Connecticut is on the verge of repealing the state’s death penalty. The legislation passed in the Senate and will be voted on in the House next week. This action is expected to save Connecticut taxpayers $5 million a year. This will be the 5th state in 5 years to end the use of death penalty. In addition, Oregon’s governor has declared a moratorium. Other states are steadily moving closer to abolition.

In stark contrast, Florida has plans to kill David Gore next week. The following events are scheduled:

Tomorrow is Good Friday, a day when Pax Christi, the Catholic Conference, and TCADP unite in front of the Old Capitol at noon to say the Stations of the Cross. These are not the traditional prayers, but instead they are oriented to the execution of Jesus and how it relates to executions today
One week from today, on Thursday, April 12, the State of Florida will execute David Gore at 6 pm. We will gather in front of the Governor’s mansion at that time for a vigil.
On the following day, Friday, April 13, there will be a Service of Remembrance at 12 noon at the Rotunda of the Capitol to remember Mr. Gore and his victims.

Sheila Meehan
TCADP Board

A two-hour forum that will include perspective and commentary from FSU President Emeritus, former Dean of the College of Law and former American Bar Association President Talbot “Sandy” D’Alemberte; former Florida Supreme Court Justice Raoul Cantero; 2nd Judicial Circuit Judge Janet Ferris (retired); 18th Judicial Circuit Judge O.H. Eaton (retired) and former member of the ABA Florida Death Penalty Assessment Team; Harry Shorstein, former Fourth Judicial Circuit State Attorney and former member of the ABA Florida Death Penalty Assessment Team; Mike Minerva, CEO, Innocence Project of Florida, former 2nd Judicial Circuit Public Defender and former member of the ABA Florida Death Penalty Assessment Team; Stephen Hanlon, Chairman, The Constitution Project, and former Chairman of the ABA Steering Committee; Mark Olive, renowned capital case litigator; Chris Slobogin, law professor at Vanderbilt University and former chair of the ABA Florida Death Penalty Assessment Team, Les Garringer, executive director of the Florida Innocence Commission and former Monroe County Judge, and Frank Patterson, Dean, FSU College of Motion Picture Arts.

When: Monday, November 14th from 9:30 to 11:30 a.m.

Where: FSU College of Law Rotunda, 425 W. Jefferson St. (across from the Leon County Civic Center)
*sponsored in cooperation with The Constitution Project
This special event is free and open to the public.

On behalf of the board of Tallahassee Citizens Against the Death Penalty, I have some bad news and some good announcements – all for early September – 6, 7, and 11.

The Governor has set a new date for the killing of Manuel Valle. It is now scheduled for Tuesday, September 6 at 6 p.m.

Please attend the Vigil in front of the Governor’s mansion on September 6th at 6 p.m. This will be the first in the Scott administration.

On the following day, Wednesday, September 7th, we will gather at the Capitol Rotunda at 12 noon for a Memorial Service for Mr. Valle and for victim, Louis Pena.

———————
BILL DILLON – Exonerated through DNA in 2008

On Wednesday evening, September 7th you will have the opportunity to hear Bill Dillon perform at The Moon in Tallahassee.  Dillon was exonerated through DNA evidence after spending 27 ½ years in prison for a crime he did not commit.  He is a songwriter and recording artist and will be performing songs from his new CD, Black Robes & Lawyers, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. Admission is free.  Donations accepted. For more information: www.FloridaInnocence.org

—————————-

DALE S. RECINELLA

Sunday, September 11 at 2:00 pm – O’Brien Hall – St. Thomas More Co-Cathedral

Dale will share his amazing story from high-powered lawyer to Catholic Correctional Chaplain on Florida’s Death Row. Dale’s latest book describes his journey from growing up in the slums of Detroit to racing through “the good life” on Wall Street to finally walking the path of ministry on Death Row.  Dale is an outstanding and inspiring speaker and someone who has much to offer to the movement.

His most recent book, Now I Walk on Death Row will be available for purchase.

Co-sponsored by Pax Christi and TCADP

Note: St. Thomas More Co-Cathedral is on Tennessee & Woodward Avenue in Tallahassee.

Sheila Meehan
TCADP Board

By DAVID R. DOW
Published: July 8, 2011, Houston
LAST week was the 35th anniversary of the return of the American death penalty. It remains as racist and as random as ever.
Several years after the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, a University of Iowa law professor, David C. Baldus (who died last month), along with two colleagues, published a study examining more than 2,000 homicides that took place in Georgia beginning in 1972. They found that black defendants were 1.7 times more likely to receive the death penalty than white defendants and that murderers of white victims were 4.3 times more likely to be sentenced to death than those who killed blacks.
What became known as the Baldus study was the centerpiece of the Supreme Court’s 1987 decision in McCleskey v. Kemp. That case involved a black man, Warren McCleskey, who was sentenced to die for murdering a white Atlanta police officer. Mr. McCleskey argued that the Baldus study established that his death sentence was tainted by racial bias. In a 5-to-4 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that general patterns of discrimination do not prove that racial discrimination operated in particular cases.
Of course, the court had to say that, or America’s capital justice system would have screeched to a halt. Georgia is not special. Nationwide, blacks and whites are victims of homicide in roughly equal numbers, yet 80 percent of those executed had murdered white people. Over the past three decades, the Baldus study has been replicated in about a dozen other jurisdictions, and they all reflect the same basic racial bias. By insisting on direct evidence of racial discrimination, the court in McCleskey essentially made the fact of pervasive racism legally irrelevant, because prosecutors rarely write e-mails announcing they are seeking death in a given case because the murderer was black (or because the victim was white).
In Texas, though, they do come close. In 2008, the district attorney of Harris County, Chuck Rosenthal, resigned after news emerged that he had sent and received racist e-mails. His office had sought the death penalty in 25 cases; his successor has sought it in 7. Of the total 32 cases, 29 involve a nonwhite defendant.
Since 1976, Texas has carried out 470 executions (well more than a third of the national total of 1,257). You can count on one hand the number of those executions that involved a white murderer and a black victim and you do not need to use your thumb, ring finger, index finger or pinkie.
Well, you might need the pinkie. On June 16, Texas executed Lee Taylor, who at age 16 beat an elderly couple while robbing their home. The 79-year-old husband died of his injuries. Mr. Taylor was sentenced to life in prison; there he joined the Aryan Brotherhood, a white gang, and, four years into his sentence, murdered a black inmate and was sentenced to death. When Mr. Taylor was executed, it was reported that he was the second white person in Texas executed for killing a black person. Actually, he should be counted as the first. The other inmate, Larry Hayes, executed in 2003, killed two people, one of whom was white.
The facts surrounding Lee Taylor’s execution are cause for further shame. John Balentine, a black inmate, was scheduled to die in Texas the day before Lee Taylor’s execution. Mr. Balentine’s lawyers argued that his court-appointed appellate lawyer had botched his case, and that he should have an opportunity to raise issues the lawyer had neglected. Less than an hour before Mr. Balentine was to die, the Supreme Court issued a stay.
Lee Taylor’s lawyers watched the Balentine case closely; their client too had received scandalously bad representation, and, they filed a petition virtually identical to the one in the Balentine case. But by a vote of 5-to-4, the justices permitted the Taylor execution to proceed. If there were differences between the Balentine and Taylor cases, they were far too minor to form the boundary between life and death. But trivial distinctions are commonplace in death penalty cases. Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr., one of the five justices in the McCleskey majority, retired from the court in 1991. Following his retirement he said he had voted the wrong way. If Justice Powell had changed his mind a year sooner, Warren McCleskey, who was executed in Georgia in 1991, would still be alive.
And because of a vote from a single Supreme Court justice, John Balentine lives while Lee Taylor died. When capital punishment was briefly struck down, in 1972, Justice Potter Stewart said the death penalty was arbitrary, like being struck by lightning.
It still is, and it’s the justices themselves who keep throwing the bolts.
David R. Dow, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center, is the author, most recently, of a memoir, “The Autobiography of an Execution.”

Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., stopped making its brand of sodium thiopental, Pentothal, at a North Carolina plant early last year because of an unspecified raw material supply problem. When Hospira attempted to move production to a factory in Liscate, Italy, near Milan, Italian authorities demanded assurances that the drug wouldn’t end up in the hands of executioners. Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg said company officers couldn’t make that guarantee and decided instead to “exit the sodium thiopental market.”

“We cannot take the risk that we will be held liable by the Italian authorities if the product is diverted for use in capital punishment,” Rosenberg said.

by: Robert Wilbur, t r u t h o u t | News Analysis

Practicing Medicine on Death Row ( Edited: Jared
Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t)

Execution by lethal injection has shone a harsh light on the complicity
of health professionals – physicians, nurses and paramedics – in
carrying out capital punishment. In a 2001 survey in the prestigious
journal, Archives of Internal Medicine, an astonishing 41 percent of
physicians surveyed said that they would assist or even carry out an
execution by lethal injection and there is little evidence that the
percentage has changed significantly since then. Deborah W. Denno JD,
PhD, a leading scholar of death penalty litigation at the Fordham
University School of Law in New York City, remarked that physician
participation in executions is more prevalent than one might think,
although exact numbers are not available because of the secrecy
surrounding executions. And this does not even include the nurses and
paramedics (also known as Emergency Medical Technicians or EMTs) who
head up the execution teams in many states. Interestingly, the
leadership of several major organizations have taken a more enlightened
view on executions than many of their members.

Execution medicine is not a new specialty. Two centuries ago, physicians
helped to design the guillotine, which remains an iconic symbol of the
French Revolution. In the United States, hanging was the punishment of
choice until 1890, when New York State carried out the first execution
with the electric chair – invented by a physician, touted for its
humaneness by an oral surgeon and carried out secretly by Thomas Alva
Edison.

Throughout most of the 20th century, the electric chair remained the
favored means of execution in the United States, though the gas chamber,
the firing squad and the gallows all had their partisans. Today, it
seems virtually certain that all these means for taking life will pass
into history. Of the 35 states that allow capital punishment, all do so
by lethal injection. For this, we have to thank the former medical
examiner of Oklahoma and part-time pharmacologist, A. Jay Carson, MD,
who compounded a three-drug cocktail that has, until recent years, been
promoted as a more humane way of dispensing justice than bullets, gas,
rope or electricity. Dr. Carson’s cocktail consists of sodium
thiopental, an ultra-short-acting barbiturate anesthetic, pancuronium
bromide, an agent that paralyzes the skeletal muscles (including those
of breathing and speech) and potassium chloride, which stops the heart
in high doses. Though conceived in Oklahoma, it was Texas that carried
out the first lethal injection execution in 1982. In subsequent years,
lethal injection progressively supplanted all other means of execution.

Even in the heyday of the electric chair, physicians played a pivotal
role in the death chamber. Though the executioner was an electrician, it
was the physician’s job to “pronounce” the prisoner dead – and, if a
heartbeat was detected, to signal the executioner that another jolt or
two was required. Clearly the physician’s role was not exactly congruent
with the fundamental credo of medicine, “Do No Harm.” And with the
growing popularity of lethal injections since the 1980s, physicians,
nurses and paramedics play a significantly more important role in
executions because of the greater medical demands of the procedure.

Killing by lethal injection involves the insertion of two long tubes
(catheters) into the veins of the condemned person, one for the drugs
and the other for “backup.” The catheters snake through a hole in the
wall of the execution chamber, where the prisoner is strapped down to a
gurney, into an adjacent room where the drug dispenser hangs. All this
is done behind a closed curtain to conceal the identity of the
executioners. With the catheters in place, the curtain is parted and the
drugs are administered. First goes thiopental, hopefully in a
sufficiently hefty dose to ensure deep sleep. Next comes the
muscle-paralytic agent, pancuronium, and finally the coup de grace:
potassium chloride. Throughout all this, the electrocardiogram is
monitored and when the EKG is flat, the execution is deemed a success.

In the view of those who believe in such a thing as a humane execution,
the Carson cocktail seems just the ticket because – theoretically at
least – thiopental ought to render the condemned deeply asleep before
the other two drugs kick in. There are, however, several ways that a
lethal injection execution can be botched. Veins can be hard to find,
especially in the obese or in drug addicts, who have destroyed their
superficial veins from years of shooting up. Many hospitals and clinics
use specially trained technicians, called hemophylists, to draw blood
and insert catheters – and not surprisingly, some states have started to
use hemophylists on death row, because the failure to properly insert a
catheter into a vein may be the major reason for botched executions:
instead of entering the circulatory system, the drugs just spread
through the surrounding tissue. Inadequate doses of thiopental are the
second error, with the result that the condemned is not asleep when the
other two drugs hit home. Pancuronium will make the condemned feel as if
he or she is suffocating – as he or she indeed is – but the witnesses to
the execution haven’t a clue what’s really happening because the person
on the gurney can’t even cry out. The victim’s agony is even worse with
the injection of potassium chloride, which causes excruciating burning
pain until it finally stops the heart.

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Two years before the first lethal injection, the American Medical
Association (AMA) issued a policy statement that it is a breach of
medical ethics for a physician to participate in an execution. The AMA
does not take a position on capital punishment per se – only the
participation of physicians in the mayhem. Nor did the AMA prescribe
sanctions for physicians who violate their oath. The American Nurses
Association and the National Association of Emergency Medical
Technicians have also taken the moral high ground, but have yet to
punish a member for choosing the low road. The latest and most emphatic
stance comes from the American Board of Anesthesiology.

With mounting evidence of botched executions and invigorated court
challenges to lethal injections, some states have been going out of
their way to procure the services of anesthesiologists, who, as experts
in putting people to sleep, are uniquely qualified to put people to
sleep permanently. This did not sit well with the American Board of
Anesthesiology (ABA), which issued a statement in 2010 that “patients
should never confuse the practice of anesthesiology with the injection
of drugs to cause death.” The ABA went on to warn its members, called
diplomates, that “anesthesiologists may not participate in capital
punishment if they wish to be certified by the ABA.” This ruling spells
the kiss of death for an anesthesiologist who gets caught moonlighting
in the execution chamber or, indeed, helping out in any manner, because
few hospitals would open their operating rooms to an anesthesiologist
who has been stripped of his or her board certification.

So far, there are no hard data to tell whether the ABA’s position is
gaining traction; such clues as exist come from anonymous
anesthesiologists quoted on various Internet web sites, where one reads
that the ABA policy will have a “chilling effect” or, “It sure will
deter me.” However, since the states go to great lengths to conceal the
identity of their execution teams, the ABA may not have an opportunity
to implement its policy. Then, too, the states can just recruit the
services of other physicians, nurses or paramedics.

A state-by-state review by Amnesty International three years ago found
that most death-penalty states either “allow” or “require” physicians to
participate in executions, but their specific duties are not spelled
out. These duties may be buried in regulations – addenda to the laws
themselves – and Professor Denno notes that it could take years to get
these data via the Freedom of Information Act. What we can say is that
the duties range from consulting to carrying out the execution.

If a health professional were expelled by his/her licensing board, he
might well seek redress in court and it is far from certain that this
would have a welcome result for opponents of the death penalty. Appeals
courts have generally upheld the death penalty and it would certainly be
naive to expect the Roberts’ court to overturn the death penalty.
Already there are ominous indications from lower courts, both state and
Federal. In 2007, the North Carolina Medical Board decided to revoke the
licenses of physicians who participate in executions, thereby making it
impossible for them to practice medicine. Two years later, this policy
was overturned by the State Supreme Court. What is more, death penalty
states are passing “shield” laws to shroud the identity of executioners
in secrecy and to protect health professionals from disciplinary action
by their licensing boards.

It is not exactly surprising that medical ethics clash with the belief
systems of prosecutors and hanging judges. But sometimes it seems as
though proponents of the Hippocratic Oath are on a collision course with
attorneys for death row inmates. Desperate for a hook on which to build
an appeal and, if not to save a life, then at least to make the death
less painful, these lawyers have been attacking the poor training of
execution teams in a number of states, which use prison staff rather
than health professionals to carry out the executions. And the strategy,
at least, is buying time for their clients. According to Richard C.
Dieter JD, executive director at the Death Penalty Information Center in
Washington, DC: “The latest challenges to lethal injection have already
held up more executions and for a longer time, than appeals involving
such broad issues as race, innocence and mental competency.” It remains
to be seen how much time this strategy will buy; it will vary from state
to state and, with the passage of time, anything can happen, such as a
change in the state’s law, as recently happened in New Mexico. However,
Dieter does not think that “cruelty” issues will bury the death penalty.
Reflecting on the generally steady downward trend in executions since
the 1990s, Dieter speculates that, eventually, executions may become so
infrequent as to become “arbitrary,” and therefore “unusual,” in the
language of the Eighth Amendment.

Ideally, health professionals and death row lawyers will find a way to
work together, with one group declining to be complicit in executions
and the other pressing for more medically accomplished executions,
thereby catching the criminal justice system in a whipsaw effect. That
is admittedly a long shot, for just as law schools will continue to
churn out prosecutors and judges who “believe” in the death penalty, so
the research of Professor Denno and others show that there is no
shortage of health professionals prepared to take their place beside the
death gurney.

In the meantime, the ethical compass of health professionals with
respect to capital punishment was unambiguously articulated by Marlene
Martin, a board member of the nationwide Campaign to End the Death
Penalty and a registered nurse, who said, “The ABA’s tough-minded
decision is a welcome new development that merits the support of all
opponents of the death penalty. The medical community needs to draw the
line and stay on the side of healing, not of killing. All of us in the
medical community should refuse to play any role in the execution
process, from finding a vein to injecting a lethal dose of drugs.”

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