Death Penalty

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Moliere
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Moliere »

Axl Rose's Letter to Indonesian President Regarding Bali Nine
The singer wrote that not sparing the prisoners' lives would be a "cold, cruel and uncaring message of hopelessness," and he pleaded that Joko not be "blinded by rigidity and inflexibility." He also called their death sentences "draconian" and the act of killing them "barbaric, backward and truly disgraceful."

"It's true I do not know these men nor have I met them but their story has touched me deeply," Rose wrote. "I as well as many others could easily have found ourselves in their unfortunate and unarguably self-inflicted position. People make mistakes, sometimes big and horribly regrettable mistakes and sometimes more importantly people learn from their mistakes and make new choices, strive and succeed at true positive change. To not acknowledge and give such change the opportunity to prove it's value would seem in this case a greater crime than those originally committed."
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Re: Death Penalty

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2 Brothers Pardoned, Clearing Way for Them to Receive $750K
When DNA evidence freed two brothers wrongfully imprisoned for an 11-year-old girl's killing, each was given $45 by prison officials.

Nine months later, pardons issued Thursday by North Carolina's governor have cleared the way for Henry McCollum and Leon Brown to receive $750,000 each from the state for spending three decades in prison. It's been a long wait for the men who have been relying on help from family and donations while their application was pending.

The brothers' family, friends and attorneys were jubilant in early September after a judge vacated their convictions and ordered their release, citing new DNA evidence that points to another man killing and raping 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in 1983.
Thirty years on Death Row because of a coerced confession and zero physical evidence. :cry:
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Rip »

Hopefully these two killers that have escaped don't have the opportunity to kill anyone.

This is why I always reject the premise that once put away for life the safety of the public is a certainty. Although infrequent, they do escape. This was without even needing some type of catastrophe or attack on the prison to spring them loose.
After 16 days on the run, the escaped killers could be anywhere. But authorities are honing in on a rural "hot spot" in southwestern New York.

The latest possible sighting of fugitives Richard Matt, 48, and David Sweat, 35, came in Allegany County, just north of the Pennsylvania border. That's where a witness reported seeing two men along a railroad line Saturday in the town of Friendship, New York State Police said.

While state police called the report an "unconfirmed sighting," a law enforcement source briefed on the prisoner investigation told CNN there was a credible sighting of Matt and Sweat near Friendship.

The Allegany County Sheriff's Office said a tipster led investigators to a set of tracks in the area. Authorities were following the tracks to try to determine whether they're from the two escapees.

If Matt and Sweat were indeed in Friendship, that means they somehow traveled more than 300 miles southwest of Dannemora, New York, where they had escaped from the Clinton Correctional Facility.
http://www.cnn.com/2015/06/21/us/new-yo ... index.html

Executed prisoners never escape and kill again.
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Moliere
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Moliere »

Rip wrote:Executed prisoners never escape and kill again.
330 exonerations probably disagree with you.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Rip »

Moliere wrote:
Rip wrote:Executed prisoners never escape and kill again.
330 exonerations probably disagree with you.
How is that? They aren't executed. They apparently never killed the first time, and I would hope they aren't now out there trying to kill albeit not again.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Jaymann »

So if you are convicted of murder, serve your time and are released, and the victim turns up alive, do you have the right to kill them?
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Unagi »

Jaymann wrote:So if you are convicted of murder, serve your time and are released, and the victim turns up alive, do you have the right to kill them?
Or really, do you have the right to kill them, time served.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Rip »

Absolutely, if someone stood by and watched someone get convicted of their murder they deserve it.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Moliere wrote:2 Brothers Pardoned, Clearing Way for Them to Receive $750K
When DNA evidence freed two brothers wrongfully imprisoned for an 11-year-old girl's killing, each was given $45 by prison officials.

Nine months later, pardons issued Thursday by North Carolina's governor have cleared the way for Henry McCollum and Leon Brown to receive $750,000 each from the state for spending three decades in prison. It's been a long wait for the men who have been relying on help from family and donations while their application was pending.

The brothers' family, friends and attorneys were jubilant in early September after a judge vacated their convictions and ordered their release, citing new DNA evidence that points to another man killing and raping 11-year-old Sabrina Buie in 1983.
Thirty years on Death Row because of a coerced confession and zero physical evidence. :cry:

Eventually...
On Wednesday, Deputy Commissioner J. Brad Donovan of the North Carolina Industrial Commission awarded Henry McCollum and his half brother Leon Brown $750,000 each for their wrongful conviction and imprisonment for 30 years.

Donovan says the funds will be available after a period of 15 days. That is required in case the state appeals. The state treasury can then disburse the money.

Marc Snead of the state Department of Justice says the state agrees the men should get the money.
...
An attorney for the men says McCollum plan[ned] to attend the hearing along with his sister. However, Brown has been hospitalized for mental health issues exacerbated by his time in prison.

McCollum had been the longest-serving inmate on North Carolina's death row before the pair was released last year.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Utah Senate narrowly votes to abolish death penalty
A year ago, Utah lawmakers were expanding the ways the state could execute inmates condemned to death. This week, the state took a major step toward possibly abolishing the death penalty entirely.

The Utah state Senate narrowly voted on Wednesday to approve a bill that scraps the death penalty, with 15 state senators — the minimum number needed for passage — voting to send it to the state’s House of Representatives.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Moliere »

Arkansas is now hours from executing a man despite the fact that:
1. His trial judge was sleeping with the prosecutor.
2. His habeas attorney was an alcoholic who once showed up for a hearing drunk.
3. He was convicted in part by a method of hair fiber analysis that even the FBI now says is dubious.
4. There is DNA testing that could either cast doubt on or affirm his guilt. Yet the state refuses to test it. And the courts refuse to order it.
And why is Arkansas in such a rush to kill him? Because the state's execution drugs -- which it obtained illegally -- are about to expire.
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Re: Death Penalty

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WaPo
Supreme Court Justice Neil M. Gorsuch cast his first consequential vote Thursday night, siding with the court’s other four conservatives in denying a stay request from Arkansas death row inmates facing execution.
...
Gorsuch’s reasoning for his vote in not known. Neither he nor the other justices who turned down the request explained the decision. But Gorsuch was sworn in on April 10, and he has had some time to study Arkansas’ well-publicized attempt to execute several inmates before a drug used in their planned lethal injections expires.
...
Gorsuch has rejected stay-of-execution requests as a member of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit, but he has had limited exposure to the issue of capital punishment.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Texas
Whole article wrote:Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has accepted the state parole board’s recommendation and is sparing the life of convicted killer Thomas “Bart” Whitaker.

The 38-year-old Whitaker was set for execution Thursday evening for masterminding a murder plot that took the lives of his mother and younger brother at the family home in suburban Houston in 2003. His father also was wounded in the shootings and has favored clemency for his son, saying he’s forgiven him.

The seven-member parole board Tuesday unanimously recommended Whitaker’s death sentence be reduced.

Prosecutors who convinced a jury to send him to death row said the parole board’s decision was wrong and negated the jurors’ verdict.

It’s the first time in more than a decade that a Texas governor has halted an imminent execution.
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Re: Death Penalty

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NPR
If the death sentences in Alabama, Texas and Florida had all gone ahead on Thursday night as originally planned, it would have marked the first time in eight years that three convicted killers were executed on the same day.
...
And late Thursday, the execution in Alabama of Doyle Lee Hamm was postponed after last minute legal wrangling pushed late into the evening.

Only the execution of Florida inmate Eric Scott Branch, 47, who was convicted of raping and killing a college student decades ago, was carried out.
...
Abbott agreed with the board and granted his first commutation of a death sentence as governor, after allowing 30 others to be carried out.

"The murders of Mr. Whitaker's mother and brother are reprehensible," Abbott said in a prepared statement. "The crime deserves severe punishment for the criminals who killed them. The recommendation of the Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles, and my action on it, ensures Mr. Whitaker will never be released from prison."

In Alabama, Hamm's execution was unable to begin before a midnight deadline on his death warrant expired.

Appeals for Hamm, 61, who was convicted of killing a hotel clerk in 1987, have revolved around whether the inmate's cancer "had left him healthy enough to be executed without excessive suffering," according to AL.com.
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Re: Death Penalty

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NYT
When Nebraska lawmakers defied Gov. Pete Ricketts in 2015 by repealing the death penalty over his strong objections, the governor wouldn’t let the matter go. Mr. Ricketts, a Republican who is Roman Catholic, tapped his family fortune to help bankroll a referendum to reinstate capital punishment, a measure the state’s Catholic leadership vehemently opposed.

After a contentious and emotional battle across this deep-red state, voters restored the death penalty the following year. Later this month, Nebraska is scheduled to execute Carey Dean Moore, who was convicted of murder, in what would be the state’s first execution in 21 years.

The prospect has renewed a tense debate in a state with strong Christian traditions that has wrestled with the moral and financial implications of the death penalty for years, even before the 2015 attempt to abolish it. Protesters have been holding daily vigils outside the governor’s mansion to oppose Mr. Moore’s execution.

Complicating matters, Pope Francis this week declared that executions are unacceptable in all cases, a shift from earlier church doctrine that had accepted the death penalty if it was “the only practicable way” to defend lives. Coming only days before the scheduled Aug. 14 execution here, the pope’s stance seemed to create an awkward position for Mr. Ricketts, who is favored to win a bid for re-election this fall.

Mr. Ricketts, who in the past has said that he viewed his position on the death penalty as compatible with Catholicism, on Thursday issued a statement about the pope’s declaration.

“While I respect the pope’s perspective, capital punishment remains the will of the people and the law of the state of Nebraska,” Mr. Ricketts’s statement said. “It is an important tool to protect our corrections officers and public safety. The state continues to carry out the sentences ordered by the court.”
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Re: Death Penalty

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Washington
The Washington state Supreme Court on Thursday unanimously struck down the death penalty there as unconstitutional and “racially biased,” a ruling that makes it the latest in a string of states to abandon capital punishment in recent years.

The order will not stop any scheduled executions because Washington state has already frozen its death penalty under a moratorium by Gov. Jay Inslee (D) in 2014. But the court’s order, which declares that death sentences in the state should be converted to life in prison, is a sweeping rejection of capital punishment at a time when it is being used less nationwide and as states are struggling to obtain the drugs needed for lethal injections.

In their opinion, the justices focused on what they said was the unequal use of the death penalty, describing it as a punishment meted out haphazardly depending on little more than geography or timing.
...
The opinion in Washington was issued in a case that has lingered in the criminal justice system for more than two decades, centering on a man sentenced to death for the rape and murder of Geneine Harshfield in July 1996.

Allen Eugene Gregory, who was convicted of Harshfield’s death, is one of eight people on Washington’s death row; five of those people are white and three, like Gregory, are black. Gregory, 46, was first convicted and sentenced in 2001 and then, after his case was overturned, convicted and sentenced again in 2012.
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Re: Death Penalty

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... story.html
For the second time in as many weeks, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has sided with liberal Supreme Court justices to disagree with how lower courts have interpreted Supreme Court precedent.

On Tuesday, Roberts was pointed in saying the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals has “misapplied” a 2017 ruling that instructed that court to reconsider its analysis of whether death-row inmate Bobby James Moore was intellectually disabled, and thus ineligible for execution.
...
Roberts’s role in the abortion and death penalty cases were notable partly because he had been in dissent in the original decisions. His actions are not a sign that he has changed his mind; the ruling that the Louisiana law could not go into effect at this time was not a decision on the merits.

But they do seem to be an indication the chief justice believes lower courts must comply with Supreme Court precedents so long as they stand.

“On remand, the court repeated the same errors that this court previously condemned,” Roberts wrote, concurring in the majority’s finding Tuesday that Moore, the inmate, “is a person with intellectual disability.”

The Texas court’s review of Moore’s case “did not pass muster under this court’s analysis last time,” Roberts wrote in a separate opinion. “It still doesn’t.”

The court, in an unsigned opinion, said the Texas court was wrong to reaffirm that Moore was mentally capable and eligible for execution. Three of the court’s conservatives — Justices Thomas, Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M. Gorsuch — noted their disagreement in a dissent written by Alito.

He said the court’s instructions in the 2015 ruling on Moore were so gauzy it is no surprise that the Texas court had trouble following them. The proper response, he said, would have been to return the case with more specific instructions, not to take the decision away.

“The court’s foray into fact-finding is an unsound departure from our usual practice,” Alito wrote.

In a 5-to-3 decision written in 2017 by Ginsburg, the court sent back the case of Moore, who fatally shot store clerk James McCardle in a botched robbery in 1980. Moore’s decades-long trip through the appeals courts has been marked by conflicting opinions on whether he is intellectually disabled.

Texas’s Court of Criminal Appeals eventually determined he was not. But the Supreme Court concluded that this decision improperly relied on outdated medical standards, borderline IQ scores and a list of unique-to-Texas factors that Ginsburg termed an “invention . . . untied to any acknowledged source.”

On remand, the Texas court once again considered Moore’s intellectual abilities, and again found him competent.

But on Tuesday, the Supreme Court majority was unimpressed:

“We have found in its opinion too many instances in which, with small variations, it repeats the analysis we previously found wanting, and these same parts are critical to its ultimate conclusion.”
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Re: Death Penalty

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California
Gov. Gavin Newsom signed an an executive order Wednesday granting reprieves to all 737 Californians awaiting executions, saying the death penalty is “ineffective, irreversible and immoral.”
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Re: Death Penalty

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the more I hear about Newsom the more I like.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Holman »

Isgrimnur wrote: Wed Mar 13, 2019 4:35 pm
The confident assertion that every single person on death row is a "stone cold killer" is the problem right there.

It's half ignorance of systemic problems and half sick hard-on for killing prisoners.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by GreenGoo »

If there's one thing society ignores these days, it's the victims. No where in the history of humanity have victims been so little thought of, compensated, cared for than right now.

If Drumpf is really concerned about the victims, just pass a law to set everyone free and give the costs associated with killing a death row inmate to the victim's family. How's that work for ya, mr. won't someone think of the victims and kill these people already?

The real crime is halting state sanctioned murder. That's the real victim here.
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Re: Death Penalty

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WaPo
A divided Supreme Court said Monday that a Missouri death row inmate had not shown that a rare medical condition would render his execution by injection cruel and unusual punishment, though dissenters said he could choke on his own blood during the procedure.

The court ruled 5 to 4 that Russell Bucklew, convicted 22 years ago for murder, failed to show that his suffering would be exceptional and that he had not identified another manner of execution that would be better.

“The Eighth Amendment has never been understood to guarantee a condemned inmate a painless death,” Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said in announcing the decision from the bench. “That’s a luxury not guaranteed to many people, including most victims of capital crimes.
...
Missouri plans to use an injection of a single drug, pentobarbital, to carry out the execution of Bucklew. But he suffers from a congenital and rare disease called cavernous hemangioma. It causes blood-filled tumors to grow in his head, neck and throat, which his attorneys say could rupture during the state’s lethal injection process.
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Re: Death Penalty

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NPR
New Hampshire is now the 21st U.S. state to have abolished capital punishment, after its legislature voted to override a veto by Republican Gov. Chris Sununu. After a years-long effort to repeal the state's death penalty, the state's Senate voted 16-8 Thursday to finally make it official.

Calling capital punishment "archaic, costly, discriminatory and violent," Democratic state Sen. Melanie Levesque said the time has come to end it, according to New Hampshire Public Radio.
...
The issue was not decidedly along strictly partisan lines. While Sununu said he opposed the repeal, another Republican, state Sen. Harold French, has backed the bill, saying last month that it would be a "misdeed" to keep the death penalty in effect.
...
The last time New Hampshire executed a convicted murderer was in 1939, but the state does currently have an inmate on death row: Michael Addison, who was convicted of the 2006 killing of Manchester police officer Michael Briggs.

The new law would not retroactively apply to Addison, though critics of the repeal effort have warned that they believe he won't be executed if the measure is enacted.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court, confronting racial bias in the American criminal justice system, on Friday threw out a black Mississippi death row inmate’s conviction in his sixth trial for a 1996 quadruple murder conviction, finding that a prosecutor unlawfully blocked black potential jurors.

The court, in a 7-2 ruling, found that the actions of the prosecutor violated the right of Curtis Flowers, 49, to receive a fair trial as required by the U.S. Constitution. While the court sided with Flowers, its ruling does not preclude Mississippi from putting him on trial for a seventh time.

Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing on behalf of the majority, wrote that the prosecutors sought to strike black jurors through all of Flowers’ six trials. Prosecutors “engaged in dramatically disparate questioning of black and white prospective jurors” at his sixth trial, Kavanaugh added.

Conservative Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas dissented.
...
The Supreme Court ruled in 1986 that people cannot be excluded from a jury because of their race, based on the right to a fair trial under the U.S. Constitution’s Sixth Amendment and the 14th Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.
...
Flowers was found guilty in his first three trials - the first one with an all-white jury and the next two with just one black juror - but those convictions were thrown out by Mississippi’s top court. Several blacks jurors participated in the fourth and fifth trials, which ended without a verdict because the jury both times failed to produce a unanimous decision.
...
Thomas, the only black member of the Supreme Court, asked his first questions during an oral argument in three years when the case came before the justices in March. His question centered on whether defense lawyers for Flowers during his trials had excluded white potential jurors.
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Re: Death Penalty

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NBC News
Attorney General William Barr has ordered the reinstatement of the federal death penalty after a 16-year pause, the Department of Justice announced Thursday.

Barr also directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons to schedule the executions of five death-row inmates convicted of murder, the Justice Department said in a news release.

The executions are slated to take place in December 2019 and January 2020.
...
The last federal execution occurred in 2003, when Louis Jones Jr. was put to death for raping and murdering a 19-year-old female soldier.

There are currently 62 inmates on federal death row, according to a list compiled by the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit.
...
The federal inmates whose executions have been scheduled are Daniel Lewis Lee, a member of a white supremacist group convicted of killing a family of three, including an 8-year-old girl; Lezmond Mitchell, convicted of stabbing to death a 63-year-old woman; Wesley Ira Purkey, convicted of raping and murdering a 16-year-old girl; Alfred Bourgeois, convicted of sexually molesting and beating to death his 2-and-a-half-year-old daughter; and Dustin Lee Honken, convicted of shooting five people to death.

The executions will take place at the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Vox
The Supreme Court handed down a brief order Friday evening saying that the Trump administration may not bypass the ordinary legal process governing appeals if it wants to execute four men.

The case, Barr v. Roane, arises from the administration’s effort to revive the federal death penalty.

The federal government has not executed anyone since 2003; last July, however, the Justice Department announced that it planned to resume executions, and it named five men that it intended to execute in the coming months.

A federal district court blocked four of these executions shortly before Thanksgiving.

The legal dispute between these four men and the Justice Department is very narrow. None of the four men challenge their conviction, and none of them claim that they were unlawfully sentenced to die. Instead, the district court determined that the Justice Department planned to violate a federal law governing how federal inmates may be executed.

As Judge Tanya Chutkan explained in her opinion, the Federal Death Penalty Act (FDPA) provides that federal death sentences must be conducted “in the manner prescribed by the law of the State in which the sentence is imposed.” Yet, the Justice Department plans execute the four men using “a single procedure for all federal executions rather than using the FDPA’s state prescribed procedure.” That, she held, is not allowed.

Ordinarily, if a party loses in a federal trial court, they may appeal that decision to an appeals court and then, if the justices decide to hear the case, to the Supreme Court. The Trump administration, however, asked the Supreme Court to let it bypass this ordinary process. It sought a stay of Judge Chutkan’s order from the justices.

As a practical matter, such a stay would have been the end of the case because the men would have been executed while the stay was in effect, mooting the case in the process.

In any event, the Supreme Court said no to this request Friday evening. The Court’s order is very brief, although it does state that the justices “expect that the Court of Appeals will render its decision with appropriate dispatch.”

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a separate opinion that was joined by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. This statement from three of the Court’s most conservative members leaves no doubt that the three men believe that the Trump administration should prevail in this case. Yet even Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh acknowledge that the administration is trying to move too fast.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Isgrimnur wrote: Fri Jun 21, 2019 11:41 am Reuters
The U.S. Supreme Court, confronting racial bias in the American criminal justice system, on Friday threw out a black Mississippi death row inmate’s conviction in his sixth trial for a 1996 quadruple murder conviction, finding that a prosecutor unlawfully blocked black potential jurors.

The court, in a 7-2 ruling, found that the actions of the prosecutor violated the right of Curtis Flowers, 49, to receive a fair trial as required by the U.S. Constitution. While the court sided with Flowers, its ruling does not preclude Mississippi from putting him on trial for a seventh time.
NBC News
Curtis Flowers, a Mississippi man who's been tried six times for a 1996 quadruple murder, was released on bail Monday, court documents show.
...
Flowers, 49, was freed on $250,000 bail after having served 23 years in prison in the murder of four people at Tardy Furniture in Winona, Mississippi, on July 16, 1996.

It is unclear whether he will be tried again.

In a statement, Flowers' attorney Rob McDuff said Flowers' legal team would seek to have the charges dismissed next month.
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Re: Death Penalty

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WaPo
The Supreme Court will not consider a challenge to new federal death penalty protocols proposed by the Justice Department, clearing the way for the government to resume executions as early as July for the first time since 2003.

The court, without comment, declined Monday to take up the lawsuit filed by four death row inmates. As is customary, it gave no reason.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor indicated they would have accepted the case.
...
Attorney General William P. Barr in the past summer said the department planned to resume executions using a new lethal-injection procedure that involves a single drug, pentobarbital. The Justice Department has laid out plans for three executions in July and a fourth in August. All involve inmates convicted of murdering children.
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Re: Death Penalty

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CNN
Daniel Lewis Lee, a convicted killer, was executed Tuesday morning in the first federal execution in 17 years after the Supreme Court issued an overnight ruling that it could proceed.
...
The Supreme Court cleared the way for the resumption of the federal death penalty in an unsigned order released after 2 a.m. ET Tuesday.

The court wiped away a lower court order temporarily blocking the execution of Lee in a 5-4 vote.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Isgrimnur »

NBC News
A federal court delayed the execution of Lisa Montgomery, the first woman to face the federal death penalty in decades, on Thursday because her attorneys caught Covid-19 and couldn't prepare her clemency application.

The court order, signed by U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss, blocks the federal government from executing Montgomery before the end of the year. That will give her lawyers — Amy Harwell and Kelley Henry — time to prepare a petition to president for a commuted sentence.
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Last month the The U.S. Justice Department scheduled her for lethal injection on Dec. 8 in Indiana. It would be the first federal execution of a woman in almost 70 years. Montgomery was convicted of strangling a Missouri woman who was eight months pregnant woman in 2007 and taking her unborn baby, who survived.
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Montgomery's lawyers have argued that she suffers from "several mental disabilities that frequently cause her to lose touch with reality." These mental health issues have only gotten worse during the pandemic, they said in court documents, because she could not access mental health care or her lawyers.

More than 1,000 advocates recently signed a series of letters sent to the federal government arguing that mental illness and the physical and sexual trauma that she survived, as well as Montgomery's experience being sexually trafficked as a child, meant the death penalty was an inappropriate punishment.
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Jaymann
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Jaymann »

Looks like Trump won't be able to outlaw abortion before he leaves office, so he's doing the next best thing: executing grown fetuses.
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Tao
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Tao »

Barr reinstated Federal executions after a 17 year hiatus and has had the DOJ pushing them through at a rapid pace, eight so far. Barr and the DOJ are trying to execute five more individuals before inauguration day. I don't have a firm stance on the death penalty in either direction and it appears the individuals executed and scheduled have done some really heinous things but I don't believe the death penalty should be approached with the verve and vigor Barr seems to have. I initially found it baffling to reconcile that with his Catholic zealotry but history shows he is not alone in that regard.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Isgrimnur »

NPR
The U.S. Supreme Court blocked the planned execution of an Alabama death row inmate late Thursday night, after justices upheld a lower court's ruling requiring Willie B. Smith III's personal pastor to be in the chamber with him when he was given the lethal injection.

The decision came down the same night Smith was originally scheduled to be put to death inside of the William C. Holman Correctional Facility.

In the ruling, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that Alabama's Department of Correction's policy barring clergy members from the execution chamber over security concerns is a burden on Smith's religious liberties. She said his request is protected under the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act.
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Justices Brett Kavanaugh and John Roberts wrote the dissenting opinion. The vote count was not listed.
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State officials denied Smith's request for his pastor citing security concerns and a policy banning non-prison officials from being in the room. In 2019, the state changed its rules so that no religious officials would be allowed in.

The state attorney general's office said in court documents that Smith's pastor could witness the execution in an adjoining room.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by hitbyambulance »

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nat ... 543364001/
State lawmakers gave final approval Monday to a bill that will end capital punishment in Virginia, a dramatic turnaround for a state that has executed more people in its history than any other.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Isgrimnur »

Dallas
A former Dallas County prosecutor has surrendered his law license after the State Bar of Texas said that he withheld evidence that caused two men to be wrongfully convicted of killing a South Dallas pastor, the Dallas Morning News reported.

According to the report by the Dallas Morning News, Richard "Rick" E. Jackson was disbarred last month.

The State Bar concluded that Jackson failed to inform the defense attorneys of Dennis Allen and Stanley Mozee about evidence that could have cleared them during their capital murder trials in 2000, the Dallas Morning News reported.

As a result, the courts said that Allen and Mozee wrongfully spent 14 years in prison for the murder of Rev. Jesse Borns Jr., who was killed in 1999.
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Re: Death Penalty

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Dallas News
Jackson joins a short list of only four prosecutors nationwide disbarred for egregious misconduct in wrongful convictions, according to the Innocence Project. Three of the four prosecutors are from Texas. Ken Anderson was jailed for five days for withholding a bandana that DNA testing later led to Michael Morton’s exoneration in the killing of his wife in Williamson County. Charles Sebesta concealed that the actual killer in the slaying of six family members repeatedly denied that Anthony Graves was an accomplice until he struck a deal with the prosecution and testified against Graves in Burleson County. Anderson and Sebesta were the elected district attorneys in their counties. The other former prosecutor, Kenneth Peasley, was a deputy county attorney in Tucson, Ariz., when he allowed a detective to lie on the stand in two capital murder trials.

Jackson retired from practicing law in 2013 after he was fired from the Denton County district attorney’s office. While testifying in proceedings for Allen and Mozee’s cases, Jackson said he was terminated because he wanted to be tougher on crimes than his boss. The district attorney’s office did not respond to requests for comment.
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[Jackson’s lawyer Bob] Hinton said Jackson didn’t want to comment. He is angry over what he considers false accusations against him and was physically ill in Hinton’s office when he decided to surrender his law license, Hinton said. The career prosecutor now spends summers in Alaska, where he drives tour buses that work with cruise ships, Hinton said.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Smoove_B »

I'll take "Headlines I did not expect to see" for $500

JUST IN: South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster signed a bill today to require death row inmates to choose between firing squad or the electric chair.
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Isgrimnur
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Re: Death Penalty

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Holman
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Holman »

A firing squad is an atrocity.

The idea behind lethal injection was that (in theory) it caused death without suffering, meaning that the state is taking a life but not torturing the criminal. It was designed as more moral replacement for the electric chair, which (we learned in long practice) actually causes pain amounting to torture itself.

The electric chair was originally intended as a more moral means of execution than the firing squad or hanging.

In the firing squad, what's traditionally done is to give some of the shooters live ammo and some of them blanks so that each can feel that they didn't personally take a life. But even if every shooter has live rounds, being pumped full of bullets is not guarantee of an "easy" death. There is always an officer nearby whose role was to deliver the final bullet-in-the-head to a suffering prisoner. Imagine having that job.

Plus (and I don't have time to look it it up, but I saw a reference earlier), it turns out that the state of South Carolina in the past has never actually executed a prisoner by firing squad. This "return" to a "previous" method is just snuff porn.
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Re: Death Penalty

Post by Kraken »

Fun fact: France didn't abandon the guillotine until 1977.
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