"It's been so long that we have had to deal with all of this; now that it's over, I don't have to think about him anymore," a tearful Becky Washa, Holly's sister, told reporters during a news conference after the execution.The story is mostly about the debut of Washington's one-drug protocol.
After making a nearly three-minute statement from the prison's death chamber, Brown was administered five grams of sodium thiopental intravenously while strapped to a gurney. His chest heaved three times and his lips shuddered, then there was no movement.
Witnesses said Brown died about a minute and a half after the drug was administered. He was pronounced dead by prison officials at 12:56 a.m. Brown was the first person executed in Washington since August 2001.
The anti-DP lawyer says exactly what you would expect. "However, killing a human being is never humane when we could instead lock him up forever." Of course, we have seen in the case of the juvenile murderers that the instant the death penalty is off the table they start claiming that locking them up forever is inhumane and referring to LWOP as a sentence to "die in prison." That is, death is suddenly no longer different.
He also predicts the other states will switch. On that point, I agree, although it may be a slow process. It will be slower than it needs to be because the anti-DP crowd and courts sympathetic to them have imposed unnecessary obstacles to the procedure for changing protocols in many states.
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