Death Penalty

"Punishment only comes after exhaustive legal and judicial processes, including recourse to the supreme court of the land... It is thus on record that we have not carried out any capital punishment in recent years in Nigeria."  This statement was made last month, on November 15, 2007, by a Nigerian government representative at the United Nations.  It was widely assumed, and reinforced by this statement, that Nigeria had not executed anyone since 2002.

Amnesty International has just uncovered evidence that, in fact, at least 7 (and possibly more) individuals have been put to death in the last two years in Nigeria.  These executions took place secretly, all were executed by hanging, all were convicted in a Kano state court and all had their death warrants signed by the current Kano state Governor, Malam Ibrahim Shekarau.  You can read more about each individual case here.  You can also read more on this situation from the BBC. 

"It is inexcusable for a government to mislead about something as serious as the taking of human life, and we are shocked at what appears to be an attempt by the Nigerian government to deliberately deceive the international community," said Erwin van der Borght, director of Amnesty International's Africa Program.   Capital Punishment is a serious matter; executions cannot be carried out in secret.  No matter one's position on the death penalty itself, international law dictates that individuals must have access to a fair trial and such secret executions force us to question Nigeria's judicial process.  Two separate commissions, established by the government and President of Nigeria, reaffirmed these concerns.  Both found that inmates on Nigeria's death row are "almost exclusively poor and without legal representation."

Nigeria must impose a REAL moratorium on executions to investigate these allegations and to ensure that every individual has access to a fair trial, effective legal representation and the ability to appeal their conviction.

~Jessie with PADP

We are so happy to say that the New Jersey Legislative Assembly just passed the abolition bill (with a 44-36 majority).  Thanks to everyone who made this a reality!

Here is what Amnesty International USA's executive Director Larry Cox had to say:

Amnesty International USA applauds the New Jersey Assembly for voting to abolish the death penalty.

Contrary to what some have said, the New Jersey vote was not taken too quickly or lightly. It was only after careful study and deliberation that legislators concluded that the death penalty does not address violent crime or make New Jerseyans any safer. A thorough examination of the state's death penalty system has revealed it for what it truly is: a colossal public policy failure that wastes taxpayer dollars and diverts valuable resources from proven crime prevention measures.

The problems uncovered by this examination of the death penalty are not unique to New Jersey. Lawmakers across the country are realizing that capital punishment is permanently flawed, and the public is increasingly wary of a system that holds the very real possibility of executing the innocent. By holding criminals accountable and eliminating the possibility of a horrific error with a one-two punch, New Jersey stands to embolden lawmakers who were as fearful of eliminating capital punishment as they were of keeping it. This is a harbinger of things to come.

# # #

Someone always has to go first, thanks to New Jersey for the conviction to do so. This is history in the making and a sign of more to come.

We ARE changing the world!

PADP Intern

During the period of time between 1995 and 2007, I worked in one industry, went back to school and completed one and 7/8ths degrees in another industry.  I have moved over ten times and traveled a tiny portion of the world.  People have married, had kids and so on.  A lot changes in twelve years.

Unless you are Jonathan Hoffman. For the first seven of those years, Jonathan had been on death row in North Carolina. He was awarded a new trial in 2004 and held in maximum security since then (see here for the source).Twelve years in a cell. Until yesterday.  Yesterday, Union County District Attorney John Snyder dismissed the murder charges against him due to serious prosecutorial misconduct in Jonathan's original trial and a serious lack of evidence.

The first trial was based almost entirely on witness testimony.  There was no physical evidence and the star witness, Hoffman's cousin, was paid thousands, given immunities for a number of  prosecutions against him and a reduction in another sentence to testify against Hoffman.  The DA's did not tell the defense, the jury or the judge about this deal. And Hoffman's cousin has since recanted his testimony.

Jonathan Hoffman is the 126th person to exonerated for the crimes for which they were sentenced to death.  How many more people have to lose years of their lives or lose their life before we accept that this capital punishment system is irreparable and can never guarantee only the guilty face execution?

I wanted to comment briefly on one of the questions raised during the online chat today:

Question Submitted by Robbie:

Thank you for answering my first question. I have a follow up, if the person that is being executed has been administered anesthesia properly with the first injection, do lethal injection still constitute "cruel and unusual" punishment if he or she are unable to feel pain thereafter?

Ty Alper answers:

Thank you all for such excellent questions. I'm sorry we do not have any more time. In answer to your last question, Robbie, there is no easy answer. For those who believe that all executions constitute cruel and unusual punishment, any lethal injection, even done humanely, violates the Constitution. In the context of court challenges to the administration of lethal injection, however, a "humane" execution is one that does not cause any unnecessary pain to the individual being executed. The three-drug formula employed in almost all jurisdictions can result in humane executions - under that definition - but only if administered properly, with the precision and care that the use of such drugs requires.

Although the actual moment of death may not be physically painful for the prisoner if the administration of the drugs goes well, there are still a number of factors that make each and every execution cruel and unusual.

For the prisoner, there is the trauma of knowing exactly when and how you are going to die.  Most of us are free to enjoy life knowing, sure, someday we will die, but are fairly secure in the knowledge that it won't be today or next week, and we don't know the method, we are not tortured by the knowledge that we will be run over by a bus, or violently murdered. And we do not see our neighbors walk down the street and know that they will not return because they are on the way to be killed by the same manner that we will be killed in at a later date. To know this, to live each day, whether for a week, a month or decades, knowing this information is cruel and unusual.

Further, though prisoners are continuously aware that they will die and how they will die, sometimes the when is not as certain.  Imagine being told you will die on Februray 22 by that bus on this route at 11:59pm. You will probably do everything in your power to prevent your death, maybe you stay in that day, maybe you change buses or take a cab instead, but while you fight you are still mentally preparing yourself and your loved ones for your death.  Then at some point on February 22 you find out that they've stopped the bus so you won't die that day.  But in 60 days they will run the bus again and you will die by it.  You maybe relax a little because you have 60 more days to breath, but then you start to fight the new date, and you mentally prepare to die again.  then this bus is stopped and a new date is set.  This is traumatic and cruel and unusual.

And it is traumatic and cruel and unusual for the families of the victims and the families of the prisoner as well to go through the process of the death penalty.  Both sets of families want to heal , to mourn and grieve and the path for this can be interrupted by the process of capital cases.

And it is traumatic for the prison guards, the wardens, the prison miinister, the executioners and so many more. 

The death penalty takes its toll on a large section of people.  Not just the prisoner, and not just for the length of time it takes to complete a 'humane' killing. 

DPIntern

Tomorrow, December 7, 2007, is the 25^th anniversary of the first lethal injection in the USA.  Charles "Charlie" Brooks Jr. of Fort Worth, Texas was the first man (and potentially the first innocent man killed by lethal injection, see here ) injected with the three drug-cocktail which would spread faster than any infectious disease to become the country's preferred method of state-killing. Twenty-five years and 1099 executions later (929 of which were by injection), the last man to die by lethal injection, so far, was the now infamous case of Michael Richard.

Both of these, the first and last cases of lethal injection, illustrate the inherent cruelty and arbitrary nature of the death penalty.  It is perhaps a little ironic that the first man executed by lethal injection was possibly innocent.  And almost 25 years to the date, the 125^th person was exonerated from death row on December 5, 2007 (see here for our blog on this exoneration).  Obviously there is a problem here...

The death penalty is a callous continuation of violence, and lethal injection, though propagated as a more humane method of killing, has not diminished this.  Or, at least not for everyone - the observers see a less cruel death - the prisoner does not always experience the less cruel death. And then there is the issue of the medical professions role...

Larry Cox, Amnesty International USA's executive director, released a statement yesterday on the matter:

"Texas was the first state to use lethal injection with the December 7, 1982 execution of Charlie Brooks. Since then almost half of such executions have been carried out in Texas, where the chemical mix has been used to put 405 human beings to death. Ironically, in 2003 Texas passed a law prohibiting the use of this very same cocktail to euthanize cats and dogs -- a ban that exists in law or in practice throughout most of the country. If this procedure is unacceptable for pets, clearly it is unacceptable for human beings.

"Furthermore, lethal injection has a corrosive effect on the medical profession, which finds itself reluctantly conscripted to play a lead role in state-sanctioned killing. Health professionals who have sworn to do no harm and to sustain human life are mired in an ethical morass when they must participate in a process that extinguishes it."

See here for the full statement. 

AmnestyUSA  is hosting an online chat about lethal injection with Ty Alper, Counsel of Record for the amicus brief Michael Morales, et al. in the upcoming lethal injection Supreme Court case Baze v. Rees on December 7 from 1-2pm ET. Click the online chat link here and on our website to join in the conversation to find out more about this inhumane method and why it needs to go (along with all methods of execution).  You can also ask questions in advance here.

Lets create a new anniversary for the death of lethal injection and capital punishment!

DP Intern

Michael Lee McCormick was acquitted yesterday, December 5^th, by a Tennessee jury of the 1985 murder of Donna Jean Nichols.  He spent over 15 years on Tennessee's death row for this murder, which he did not commit.  In his first trial, McCormick was convicted based on hair evidence from Nichols' car and a secretly recorded confession to an undercover cop.  Today's AP article reported that DNA testing later found the hair did not match McCormick, and the jury in his new trial agreed with the defense that McCormick had been lying in his confession.  Influenced by Mr. McCormick's reputation as an alcoholic and a notorious liar, the jury felt that a secretly recorded confession alone was not enough to convict.    

According to the Innocence Project, false confessions are a leading cause of wrongful conviction. 

In over 25% of DNA exoneration cases, innocent defendants made incriminating statements, false confessions, or plead guilty.

Why do innocent people confess?  Causes include duress, coercion, fear, threat of harsh sentence, misunderstanding, intoxication, mental impairment - just to name a few. 

Michael McCormick is now the 125^th person to be exonerated from death row in the United States since 1973.  In that same time 1,099 people have been executed.  These scary figures force us to see the horrible reality that, of the 1,099 executions, there almost certainly were innocent people who lost their lives to the state in the name of justice.  Is that justice?  An execution cannot be reversed - a person's life cannot be returned to them once it is taken away.  Are we really so bloodthirsty that we are willing to execute innocent people just to save our inhumane practice of state-sanctioned killing?

With 125 proven cases of innocence on death row, it is time that our society accept the fallibility of the U.S. justice system and extinguish the risk of executing innocent people by abolishing capital punishment once and for all.

It's been over 40 years since Iowa and West Virginia repealed their capital punishment statutes in 1965.  Since that time the death penalty has been invalidated, and reinstated; lethal injection has taken over as the main method of execution; and 124 people have been found innocent and released from death row.  Now, it looks like we are experiencing history in the making as New Jersey moves one step closer to becoming the next state, the first in over 40 years, to legislatively abolish the death penalty.

The Senate budget committee approved the abolition bill today by a vote of 8-4, which you can read about here.  This is the first step of several before we can add New Jersey to the ranks of the 13 other states in the U.S., and 133 other countries around the world, who have wisely decided that the death penalty has no place in today's society.  Next, the bill will go for a full Senate vote sometime before the legislative session ends on January 8^th.  The bill must also pass through an Assembly committee, and will then go in front of the full Assembly for a vote on December 13^th. 

At this point Governor John Corzine, a death penalty foe, must sign the bill into law.

The wheels of New Jersey's death penalty machinery began to slowly grind to a halt in January 2006 when a state-wide moratorium was imposed to allow a commission to study the state's death penalty policy.  The commission delivered their findings in January 2007, and you can read the full report here. 

Basically, lawmakers in New Jersey discovered what many have known for quite some time ... that the death penalty is dead wrong!  It is past time that states across the country finally begin to evaluate their systems of capital punishment as New Jersey has ... and I expect most will come to the same conclusion, that it is time to kill the death penalty.

And for those of you sitting at your computer in New Jersey - don't just read this blog - call your representatives!  Call your senators and assembly members.  They still need to hear from you.  Already called?  Call again!  Tell them that you oppose the death penalty and you want them to vote for the death penalty abolition bill.  Don't know their number?  Visit New Jerseyans for Alternatives to the Death Penalty's action center and scroll halfway down the page where you will see a link to every legislator's contact information.  It's that easy, so NO excuses!  Do it today!  Be a part of history in the making ...

And, as we've said before on this blog ... Go New Jersey Go!