snorted and gasped, witnesses said.

The drawn-out process prompted the governor to order a review and drew renewed criticism of lethal injection, the main method of execution in the United States, just months after a high-profile botched execution in Oklahoma.

“I’ve witnessed a number of executions before and I’ve never seen anything like this,” Dale Baich, one of Wood’s attorneys, told The Washington Post in a phone call. “Nor has an execution that I observed taken this long.”

Read the rest here.

Related Story: Federal Judge calls for more  primitive, but effective methods of execution...

Hundreds sentenced to death may be innocent

(Reuters) - As many as 300 people who were sentenced to death in the United States over a three-decade period were likely innocent, according to a study published in a leading science journal on Monday.

Dozens of defendants sentenced to death in recent years have been exonerated before their sentences could be carried out, but many more were probably falsely convicted, said University of Michigan professor Samuel Gross, the study's lead author.

"Our research adds the disturbing news that most innocent defendants who have been sentenced to death have not been exonerated," Gross wrote in the study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

However, he stressed that this did not indicate a jump in the number of people believed wrongly executed because some had had their sentences commuted to life imprisonment and others lingered on death row.

In their research, Gross and his colleagues examined the 7,482 U.S. death sentence convictions between 1973 and 2004.

Read the rest here.

Oklahoma Postpones Double Execution After First Is Botched

McALESTER, Okla. — What was supposed to be the first of two executions here Tuesday night was halted when the prisoner, Clayton D. Lockett, began to twitch and gasp after he had already been declared unconscious and called out “man” and “something’s wrong,” according to witnesses.

The administering doctor intervened and discovered that “the line had blown,” said the director of corrections, Robert Patton, meaning that drugs were no longer flowing into his vein.

At 7:06 p.m., Mr. Patton said, Mr. Lockett died of a heart attack.

Mr. Patton said he had requested a stay of 14 days in the second execution scheduled for Tuesday night, of Charles F. Warner.

It was a chaotic and disastrous step in Oklahoma’s long effort to execute the two men, overcoming their objections that the state would not disclose the source of the drugs being used in a newly tried combination. 

Read the rest here.

Dramatic last minute pardon

It's a scene repeated in countless Hollywood B movies, only this time it actually happened, in Iran of all places. A terrified young man convicted of murdering a 17 year old boy (the killer was also 17 at the time) is lead from his cell to the public gallows in front of a large crowd. The noose is waiting, and a chair the condemned will be made to stand on, presumably to be kicked out from under him at the right moment. At the last moment an old woman steps forward and slaps him across the face, and then pardons him. The woman is the victim's mother. Under Islamic law only the closest living relation to a murder victim can grant a pardon.

Read the story here.

Rethinking Capital Punishment

The year was 1573, and 19-year-old Frantz Schmidt was beheading stray dogs in his back yard. He was not a troubled teenager in need of psychological attention. Frantz was practicing for his life's calling.

Unlike teens today, Frantz didn't have to decide what he wanted to be when he grew up. Male teens followed in their fathers' footsteps. For Frantz, that meant becoming an executioner. It also meant having to live with enormous social stigma.

Despite the shame, Frantz, a Lutheran, believed his executioner's role was divinely sanctioned. Martin Luther wrote that "the hand that wields the sword and strangles is … no longer man's hand but God's." Executioners, he believed, are "very useful and even merciful," since they stop villains and deter crime. Historian Joel Harrington (The Faithful Executioner, Macmillan, 2013) called Luther's comment "a celebrity endorsement for the profession." If there is a lack of hangmen and you are qualified, Luther urged, apply for the job.

Luther believed that civic order is divinely ordained. The cities of Frantz's native Bavaria had been plagued by bandits, feuds between noble houses, and roving knights who supported themselves by pillaging. Bavaria needed a justice system to curb such violence and discourage vengeance and vendettas.

Nevertheless, Luther's endorsement was sharply at odds with the teachings of the early church Fathers. They didn't oppose the state's use of capital punishment. They didn't even address that question, since Christianity was still a countercultural minority with an ethic for "resident aliens."

 But as Ron Sider noted in The Early Church on Killing (Baker Academic, 2012), those Fathers who discussed capital punishment found it unthinkable that a follower of Christ could take a life, even as part of a judicial sentence. Lactantius said that a Christian should not even accuse someone of a capital crime, "because it makes no difference whether you put someone to death by word or by sword since it is the act of putting to death itself which is prohibited." Origen, recognizing that capital punishment had a place under the Old Covenant, drew a stark contrast between the law of Moses and the law of Christ. Christians, he said, cannot "condemn [someone] to be burned or stoned." Tertullian asked whether a Christian could be a civil magistrate and concluded that believers must avoid "sitting in judgment on someone's life."

Read the rest here.

Louisiana admits wrongful conviction of man who spent 30 years on death row

Ooops. Sorry about that chief. No hard feelings?

Faced with drug shortage Virginia looks to 'old sparky'

Virginia has joined the ranks of states preparing for the day when they will not be able to lay their hands on the drugs needed to execute prisoners. Unlike Missouri which is considering firing squads, or Washington State, that still has the country's last operational gallows, the Old Dominion is planning to plug in its old electric chair.

Faced with drug shortage, some states look to firing squads

A Nazi spy about to be shot by firing squad during World War II

A shortage of a drug commonly used in executions has prompted lawmakers in at least two states to call for the return of firing squads.

Missouri state Rep. Rick Brattin, a Republican representing Harrisonville, introduced legislation Friday (.pdf) that would add five-person firing squads as an alternative to the state's current method of capital punishment, lethal injection.

Brattin cited the prolonged death Thursday of Dennis McGuire in Ohio as evidence that alternative methods were needed after manufacturers of pentobarbitol, the drug most commonly used in lethal injections, began withdrawing it from use in executions on ethical grounds.

Read the rest here.

Longtime readers of the blog know my view of capital punishment. I think it's usefulness, which is almost nonexistent, is outweighed by its many flaws. But that aside, I have also long held that if we are going to do it, this is one area where low tech is almost certainly better and more humane. Americans are by and large contradictory when it comes to the death penalty. Most still favor it, though those numbers are dropping rapidly. But it seems that when it comes down to the mechanics of killing another human being we are a little squeamish. We have been forever trying to find a new more technologically advanced way to kill other people without creating a mess or appearing too violent.

Unfortunately all of our innovations have failed to reliably shorten the process of making someone who is alive, dead, and or they appear to be positively barbaric as in the case of the electric chair. And what's with this obsession over lethal injection? There are just way too many documented cases of it taking over half an hour to kill the inmate using that method.

A lot of the problem stems from the fact that unlike European countries that had paid and professionally trained executioners, we never went for that. Consequently if you were sentenced to be hanged in the old West, it could be almost anyone who ended up with the job of seeing you into the hereafter. Predictably, this lead to botched hangings which in turn gave that method of execution a bad reputation. But the reputation was not deserved.

In Britain, which did have professional executioners on the civil service list who were required to be trained and apprenticed in their craft, a hanging typically took less than a minute from the time the executioner entered the condemned man's cell. He was pinioned and frog marched into an adjoining room where the gallows was kept, a hood was popped over his head followed by the noose and then the trap was released.

No reading of the death sentence, no hymn singing or pious sermons and no last words. Likewise a bullet to the back of the head is hard to beat for speed, simplicity and conclusive results. For those who just have to some level of tech involved, the French method also seems pretty quick and effective. So why don't we adopt one of these methods?

It has nothing to do with the condemned man, it is the sensibilities of the witnesses and guards who have to watch. Hanging, no matter how fast, is a violent act aimed at breaking a man's neck. Shooting and mechanical decapitation are also pretty violent, not to mention gory.

So my guess is that all of this talk is going nowhere.

Study: Two percent of counties responsible for majority of US executions

Just two percent of counties in the United States are responsible for more than half of the country's executions since 1976, according to a new report from the Death Penalty Information Center.

The report, released last week, found that not only are just 62 U.S. counties behind the majority of the death row population and death sentences, but 85 percent of the remaining 3,081 counties in the U.S. have not had a single case resulting in an execution in over 45 years.

"In large swaths, there are no executions. The U.S. is in one sense a death penalty country, but in another sense, a very hesitant, pick-and-choose kind of death penalty country. It's not used in the majority of our jurisdictions," said Richard Dieter, the Death Penalty Information Center's executive director and author of the report.

The total cost of one death sentence is estimated at $3 million, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, a non-profit organization that promotes discussion on capital punishment.

Read the rest here.

Ft. Hood Shooter is Guilty of Murder x 13

He may face the death penalty. Of course I am on the record as being against capital punishment. However I have no real moral qualms about executing people like that, especially when there is zero doubt of their guilt. Here are the problems in this case...

* No one has been executed by the military since the early 1960's.
*Most legal experts believe the death penalty system in the military is so dysfunctional that it effectively doesn't exist.
* If appeals are filed it is going to cost a fortune and take decades to kill this evil SOB, if it is even possible.
* Hasan is currently a crippled killer who knows he is going to die in prison no matter what. He desperately wants a glorious martyrdom as opposed to a life of solitary confinement in a supermax prison while confined to a wheelchair.

I have no interest in giving him what he wants.

The worst thing we could do to him would be to toss him in the deepest darkest cell we can find and throw the key away. Let him languish there for a hundred years as just another sociopath who got his fifteen minutes of fame at the expense of other peoples' pain and suffering. For him that would be akin to torture. And of course if we kill him, he is likely to become a hero to extremists both in this country and abroad.

So however emotionally satisfying it would be to see him out of this world with the proverbial blindfold and cigarette, I say let the bastard rot in jail until the Second Coming.

A Morbid Anniversary

On this date 77 years ago Rainey Bethea gained the unhappy distinction of being the guest of honor at the last public execution in the United States which occurred in Owensboro Kentucky. An African American convicted (he confessed) of raping and murdering a 70 year old white woman, he was executed before a crowd of not less than 20,000 people. Adding to the rare spectacle of a public execution was the fact, astonishing for the time, that it was to be presided over by quite possibly the nation's first female sheriff. Florence Thompson had ended up with the job after her duly elected husband unexpectedly expired from pneumonia a few months earlier. And under state law it was the Sheriff's responsibility to handle these things.

Contrary to most of the highly sensational press reports at the time, the crowd was sober, orderly and subdued throughout the affair. Further the sheriff had taken the eminently sensible precaution of engaging two men to actually do the deed, one of whom was highly experienced.

The only real hitch occurred when the hangman, an ex cop from Louisiana, showed up immaculately attired in a white seersucker suit with a Panama hat... dead drunk. In due course Mr. Bethea was escorted quickly from the jail to the gallows and placed without difficulty on the trap door where his arms and legs were bound firmly with restraining belts by the assistant. There he declined to make any last statement but instead made a quick final confession to the attending Roman Catholic priest before the noose and a black hood were slipped over his head. At this point the signal was given to the ex-cop turned hangman to do the only thing he was required to do, and release the trap.

Alas, he was so plastered he couldn't get his hand to grasp the lever!

There followed several seconds of horrifying confusion as the signal was repeatedly given, and seemingly ignored, until finally an exasperated sheriff's deputy lunged forward and pulled the lever himself.

Thankfully, the assistant actually knew what he was doing and had made all of the preparations and arrangements exactly correct. The end result being that Mr. Bethea's neck was cleanly broken and he was pronounced dead only minutes later. But that is not what most of the country thought happened.

The press basically decided that facts were not important and the story that went out told of a massive, highly intoxicated crowd, only barely kept back from the gallows. The newspapers said that Sheriff Thompson fainted when the trap was released. There was talk of people staggering out of saloons to go and join the hanging. In short there was a national uproar.

The upshot of all of this was that when the state legislature met again in 1938, in those days it met only every two years, it passed a bill moving executions to the state prison which the governor quickly signed. But he later repented and expressed regret saying that he thought the state had become less safe with the abolition of public hangings.

Feds Reviewing Dozens of Death Sentences for FBI Errors

An unprecedented federal review of old criminal cases has uncovered as many as 27 death penalty convictions in which FBI forensic experts may have mistakenly linked defendants to crimes with exaggerated scientific testimony, U.S. officials said.

The review led to an 11th-hour stay of execution in Mississippi in May.

It is not known how many of the cases involve errors, how many led to wrongful convictions or how many mistakes may now jeopardize valid convictions. Those questions will be explored as the review continues.

Read the rest here.

Words fail me.

Missouri may bring back gas chamber due to dwindling lethal injection supplies

ST. LOUIS — With drugs needed for lethal injection in short supply and courts wrangling over how to execute prisoners without them, Missouri's attorney general is floating one possible solution: Bring back the gas chamber.

In court filings and interviews this week, Attorney General Chris Koster noted that Missouri statutes allow two options for executions: lethal injection and death by gas. Koster's comments come amid his growing frustration over the Missouri Supreme Court's refusal to set execution dates until lethal injection issues are resolved.

"The Missouri death penalty statute has been, in my opinion, unnecessarily entangled in the courts for over a decade," Koster said Wednesday in an email exchange with The Associated Press.

Asked about concerns by some who say using lethal gas could violate condemned inmates' constitutional guarantee against cruel and unusual punishment, Koster responded: "The premeditated murder of an innocent Missourian is cruel and unusual punishment. The lawful implementation of the death penalty, following a fair and reasoned jury trial, is not."

Read the rest here.