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

From BBC

Jerry Jackson was the 31st prisoner put to death in the US this year

The US state of Virginia has executed a convicted murderer and rapist by lethal injection, despite objections from the drug manufacturer.

Jerry Jackson, 30, was put to death on Thursday evening for the murder of 88-year-old Ruth Phillips.

A shortage of drugs used in past US executions has forced Virginia authorities to rely on an epilepsy drug manufactured by Danish firm Lundbeck. Lundbeck has said it opposes the “distressing misuse” of its product. Asked if he had any last words, Jackson shook his head and said “no”, reports the Associated Press news agency.

Difficulty obtaining drugs. The drugs that were used to execute Jackson at the Greensville Correction Center in Jarrat, Virginia, were obtained before Lundbeck imposed strict controls on the distribution of pentobarbital, a drug used to treat severe epilepsy.

Jackson raped and murdered Ruth Phillips during an attempted burglary

The company has strongly objected to its product’s use in capital punishment, and has restricted distribution in an attempt to keep it out of prison death chambers.

“We’re in the business to improve people’s lives, so the use of pentobarbital to end people’s lives contradicts everything that we’re in business to do,” Matt Flesch, a US spokesman for Lundbeck, told the BBC.

Jackson was convicted and condemned to death in 2002 on two counts of capital murder, rape and other charges relating to the death of Ms Phillips.

Prosecutors said he climbed in her bathroom window during an attempted burglary.

After she awoke and confronted him, he sexually assaulted and killed her.

His execution came amid a global effort by drug manufacturers to prevent their products from being used in US executions – whether for moral, regulatory or public relations concerns.

Amid the difficulty obtaining execution drugs, US states have had to experiment with different ways to kill prisoners without violating the US constitution’s bar on “cruel and unusual punishments”, analysts say.

Virginia, like many of the 34 out of 50 US states which allows capital punishment, uses a “cocktail” of three drugs to execute condemned prisoners.

If all goes according to plan, the first drug renders the prisoner unconscious, a second paralyses the prisoner (thus masking signs the first drug worked or did not work) and a third drug stops the heart.

“A lot hinges on the first drug,” Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research organisation, told the BBC.

“It causes unconsciousness, and if that doesn’t work well, the next drugs are very painful.”

Epilepsy fight. For years, the states used a drug called sodium thiopental in the first stage, but in 2010 the drug’s only US manufacturer, Hospira, announced it was halting production.

The execution was held at Greensville Correction Center

Some US states turned to Dream Pharma, a British firm operating in Acton, West London, for sodium thiopental, until a ban on exports was imposed in December 2010.

Amid trouble obtaining sodium thiopental, the states this year have turned to pentobarbital.

So far in 2011, US states have executed 23 prisoners using that drug, prompting strong condemnation from Lundbeck.

While the drug, sold under the brand name Nembutal, comprises less than 1% of the company’s sales, Lundbeck said it declined to stop production because doctors it had surveyed said they would have trouble treating severe epilepsy without it.

But the company last month announced restrictions on the drug’s distribution in an effort to keep it from being shipped to prisons in US states that practice capital punishment.

Under that programme, Lundbeck will review orders for pentobarbital and deny them to prisons in capital punishment states.

Purchasers will have to sign a form affirming the drug is for their own use and will not be used for capital punishment and that they will not re-distribute the drug without the company’s approval.

“While the company has never sold the product directly to prisons and therefore can’t make guarantees, we are confident that our new distribution program will play a substantial role in restricting prisons’ access to Nembutal for misuse as part of lethal injection,” chief executive Ulf Wiinberg said.

The company has also sent letters to 16 states that have used or have said they would use pentobarbital in lethal injection expressing their opposition and concern, Mr Flesch said.

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.”