Hit man and repeat murderer Thomas Arthur was finally executed in Alabama last night after dodging seven prior execution dates. Kim Chandler has this story for AP.
Arthur filed a last-minute petition in the U.S. Supreme Court, and Justice Thomas (the assigned Circuit Justice for the Eleventh Circuit, including Alabama) granted a temporary stay while the Court considered it. The Court lifted the stay and denied relief barely in time for the execution to be carried out before the warrant expired at midnight.
The petition had to do with the state's use of midazolam as the first drug of the protocol. An additional wrinkle was the defendant's request for his lawyer to have a cell phone to make a call if things went badly. Justice Sotomayor dissented alone.
The midazolam problem is entirely artificial and entirely unnecessary. The federal government needs to bring down the barriers that are presently preventing the states from importing barbiturates from willing suppliers in Asia. Is anyone in the government paying attention?
Update: Kim Chandler and Jay Reeves have this follow-up story for AP on racing the clock.
Arthur filed a last-minute petition in the U.S. Supreme Court, and Justice Thomas (the assigned Circuit Justice for the Eleventh Circuit, including Alabama) granted a temporary stay while the Court considered it. The Court lifted the stay and denied relief barely in time for the execution to be carried out before the warrant expired at midnight.
The petition had to do with the state's use of midazolam as the first drug of the protocol. An additional wrinkle was the defendant's request for his lawyer to have a cell phone to make a call if things went badly. Justice Sotomayor dissented alone.
The midazolam problem is entirely artificial and entirely unnecessary. The federal government needs to bring down the barriers that are presently preventing the states from importing barbiturates from willing suppliers in Asia. Is anyone in the government paying attention?
Update: Kim Chandler and Jay Reeves have this follow-up story for AP on racing the clock.
A question I've always wondered about: Why do these death warrants (or execution warrants) have a termination date? Once the judgment of the court has become final, it would seem to me that the execution could then be carried out at any time. I'm curious as to why this is not so.
"An additional wrinkle was the defendant's request for his lawyer to have a cell phone to make a call if things went badly."
Sounds like something that should have been raised waaaaaay earlier in the process. That Sotomayor swallowed that is very telling.
Bill, as I understand it, that's essentially how it happens in Japan. The prisoner just waits on death row until one day the prison officials come in and say "okay, now," however you say that in Japanese.
But we have a long tradition of setting execution dates in this country. More recent statutes provide a range of dates rather than a specific calendar date so we don't have this midnight problem.
California's Proposition 66 provides for a 10 day window.
Kent,
Thanks. Yes, a 10 day window sounds a lot better. The way last minute litigation has become -- with no sanctions for multitudinous last-minute claims -- the killer's lawyer is able to run the clock almost to expiration, as apparently he did here. Creating a window will not completely eliminate this problem, but would improve things a good deal.
"The federal government needs to bring down the barriers that are presently preventing the states from importing barbiturates from willing suppliers in Asia. Is anyone in the government paying attention?"
Though AG Sessions has had a lot on his plate since his confirmation nearly five months ago, I presume this would not be a heavy lift for him and/or the heads of the FDA/DEA, right?
I have noted in this space before that AG Sessions has, notably, not been talking up increased use of the death penalty as one of the tools to be used to respond to the uptick in murders. That silence combined with failing, it seems, to help states have the means for carrying out executions continues to mystify me and continues to lead me to conclude that abolitionist forces have largely succeeded in permanently changing both the politics and the rhetoric of capital punishment in the US.
Law professors have been concluding, for one urgently pressed reason or another, that the "death penalty is dying," and have been doing this for about the last thousand executions.