by TChris

John Allen Muhammad has been sentenced to death for his role in one of ten sniper slayings. Nonetheless, a prosecutor in a different Virginia County wants to try Muhammad for the murder of an FBI agent. Why isn't one death sentence enough? Because the prosecutor -- Robert Horan Jr. -- wants an "insurance policy."

The "insurance" comes at a high price. Virginia spent about $3 million for the first trials of Muhammad and Lee Malvo. While Horan maintains that cost shouldn't deter a prosecutor from racking up death sentences, he may be forced to change his thinking. The Virginia legislature has slashed $5.5 million from local prosectors' budgets in the last two years. Horan may not have the resources to prosecute more mundane crimes if he commits his budget to a death penalty trial for a condemned man.

by TChris

Kevin Cooper, whose execution was stayed just hours before his life was to end, is arguing that new tests should be conducted on the blood and hair evidence used to convict him of murdering four people in 1985.

Defense lawyers say testing on blood evidence could reveal the presence of a chemical that would indicate the blood was planted by investigators. Cooper's blood was found inside the [victims'] home and on a T-shirt that also contained the victim's blood. The shirt was found outside a bar several miles from the victims' home.

The defense also wants scientific testing on hairs found in the hands of some of the victims. The hairs aren't Cooper's, and the defense contends that they might belong to other, multiple killers.

The district judge scheduled a hearing in June to hear evidence about footprints found in the home of the murdered family.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument today in the case of Alabama death row inmate Larry David Nelson. Our most recent background on the lethal injection controversy is here and here. From the AP article:

Because of the condition of his veins - damaged by drug use - it may be impossible to insert an intravenous line without a type of surgery, Stevenson said. Justices peppered Stevenson and Alabama's lawyer with questions about how his death sentence would be carried out, with the possibility of prison staff cutting into his neck or thigh to get to a good vein. The court is deciding a technical question of whether last-minute appeals from death row inmates should be allowed in federal courts.

At the insistence of Attorney General John Ashcroft, two men faced the death penalty in federal court in Binghamton, NY this week. They were convicted in June of killing a rival drug dealer. The jury could not agree on the penalty, which means the pair will get life in prison without parole. A third defendant was found to be mentally retarded the week before trial, and thus could not face the death penalty. He too will serve life in prison without parole.

Please don't feed the trolls.

What does a death row prisoner do on his last day? Read about how Lawrence Colwell, Jr. spent his day. Colwell will be executed in Nevado at 9pm PT, 45 minutes from now. Colwell is a volunteer--meaning he abandoned his appeals. Up until this morning he was talkative. Today he's quiet.

Colwell will be the first Nevada prisoner to be executed since 2001. Here's an strange fact: Of the last 8 executions in Nevada, 7 were of volunteers.

Update: Here's another account of his final hours.

Plans to reinstate the death penalty in Minnesota were hit with a potentially fatal blow yesterday when the senate rejected a bill to allow voters to decide.

Death penalty supporters, including the Senate sponsor, Mady Reiter, R-Shoreview, and Gov. Tim Pawlenty, said there is little chance of passage this year though a death penalty bill remains alive in the House. The measure was defeated 8-2 in the Senate Crime Prevention and Public Safety Committee with all the Democrats and two of the four Republican members voting against it. The bill would place the issue before voters in November in the form of a constitutional amendment.

In other death penalty news, hundreds of Carribean death row inmates may get a reprieve:

Hundreds of death row prisoners in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica could win a reprieve if an unprecedented privy council hearing beginning in London today rules that the mandatory death penalty for murder is unconstitutional....
The appeal is the culmination of a strategy deployed over the last six years by English lawyers working free of charge on behalf of Caribbean death row inmates....If they succeed, up to 300 prisoners on death row in the three countries will have to have their sentences reviewed. The death penalty will not be abolished but will be limited to the most serious cases, and will no longer be the automatic penalty for murder.

by TChris

Archbishop Desmond Tutu visited Texas death row inmate Dominique Green today. Green believes that his life was changed by reading a book that Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Tutu wrote describing his experience "as president of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, where participants in apartheid-fueled violence were encouraged to acknowledge their past and victims and their families were encouraged to forgive their attackers." Tutu opposes capital punishment.

Green's supporters, including Thomas Cahill, a historian and best-selling author who previously visited with Green and is a friend of Tutu's, believe Green's trial was marked by racism and that his court-appointed lawyer was incompetent.

Green was sentenced to death in 1993. His execution date has not been set.

by TChris

Support for the death penalty has eroded as voters have grown increasingly concerned about the execution of the innocent. Legislators in Michigan, however, are moving toward ending a 158 year old ban on the death penalty in that state.

The House Regulatory Reform Committee voted 6-4 Tuesday to send the House a resolution that would ask voters this fall whether they want to change the state constitution to allow the death penalty to be considered for first-degree murder cases where there is no doubt about a defendant's guilt.

Imposing death when there is "no doubt" about guilt is an interesting standard. If proof beyond a reasonable doubt doesn't prevent the conviction of the innocent, there is little reason to think that requiring proof "beyond any doubt" will assure that the innocent are never put to death. Conversely, if proof beyond a reasonable doubt isn't good enough to justify a death sentence, should it be good enough to justify a lifetime of imprisonment?

So many inmates are executed in Texas -- 320 since 1976 --it's become a rote, mechanized assembly line procedure.

Texas has performed more than one-third of all the executions carried out in the United States in the last 28 years, and the state's execution chamber, a small, brick-walled room painted hospital green, is by far the nation's busiest. Last year, an average of two condemned inmates each month were strapped onto the stainless steel gurney, covered with a white sheet and briskly injected with three lethal drugs. So far this year, the pace is even faster.

They may not agree on much else, but prosecutors and defense attorneys, death penalty supporters and opponents and even the inmates and their guards concur on this: Texas has evolved an exceedingly efficient bureaucracy for putting people to death.

Here's what one guard had to say:

"Yes, it does get automated, because we do it so much," said Jim Willett, the former warden at the 19th Century Walls prison--where the execution chamber is located--who oversaw nearly 90 executions before his retirement in 2001. "But I don't know that I don't feel sorry for the guy working some other place that does three a year. Because if I do one here and I feel really bad about it--something about the guy or his crime, he's young or whatever--it ain't gonna be long till another one comes along. "It's kinda like baseball," Willett concluded. "You have a bad game today, another day or two you're gonna be playing another game."

Texas maintains a comprehensive death row website, which until only recently, included the last meals ordered by the prisoners.

The following article was submitted to us by the author, Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg of the Medill School of Journalism. We don't normally reprint the work of others, but since it's on a topic we have written about extensively at TalkLeft, we're making an exception. The article is about the upcoming execution of David Clayton Hill in South Carolina.

Hill is scheduled to die March 19, despite a ruling from a federal judge that orders South Carolina to investigate its lethal injection process. One of the drugs that will be used to kill Hill is found inhumane to euthanize animals.

Hill's attorneys are urging people to call the Governor and ask him to stop Hill's execution. The governor's contact information is at the end of the article:

You Wouldn't Do a Dog This Way

South Carolina is pushing forward with the execution of David Clayton Hill, despite an order from a federal judge directing the state to investigate its lethal injection procedures.

Lethal injection, contrary to popular myth, is not a peaceful way to die.

According to Hill, South Carolina does not give inmates enough thiopental, the drug which causes the inmate to lose consciousness. If Mr. Hill is executed on March 19 --as the state wants -- he may remain conscious through the other drugs' effects. This means, he could suffer a heart attack, while suffocating. He will be paralyzed throughout the execution from the thiopental.

The chemical used in lethal injection to induce a heart attack -- pavulon -- is found inhumane to euthanize animals in South Carolina and nineteen other states. Pavulon is banned in South Carolina.

"You wouldn't do a dog this way," said Jerome Nickerson, Hill's attorney in a phone interview. "The state of South Carolina needs to investigate its procedures for lethal injection as the federal court has directed."

No physical evidence. No witnesses. A recanted confession. So why is Max Soffar still on death row? Kinky Friedman is on the case. Here's a snippet, go read the whole thing:

For the past 23 years, since confessing to a cold-blooded triple murder at a Houston bowling alley, Max has been at his final station on the way: the Polunsky Unit, in Livingston. But he long ago recanted that confession, and many people, including a number of Houston-area law enforcement officers, think he didn't commit the crime. They say he told the cops what they wanted to hear after three days of interrogation without a lawyer present. At the very least, they say, Max's case is an example of everything that's wrong with the system. In the words of my friend Steve Rambam, who is Max's pro bono private investigator, "I'm not anti-death penalty; I'm just anti-the-wrong-guy-getting-executed." Another observer troubled by Max's case is Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals judge Harold R. DeMoss Jr., who wrote in 2002, after hearing Max's last appeal, "I have lain awake nights agonizing over the enigmas, contradictions, and ambiguities" in the record.

Chief among these Kafka-esque elements is the fact that Max's state-appointed attorney was the late Joe Cannon, who was infamous for sometimes sleeping through his clients' capital murder trials. Cannon managed to stay awake for Max's, but he did not bother to interview the one witness who might have cleared him. There are, incidentally, ten men on death row who were clients of Cannon's. Then there's the evidence—or the total lack of it..... [link via Brian at Ain't No Bad Dude.

It was just over a year ago that former Illinois Governor George Ryan pardoned all on death row. Now, with new Governor Rod R. Blagojevich, the debate is heating up again:

On one side of the new debate are legislators and prosecutors who say landmark reforms state lawmakers have adopted in recent months mean it is time to begin executions again. On the other side are critics of capital punishment who praise the reforms but say many more must be made before Illinois can be certain it is not executing an innocent person — if that can ever be assured.

The reforms instituted by the Illinois legislature over the past year are good ones. But they have not been in place long enough to fix the broken system. According to Edwin Colfax, executive director of the Illinois Death Penalty Education Project:

"Our big concern is that people see the substantial progress we've had to date and are under the impression that the death penalty has been fixed," Mr. Colfax said. "That would be a tragedy. The reality is that there is such a long way to go. We are not on the cusp of a death penalty system that deserves our confidence."