The U.S. Supreme Court is meeting today on lifting the stay of
execution for Mark Schwab.  Insiders say that if the stay is lifted, a
new execution date may be announced as early as Monday.

—-Mark

Mark Elliott
Executive Director
Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty, FADP.org

There was one bright spot in today’s decision. Although Justice John Paul Stevens voted with the majority concerning the legality of the lethal injection procedure, he declared that in his opinion, the death penalty is unconstitutional. “I have relied on my own experience in reaching the conclusion that the imposition of the death penalty represents ‘the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes. A penalty with such negligible returns to the state (is) patently excessive and cruel and unusual punishment violative of the Eighth Amendment.’”

As an organization, TCADP has “enjoyed” more than a year with no executions. We have had the opportunity to present informative and sometimes challenging programs on the death penalty and we may have even influenced a few people along the way. Now we must, once again, begin to prepare for the vigils and memorials that will be scheduled. Attorney General McCollum and Governor Crist have already declared that Florida is ready to move ahead with the execution of Mark Schwab.

TCADP is planning a panel discussion on eyewitness mis-identification for later this month and our annual meeting will be schedule in May. We will keep you posted as things develop.

Sheila Meehan

Chair, TCADP

Supreme Court Allows Lethal Injection for Exection

The Supreme Court Wednesday rejected a challenge to the
lethal three-drug cocktail used in most U.S. executions
during the past 30 years.

Read More:
http://www.nytimes.com/?emc=na

Thursday, Jan. 03, 2008
Death Penalty Walking
By David Von Drehle

On Jan. 7, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in a pair of Kentucky lawsuits challenging the lethal three-drug cocktail used in most U.S. executions. The gist of the cases is that the drug combination is unnecessarily complicated, using three chemicals when one would do, and that when this procedure is administered by undertrained prison officials, there’s an unconstitutional risk that something will go wrong. Instead of going to a quiet death, an inmate could experience terrifying paralysis followed by excruciating pain.
In a perfect world, perhaps, the government wouldn’t wait 30 years and several hundred executions to determine whether an execution method makes sense. But the world of capital punishment has never been that sort of place. This weighty moral issue, expressive of some of our society’s deeply held values, involves a lot of winging it. In 1990, for instance, a sponge used in the headpiece of Florida’s electric chair wore out. There’s no factory or parts catalog for execution devices, so the prison sent a guy to pick up a sponge at the store. Problem was, he bought a synthetic sponge instead of a genuine sea sponge, and when Jesse Tafero was strapped in, his head caught fire. Florida officials diagnosed the problem afterward by testing a similar sponge in a toaster.

To read the entire article: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1699855,00.html

A perfect storm of problematic executions, wrongful convictions and recent court rulings against the practice of lethal injection has led a growing number of states to challenge the death penalty through lawsuits and legislative action.

Adding still more to the momentum are a public backlash against the cost of capital cases and the development of more effective defense techniques, such as mitigation specialists who humanize death row inmates.

Eleven states have halted some or all executions — including Florida and Maryland in December — and more lawmakers have been speaking out against the death penalty.

Last month alone, Maryland’s governor urged legislators to replace the death penalty with life without parole, North Carolina’s governor said executions should be halted until issu! es surr ounding lethal injection are solved and Montana’s Senate voted to abolish the death penalty.

Court decisions have also continued to come down, such as a Delaware judge granting class action status on Feb. 22 to all death row inmates based on a case challenging lethal injection. Jackson v. Danberg, No. Civ. 06-3000-SLR (D. Del.). “It’s probably the strongest momentum since the death penalty was reinstated in the mid-1970s,” said John Holdridge, director of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Capital Punishment Project, which advocates against the death penalty.

The Death Penalty Information Center recently listed the following 11 states as those that have stopped some or all executions: Arkansas, California, Delaware, Florida, Maryland, Missouri, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, South Dakota and Tennessee, according to Richard Dieter, executive director of the nonprofit Washington, D.C.-based organization, which opposes capital punishment.

North! Caroli na’s officials were in talks last week in hopes of resolving the situation, and the state’s attorney general hinted on March 1 that a solution may be imminent. The executions have stopped either through government-issued moratoriums or judges’ rulings, and have had varying effect.

In South Dakota, for example, Gov. Mike Rounds on Feb. 23 signed legislation that clarifies the mixture of drugs to be used in executions, which is an issue that has delayed just one execution, said his press secretary, Mitch Krebs. The law goes in effect on July 1, and Krebs said other executions are expected to resume as scheduled.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, executions have been on hold since January 2006, when the state Legislature appointed a commission to study the issue. This January, the group recommended the death penalty be abolished. Reverend M. William Howard of Bethany Baptist Church in Newark, N.J., who chaired the 13-member New Jersey Death Penalty Study Commission, agr! eed wit h speculation that the state could become the next to abolish the death penalty.

“I don’t think that’s a wild idea at all,” he said, pointing out that Gov. Jon Corzine has pledged to sign such legislation into law.

Friends,

Important news about the ClarenceHill/Razzaq Muhammad execution.

The vigil at Raiford last night was attended by over 50 concerned Floridians from diverse religious, ethnic and racial backgrounds…united in their opposition to the Death Penalty. A bus from the Orlando Diocese brought several dozen folks, picking them up at cities across mid-Florida. There were local vigils held around the state.

Media coverage has been extensive with over 300 articles thus far in the press the world over. Not only in Florida and the U.S., but also Taiwan, the Middle East, Europe and elsewhere, people are learning more of the truth about Florida’s Death Penalty. Radio coverage has been wide-ranging. Over 100 radio stations have run news clips with interviews opposing the Death Penalty. As an example, the Rush Limbaugh Show was broadcast on some stations with a news segment that included FADP explanations as to why the DP was “ignorant and unnecessary.”

Editorials exposing the flaws in our Death Penalty system have been printed in the Miami Herald, St. Pete Times and Palm Beach Post…more will likely follow. Please let you thoughts be known and keep up the pressure on our elected officials by sending LETTERS TO THE EDITOR and contacting your representatives.

Thanks to George Bickner and others, News articles are being updated regularly and available at www.FADP.org a.k.a. DP in the News

Please take time to read the following items:

Letter from Clarence Hill/Razzaq Muhammad published in international press.

Stunning report out of Maryland. What really goes on behind the killing room curtain?

Vigil coverage: Headline “Death Brings Little Relief To Victim’s Family”

Gainesville.com

New York Times

By MONICA DAVEY

The State of Missouri, facing a deadline today for changing the way it executes condemned prisoners by lethal injection, told a federal judge last night that it was simply unable to meet his demand that the state hire a board-certified anesthesiologist to oversee executions.

The judge, Fernando J. Gaitan Jr. of the United States District Court for the Western District of Missouri, had demanded an overhaul of the system after the doctor who now mixes the drugs for the state described an improvised process that Judge Gaitan found so chilling that he temporarily barred executions in Missouri.

A United States Supreme Court ruling last month made it easier for death row inmates to challenge procedures used in lethal injection, and legal cases across the country are questioning whether the methods cause unconstitutional pain and suffering.

With state officials’ response last night outlining changes to their procedures, Missouri has moved to the center of the charged debate over the technique, which is used in executions in 37 states.

In a sworn deposition, the Missouri doctor, whose name is being withheld by the state, acknowledged that he had sometimes given the condemned a smaller dose of anesthesia — used to reduce the pain of the lethal drugs to come — than the state had said was its policy.

The doctor said he was solely responsible for counting out dosage amounts of the three drugs administered in sequence, knew of no written protocol by the state for carrying out executions and was at times “improvising.”

He also said he is dyslexic, sometimes mixing up phone numbers or cable bill account numbers. “So it’s not unusual for me to make mistakes,” the doctor, identified in court records as John Doe I, said.

He indicated in his testimony, however, that he had made no mistakes in his death chamber work and that the mistakes elsewhere were “not medically crucial.”

Judge Gaitan said he was “gravely concerned” about the doctor’s dyslexia and criticized the lack of “checks and balances,” ruling on June 26 that the state was subjecting the condemned to “an unnecessary risk that they will be subject to unconstitutional pain and suffering when the lethal injection drugs are administered.”

The judge ordered Missouri to hire a board-certified anesthesiologist (John Doe I is a surgeon), and gave the state until today to submit a formal, written set of procedures, including increased monitoring of inmates and an assurance of sufficient anesthetic drugs.

But in the state’s filing last night, officials said they had sent letters to 298 certified anesthesiologists who reside anywhere near the state’s death chamber in Bonne Terre, and were turned down by all of them.

“A requirement of using a board-certified anesthesiologist is a requirement that cannot presently be met,” Attorney General Jeremiah W. Nixon wrote. “To enforce it may effectively bar implementation of the death penalty in Missouri. Surely that is not what the court intended.”

It was uncertain whether the judge, who could not be reached late last night, would accept the state’s alternative: Missouri officials said they would instead use “medical personnel in roles appropriate,” like a physician, nurse or pharmacist preparing the drugs.

It was unclear from the filing whether the state intended to retain John Doe I. The American Society of Anesthesiologists and the American Medical Association say physicians should not take part in executions, and Orin F. Guidry, the president of the A.S.A., recently issued a letter to members reiterating that position in light of the Missouri ruling.

Missouri has executed 66 people by lethal injection since 1989. The doctor said in the deposition that he had assisted for about a decade.

Around the nation, lawyers and advocates on all sides of the debate said they were closely watching developments in Missouri. Judge Gaitan’s ruling was the most specific and sweeping regarding procedures in any state, they said.

In April, a federal judge permitted an execution in North Carolina without an anesthesiologist, saying the state could use a brain wave monitor to ensure that the prisoner would be unconscious and unable to feel pain.

“This issue is being challenged in all states, but it’s reaching a boiling point in some states and Missouri may be on the cutting edge,” said Richard C. Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, a research group that opposes capital punishment.

In Arkansas, a federal judge delayed an execution that had been set for July 5 to allow time to review that state’s lethal injection procedures and chemical combinations.

In Ohio, corrections officials presented Gov. Bob Taft with changes to the state’s procedures, after Joseph L. Clark’s execution this year, when workers struggled for 90 minutes to find a suitable vein for the lethal drugs, and in preparation for another execution, the first in the country since the Supreme Court ruling. The new procedures were used Wednesday for the first time on another man, Rocky Barton, and corrections officials there said the execution took place “without complications.”

In January, on the eve of the scheduled execution of Michael A. Taylor, a Missouri man who pleaded guilty to the first-degree murder and rape of a 15-year-old girl in 1989, Judge Gaitan had ruled that the state’s method of execution did not constitute cruel or unusual punishment. That execution was later halted by an appeals court, which remanded it to Judge Gaitan for further hearings.

Like most states that use lethal injection, Missouri requires three drugs in a row: Sodium pentothal, the anesthetic, is administered, followed by pancuronium bromide, which, as a paralytic, prevents movements of the body, and then potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

If a person has not received sufficient amounts of the anesthetic, the final drug is likely to be deeply painful, medical experts say, but the paralytic agent may prevent the person from revealing that pain.

Initially, Missouri Department of Corrections officials testified that the condemned consistently receive five grams of the anesthetic. But state logs of the most recent six executions revealed that only 2.5 grams had been prepared and used in at least one recent execution.

In his deposition, the doctor, John Doe I, defended the use of less than five grams, emphasizing that nearly all people would be fully anesthetized at a far smaller dose and that most other states use only two grams. In addition, the doctor said, he was able to determine whether the anesthesia had taken effect by looking at the inmate’s facial expression.

But Judge Gaitan, who viewed a videotape of the execution chamber, questioned whether the doctor could see the inmate’s face at all. On the gurney, the inmate faces away from the darkened room where the doctor is observing through a partly closed window, the judge wrote.

In its new policy, submitted last night, Missouri officials said that it would always, in the future, use at least five grams of anesthetic, and have on hand an additional five grams. They also said that a medical worker — a physician, a nurse or a pharmacist, for example — would be positioned to see (either directly or with a mirror) the inmate to be sure he or she was unconscious. And they said that all those involved in an execution would sign an official chemical log to track exactly what happened in each death.

In recent weeks, Department of Corrections officials defended the state’s record of executions and said that John Doe I, whose name they would not reveal citing concerns for his security, had received high marks for his work.

“The process worked, we think, very professionally and humanely,” said Brian Hauswirth, a spokesman for the department.

In his deposition, John Doe I also defended his actions, suggesting he was able to perform his job properly.

“But I am dyslexic, and that is the reason why there are inconsistencies in my testimony,” he said. “That’s why there are inconsistencies in what I call drugs. I can make these mistakes, but it’s not medically crucial in the type of work I do as a surgeon.”

Still, Mr. Hauswirth said that corrections officials had been unaware that John Doe I was dyslexic or that he had changed dosage amounts for the condemned.

Though Mr. Taylor’s scheduled execution was delayed because of legal challenges, the drugs had already been mixed for him. State logs showed they included only 2.5 grams of the anesthetic drug — half of what Missouri officials had said was their policy and now say they will always use.

Linda Taylor, the inmate’s mother, who sat at the execution facility all of that day, said she was sickened when she learned that.

“We don’t want to lose our son, period,” Ms. Taylor said. “But the fact that the drugs may not be mixed right or that he might be in a lot of pain is too much. I keep wondering about all the guys who have been executed who might have been laying there in pain and couldn’t tell anybody.”

Robert Blecker, a professor at New York Law School who supports the death penalty in certain instances, said the constitutional questions being raised about lethal injection were an effort by those opposed to capital punishment to “prevent it, delay it, diminish it.”

For those whose cases warrant the death penalty, he said, the notion that no pain should be involved in an execution makes no sense.

“We’re giving them a death that we could only wish for,” Professor Blecker said. “I don’t get it.”

Follow this link Chicago Tribune website

Noted by: Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty

By DENISE GRADY
Published: June 23, 2006, NY Times

A flood of lawsuits challenging lethal injection as cruel and unusual has stalled executions in some states and may prompt others to abandon them. And a Supreme Court ruling last week made it easier for death-row prisoners to file such suits.
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But medical experts say the current method of lethal injection could easily be changed to make suffering less likely. Even the doctor who devised the technique 30 years ago says that if he had it to do over again, he would recommend a different method.

Switching to an injection method with less potential to cause pain could undercut many of the lawsuits. But so far, in this chapter of the nation’s long and tangled history with the death penalty, no state has moved to alter its lethal injection protocol.

At the core of the issue is a debate about which matters more, the comfort of prisoners or that of the people who watch them die. A major obstacle to change is that alternative methods of lethal injection, though they might be easier on inmates, would almost certainly be harder on witnesses and executioners.

With a different approach, death would take longer and might involve jerking movements that the prisoner would not feel but that would be unpleasant for others to watch.

“Policy makers have historically considered the needs of witnesses in devising protocols” for execution, said Dr. Mark Dershwitz, a professor of anesthesiology at the University of Massachusetts who has testified about the drugs used in lethal injection.

“There’s an innumerably long list of medications that can be given to cause someone to die,” Dr. Dershwitz said. But, he added, the emphasis on ensuring a speedy death may have prevented states from considering all the options.

Deborah W. Denno, a Fordham University law professor who is an expert on execution methods, said speculation about whether any states would change their procedures was “the question of the moment.” Professor Denno said some states might tinker with their procedures just enough to avoid court cases.

And Dr. Jay Chapman, a forensic pathologist who created the nation’s first lethal injection protocol, in Oklahoma in 1977, said that were he to do it once more, he would not recommend the three-drug concoction now in widespread use.

Instead, Dr. Chapman said, an overdose of one drug, a barbiturate — the method veterinarians use to end the lives of sick animals — would painlessly cause prisoners to lose consciousness, stop breathing and die. “Hindsight is always 20/20,” he said.

Even some opponents of the death penalty favor such a change in lethal injection technique, reasoning that if execution cannot be banned, it should at least be made more humane.

Dr. Chapman’s original approach, still the policy in the federal prison system and in most of the 37 death-penalty states that use lethal injection, calls for an overdose of a barbiturate, sodium thiopental, which causes unconsciousness and in sufficient doses can also halt breathing. The sodium thiopental is followed by two other drugs: pancuronium bromide, or Pavulon, which causes paralysis and halts breathing as well, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart within seconds.

But opponents of lethal injection say that in some cases, the second and third drugs may cause severe suffering. They argue that the drugs may be mishandled because most doctors and nurses refuse to participate in executions, leaving the responsibility to people with less training.

If the sodium thiopental did not work because the dose was too low, for example, or if the drugs were given in the wrong order, an inmate could still be conscious when the paralyzing drug and the potassium were injected. In that case, the paralyzing agent would cause a feeling of suffocation. And the potassium chloride would cause a burning sensation, muscle cramping and chest pain like that of a heart attack.

The pain from the potassium would not last long: once the drug stopped the heart, the person would lose consciousness in 10 to 15 seconds, Dr. Dershwitz said. But while the pain lasted, the inmate would be paralyzed and unable to complain, and would appear serene to witnesses.

Pavulon “gives a false sense of peacefulness,” said Dr. David A. Lubarsky, chairman of anesthesiology at the University of Miami.

Indeed, because drugs like Pavulon can mask suffering, many states outlaw them for animal euthanasia.

Execution by barbiturate alone would take longer than the current method, Dr. Dershwitz said. Although prisoners would quickly lose consciousness and stop breathing, they could not be pronounced dead until electrical activity in the heart had stopped. That could take as long as 45 minutes.

In addition, Dr. Dershwitz said, barbiturates could cause “significant involuntary jerking” that would be disturbing to witnesses even though an unconscious prisoner would not feel it.

Intravenous barbiturates are not the only option, Dr. Dershwitz said. Drugs could also be injected into a muscle instead of a vein, to avoid another source of lawsuits: pain among inmates whose veins are hard to find. But injection into a muscle would take much longer to work than the intravenous method.

Another possibility might be an oral dose of barbiturates, like those doctors in Oregon can prescribe to assist suicide of some terminally patients. But prisoners would have to swallow the pills, and Professor Denno said there had never been a procedure in which prisoners had been required to participate in their own executions, essentially agreeing to commit suicide.

Dr. Chapman said that when he first proposed the three-drug technique, he imagined that it would be carried out by people with enough medical training to start intravenous lines, mix and measure the drugs, and give them in the right order.

He was then Oklahoma’s chief medical examiner, and came up with the formula at the request of a legislator who was looking for a humane alternative to the electric chair. His idea became law in Oklahoma and was also adopted by 36 other states.

Once the lethal injection laws were passed, professional groups like the American Medical Association, state medical societies and associations for anesthesiologists and nurses quickly distanced themselves, saying it would be unethical for members to participate. That creates a Catch-22 in which the medical establishment refuses to perform lethal injections and yet says no one else is qualified to do so.

Although some doctors and nurses do help in executions, lethal injection in many states is carried out by paramedics, technicians or other prison employees who do not have special training in anesthesia.

Dr. Chapman said that his original protocol had called for enough barbiturate to cause death by itself and that he had added the Pavulon just as a backup, and the potassium chloride to speed the process by stopping the heart quickly. “I think the whole concept of execution is that it’s carried out rapidly,” he said.

Whether inmates have actually felt pain or suffocation from lethal injection is not known with certainty.

“I don’t think any human has had a giant bolus of potassium chloride injected and then come back to chat about it,” Dr. Lubarsky said.

But in February a federal judge in California said execution records showed that some prisoners might have suffered. He gave the state two options: either a doctor had to be present to make sure a condemned inmate was unconscious before the second and third drugs were injected, or the execution had to be performed with sodium thiopental alone.

California found two anesthesiologists who agreed to attend its next scheduled execution, of Michael Morales, a murderer. But both doctors later withdrew, and the state said it could not find other medical experts to help carry out the sentence. The execution has been postponed at least until September, when the court will examine the state’s lethal injection protocol.

In challenging the protocol, Mr. Morales’s lawyer, the onetime Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr, cited an article published last year in The Lancet, a British medical journal. The main author was Dr. Lubarsky.

The researchers obtained toxicology reports on blood taken after death from 49 executed prisoners in four states, and found that 43 percent had levels of sodium thiopental so low that they might have suffered during execution.

“The data suggest that some people are awake,” Dr. Lubarsky said.

But other anesthesiology experts, even some who oppose the death penalty, have challenged the findings, saying many of the blood samples were taken too long after death to give a reliable measure of what the drug’s level was during execution.

Dr. Lubarsky acknowledged that the findings were being disputed and said he and his colleagues were doing additional research.

“We may find that we’re wrong,” he said. “We’ll continue to search for a better understanding of what’s going on, one that will hopefully help inform and guide the discussion taking place around this issue.”

By DAVID R. DOW
Published: June 16, 2006

Houston

EARLIER this week, the Supreme Court decided, in a 5-to-3 opinion, that a Tennessee prison inmate named Paul G. House was entitled to prove he did not commit the crime for which he was sent to death row. On the same day, I received a letter from Centurion Ministries, which argued for more than a decade that a Virginia man named Roger K. Coleman had not committed the crime for which he was executed in 1992. The letter admitted that Centurion had been wrong.

These cases have something in common: they pivot on the question of innocence. For too many years now, though, death penalty opponents have seized on the nightmare of executing an innocent man as a tactic to erode support for capital punishment in America.

Innocence is a distraction. Most people on death row are like Roger Coleman, not Paul House, which is to say that most people on death row did what the state said they did. But that does not mean they should be executed.

Focusing on innocence forces abolitionists into silence when a cause célèbre turns out to be guilty. When the DNA testing ordered by Gov. Mark Warner of Virginia proved that Mr. Coleman was a murderer, and a good liar besides, abolitionists wrung their hands about how to respond. They seemed sorry that he had been guilty after all.

I, too, am a death penalty opponent, but I was happy to learn that Mr. Coleman was a murderer. I was happy that the prosecutors would not have to live with the guilt of knowing that they sent an innocent man to death row.

The day before the DNA results were reported in the Coleman case last January, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the Paul House case. In Mr. House’s case, the DNA testing has already been done, and it tends to suggest that he is indeed innocent. During oral arguments, however, Justice Antonin Scalia (who was one of the three dissenters when the court decided the case this week) argued that disputes over factual findings in a case can’t be endlessly rehashed.

He is certainly right about that. As Justice Scalia has said elsewhere, of course we are going to execute innocent people if we have the death penalty. The criminal justice system is made up of human beings, and fallible beings make mistakes.

But perhaps that is a price society is willing to pay. If the death penalty is worth having, it might still be worth having, despite the occasional loss of innocent life. Paul House might be innocent, but how long will we keep death row inmates alive, waiting to find out?

In Mr. Coleman’s case, the Virginia Supreme Court did not address the arguments that he had raised in his appeal, because his lawyer had filed the papers one day late. When the case got to the United States Supreme Court, the court, in an opinion by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, began its analysis by saying, “This is a case about federalism.”

The case did have something to do with the relationship between the Supreme Court and Virginia’s highest court. But is that what the case was really about? Mr. Coleman was saying that his trial lawyer had been incompetent, and that the Virginia courts were refusing to address the question of whether his trial lawyer had been incompetent because his appellate lawyer had filed the appeal a day late.

Federalism might be a plot line in this story, but it hardly seems to be the major issue. When the Supreme Court brushed aside Mr. Coleman’s appeal 15 years ago, the justices said that a death row inmate cannot complain when his lawyer misses a filing deadline, because the lawyer is the agent of the client, and clients are responsible for the failings of their agents.

As a result of this syllogism, my client Johnny Joe Martinez was executed in 2002, because his court-appointed appellate lawyer neglected to file a proper appeal — a mistake he freely admitted to, attributing it to inexperience. When the Martinez case reached the federal courts, those courts, invoking the Coleman decision, said too bad for Mr. Martinez; the mistake of his lawyer was attributable to him. I could go on with other examples.

Of the 50 or so death row inmates I have represented, I have serious doubts about the guilt of three or four — that is, 6 to 8 percent, about what scholars estimate to be the percentage of innocent people on death row.

In 98 percent of the cases, however, in 49 out of 50, there were appalling violations of legal principles: prosecutors struck jurors based on their race; the police hid or manufactured evidence; prosecutors reached secret deals with jailhouse snitches; lab analysts misrepresented forensic results. Most of the cases do not involve bogus claims of innocence, like the one that swirled for 15 years around Roger Coleman, but the government corruption that the federal courts overlook so that the states can go about their business of executing.

The House case will make it hard for abolitionists to shift their focus from the question of innocence, but that is what they ought to do. They ought to focus on the far more pervasive problem: that the machinery of death in America is lawless, and in carrying out death sentences, we violate our legal principles nearly all of the time.

David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston, is the author of “Executed on a Technicality: Lethal Injustice on America’s Death Row.”