The StandDown Texas Project

The Latest News From Illinois

Today's Chicago Sun-Times carries the OpEd, "The case against capital punishment."  It's by Thomas R. Sullivan, Chairman of Illinois Capital Punishment Reform Study Commission.  He's a former U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois.

During the past 10, much of my time and energy has been devoted to studying our capital punishment system.

As co-chairman of the Governor’s Commission on Capital Punishment (2000-2002), I participated in heart-rending interviews of family members of murder victims and heard moving statements by men who were convicted, sentenced to death and imprisoned for murders they did not commit.

As chairman of the General Assembly’s Capital Punishment Reform Study Committee from 2003 to 2010, I participated in four public hearings, during which we heard the views of many of our citizens about the death penalty. We spoke at length with police and sheriff personnel, prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges. Members of both groups had great sympathy for those who lost a family member as a result of a murder. We sympathized with the men (and their family members) who had been wrongfully convicted of murders and who spent years behind bars.

As a result of these experiences, I have come to the firm conclusion that the death penalty system is extremely expensive, does not deter crime or serve any valid purpose and cannot be reformed to prevent more mistaken death sentences.

And:

So far as I am able to determine, there is no real evidence to support the theory that capital punishment deters crime. Consider this: Following a moratorium on executions in 2000 — and the commutation of more than 160 death sentences to life without parole in 2003 — the Illinois murder rate has declined. Does it follow that commuting death sentences and prohibiting executions deters murder?

An ever-growing number of states do not have the death penalty. No member of the European Union may have it. We can do just fine without capital punishment.

The death penalty diverts our attention and money from the real problems in our society that lead to crime, for example, poverty, unemployment, housing, education and health issues. The Reform Committee recommended that part of the money now spent on capital cases be made available to the families of crime victims. Rather than spending millions to support state killings, would it not be wiser to use the funds to assist crime victims?

The General Assembly was wise and courageous to pass legislation abolishing the death penalty. I respectfully urge Gov. Quinn to sign it.

The Belleville News-Democrat reports, "Death penalty advocates, foes waiting on Quinn: 'Why ... keep an evil person here?'"  It's by Beth Hundsdorfer.

First, there were the reforms, then a blanket commutation of all death row inmates by former Gov. George Ryan who then imposed a moratorium on executions that has stayed in place since 2000.

Earlier this month, Illinois lawmakers did something even proponents of the death penalty and reformers didn't expect. They passed a bill abolishing the death penalty. The bill is on Gov. Pat Quinn's desk awaiting his signature.

Advocates on both sides of the issue are encouraging phone calls and letters to the governor to sway his decision, but the pen still remains on Quinn's desk. Quinn has said he will "follow my conscience" on the issue.

Earlier coverage from Illinois begins at the link.

An Editorial Roundup From Maryland, Ohio

The Sunday Baltimore Sun editorial was titled, "Inherently inhumane: Gov. O'Malley should take advantage of changes in Annapolis and a temporary shortage of a key lethal injection drug to work toward abolishing Maryland's death penalty law."

An unexpected confluence of events this year has given Gov. Martin O'Malley a chance to advance a much-needed reform that he has long championed. Because of changes in the composition of the state Senate after last year's elections, the General Assembly may be more receptive than it has been in years past to ending executions in Maryland, not just limiting their application. Moreover, the only American manufacturer of a key chemical used in lethal injections announced last week that it would no longer produce the drug, a move that will likely put a de facto halt to executions across the U.S., at least temporarily. It is disappointing, then, that Mr. O'Malley has left off his agenda for the current legislative session a call to abolish the death penalty in Maryland.

And:

Mr. O'Malley doesn't have to wait for a vote by the review panel (whose role in any case is only advisory) in order to decide whether to resume executions in Maryland. Nor does he have to succumb to pressure from European lawmakers who want to ban the sale of lethal injection drugs to the U.S. because they oppose capital punishment. If he truly believes the penalty is unjust and immoral, he can immediately commute the sentences of the five inmates currently on the state's death row to life without parole, then take the lead in calling on lawmakers to permanently ban the practice. Regardless of what happens elsewhere, that is something he already has the power to do whenever he wishes.

"The right death penalty conversation," is the title of a Cleveland Plain Dealer editorial.  It appeared in the Sunday edition.

Ohio corrections officials are still having the wrong discussion about the death penalty.

As they have since the tortured execution of Joseph Clark in 2007, those who run Ohio's death row keep looking for the best -- that is to say, the most efficient and pain-free -- way to put condemned prisoners to death.

Last week, they announced that Ohio would change the drug used for lethal injections after the next scheduled execution on Feb. 17. The manufacturer of sodium thiopental has announced plans to drop that product line. So Ohio must shift to another powerful sedative, one possibly untested for executions.

But even as the state tinkers with the machinery of death, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer is trying to start a far more important discussion. Pfeifer wants Ohioans to reconsider not how this state puts prisoners to death, but whether it should.

And:

During Pfeifer's swearing-in this month, he urged new Gov. John Kasich to commute every death row sentence to life without parole. That would in no way sanction or diminish what they did. It would bring closure to the families of victims who now must endure endless appeals -- Frank Spisak, the next in line for execution, committed his murders in 1982. And it would guard against the chance of an innocent person being put in death.

Kasich, so far, has shown no interest in Pfeifer's suggestion. He should. So should we all.

Today's Toledo Blade carries the editorial, "Time to talk about death."

BEFORE Ohio begins using a new drug - its third in just over two years - to execute death-row inmates, state officials should take advantage of this opportunity to make sure they administer capital punishment fairly and humanely.

And:

Ohio's death row now includes 157 prisoners. Our state executed eight men in 2010, the most since the death penalty was reinstated nationally nearly 30 years ago.

Ohio ranked second to Texas' 17 executions last year. It was the only state in which executions rose in 2010.

Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer, who was chairman of the state Senate Judiciary Committee when Ohio's modern death penalty became law in 1981, is often called the father of that penalty. In the past decade, however, he has spoken out strongly against capital punishment.

More recently, Terry Collins, who was director of the corrections department between 2006 and 2010, joined the call for debate on the death penalty. In an essay in the Columbus Dispatch, Mr. Collins said that each time he witnessed an execution - 33 times in all - he wondered: "What if we got it wrong for those we executed?"

The system is not perfect. Three times during his term, Governor Strickland granted clemency to death-row inmates because of evidence that they might have been innocent.

Justice Pfeifer's suggestion that Ohio eliminate the death penalty goes too far. But if the state is going to deprive people of their lives, there can be no room for error. And the punishment must be administered justly.

It is reasonable to ask whether Ohio has applied the ultimate penalty fairly and enforced it humanely. If the answer is no, as it appears to be, then the time to debate how to improve the system is now, before anyone else is executed.

Related posts are in the editorial index; earlier coverage from Maryland and Ohio's lethal injection switch and the call for repeal, at the links.

Graves Ex-Prosecutor Underscores Death Penalty Distrust

That's the title of a Dallas Morning News editorial looking at issues raised by Anthony Graves' exoneration last year.  It appeared in the Saturday edition.

It’s natural to be defensive when one’s professional stature and integrity are on the line. A humiliating reversal sometimes brings out the worst in people, as appears to be the case for Charles Sebesta, the former Burleson County district attorney who prosecuted the highly flawed murder case of Anthony Graves.

Sebesta won a conviction that sent Graves to death row as an accomplice to the hideous murders of six in a Somerville house in 1992. Graves spent 18 years in prison, always maintaining his innocence, while Sebesta unceasingly insisted that Graves was guilty and had to die.

Graves today is a free man after receiving exoneration in October. Sebesta, meanwhile, has taken out an ad in the Burleson County Tribune and created a website to restate his claims of Graves’ guilt. His arguments are stunningly incoherent; they betray the desperation of a man who simply cannot bring himself to admit: I was wrong.

And:

Sebesta’s obsession with winning his case evidently clouded his judgment, and still does. His behavior is by no means representative of Texas’ justice system, but the fact that the system allowed such blatant error — nearly costing an innocent man his life — is exactly why Texas needs to reconsider its use of the death penalty.

Death is irreversible. Our capital punishment system has been proved imperfect. Charles Sebesta’s conduct in this case places these facts into high relief.

This state’s criminal justice system is too flawed to justify the use of the death penalty.

Related posts are in the editorial index; earlier coverage of Anthony Graves' exoneration, at the link.

Death Row Drug Dilemma

That's the title of a post at Nature, written by Emma Marris. It's subtitled, "Lack of anaesthetic used in lethal injection exposes ethics gaps in the supply chain."

The situation demonstrates that although pharmaceutical supply chains are global, the morals and mores of drug use are decidedly local. Will US states be forced to stop executing their death-row inmates by a drug embargo? And who decides which drugs are used to inject prisoners condemned to die? Nature explores an ethical dilemma.

And:

Did the FDA 'help' states obtain sodium thiopental?

Not according to a spokesperson — but they didn't hinder the states either. They did not interfere with the importation of the drug from the United Kingdom, despite knowing where the drug was headed. A spokesperson says: "In 2009 and 2010, FDA permitted the importation of several shipments of sodium thiopental to state Departments of Correction. In doing so, FDA deferred to law enforcement in the use of substances for lethal injection, which is consistent with the agency's long-standing policy. The agency did not conduct any review of these products for safety, effectiveness or quality."

Also:

If the FDA won't and the manufacturer can't stop a drug from being used in executions, who in the United States can?

A manufacturer can stop a drug being used for executions by ceasing to make it, although this will also affect any patients using the drug medicinally. Manufacturers sell to wholesalers, or sometimes direct to pharmacies. Then drugs are prescribed by a doctor and dispensed by a pharmacist, and it is these two professionals who ultimately bear the onus of deciding whether the use of a drug is appropriate. The American Medical Association has forbidden its members from participating in executions, so any medical professionals who order drugs for executions do so at the risk of their professional reputations (see 'Will medics' qualms kill the death penalty?').

Earlier coverage begins with a link to TPJ's latest Lobby Watch, posted earlier today; more on the FDA's role, at the link

North Carolina RJA to the Test

"Forsyth cases test Racial Justice Act," is the title of Anne Blythe's report in today's News & Observer of Raleigh, North Carolina.

The cases of two death row inmates who are seeking to have death sentences converted to life prison terms without parole made their way into a Forsyth County courtroom Thursday.

The landmark cases - the first of 154 death row inmates to test the Racial Justice Act - went before Judge the day after Republicans took control of both General Assembly chambers.

Their plights will be watched by politicians, legal scholars and death penalty opponents as the young law faces threats in the statehouse.

Republicans in the state legislature, who for the first time in more than a century have sweeping control, have suggested repealing the Racial Justice Act.

The law, which narrowly passed in 2009 along party lines, allows death row inmates and defendants in death penalty cases to challenge prosecutions and sentences on grounds of racial bias.

In Forsyth County, Wood will be asked to weigh statistical and anecdotal evidence to consider whether racial bias played any part in the cases of Errol Moses and Carl Moseley, death row inmates since the 1990s.

Much of the hearing Thursday was about evidentiary issues. Prosecutors asked for more details about studies done by Michigan State University law professors that are the backbone of defense bias claims.

Defense lawyers, in turn, sought information on how and why prosecutors decided to seek the death penalty.

Stephanie Carroll Carson posts, "History Made in NC Courtroom," for the North Carolina News Service.

For the first time in state history, a Forsyth County judge will consider whether race played a roll in sentencing two men to death row. Under the Racial Justice Act of 2009, inmates Errol Moses and Carl Moseley were permitted to present evidence in court that race was a factor. If their case is successful, their sentences will be converted to life in prison without parole.

Center for Death Penalty Litigation attorney Ken Rose explains.

"This is really the first time that persons on death row have had a chance to say race played a significant factor and, for that reason, they should instead be sentenced to life in prison without parole."

The Winston-Salem Journal reports, "Racial Justice Act to get test."  It's by Michael Hewlett.

On Thursday, Judge William Z. Wood of Forsyth Superior Court scheduled a hearing for the week of Feb. 7 to deal with motions filed in two cases under the Racial Justice Act that involve death-row inmates from the county — Carl Stephen Moseley and Errol Duke Moses.

The hearing Thursday was historic, drawing prosecutors from around the state. It comes at a time when legislators in the Republican-controlled General Assembly might consider repealing the law.

“It was the first Racial Justice Act hearing in a post-conviction case in the state,” said Ken Rose, an attorney for the Center for Death Penalty Litigation who represents Moses.

The law, which Gov. Bev Perdue signed in 2009, allows death-row inmates and defendants facing the death penalty to use statistics and other evidence to prove race played a role in their sentence or in the fact that prosecutors pursued the death penalty. Of the 158 inmates on death row, 149 have filed motions under the Racial Justice Act, with 12 coming from Forsyth County.

Forsyth County prosecutors plan to challenge the constitutionality of the act at the February hearing.

And:

If Wood decides that the law is constitutional, the cases will go forward. A hearing will be held at a later date during which a Forsyth County judge will decide whether the motions have merit. The only remedy Moses and Moseley can get under the law is to have their death sentences reduced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Earlier coverage of the RJA includes Republican plans to scale back or repeal the law and challenges filed last year under the law.  Related posts are in the race index.

Untested DNA Sitting on the Shelf

Brandi Grissom posts, "Thousands of Texas Rape Kits Never Tested," for today's Texas Tribune.

In police departments across Texas, tens of thousands of rape kits have been sitting on the shelves of property storage rooms for years, the result of strained budgets, overworked crime labs and a law enforcement philosophy that rape kits are primarily useful as evidence if a stranger committed the assault. Victims’ rights advocates and some lawmakers say they will work to pass legislation this year to take all of that evidence out of storage and create a DNA database that would help track rapists and perhaps even identify those who have been wrongly convicted. State Sen. Wendy Davis, D-Fort Worth, is preparing a bill that would require police departments to test all rape kits in their possession and every one they get in the future. “I think we owe it to every person who has been raped,” Davis said.

Officials at big-city police departments say they are working to reduce the backlog of rape kits in their evidence rooms and to test evidence from unsolved cases. But processing each of the tens of thousands of rape kits from as far back as the 1980s — the total number is not known — is, they say, unrealistic. Also, testing the hundreds of kits that each metropolitan police department receives every year would take much more money, equipment and staff than is currently available. (Davis has not established a price tag for her proposed legislation.) Nor is it clear, some police officials say, that DNA evidence in all cases would be useful to prosecutors. “It’s not reasonable, and it’s not an effective use of their investigators’ time or their labs’ time,” said Sgt. Elizabeth Donegan, who runs the sex crimes unit at the Austin Police Department.

In Houston, about 16,000 rape kits, some dating back decades, sit in the police department’s property room, said Irma Rios, assistant director of the department's crime lab. Rios could not say how many had been tested. “There’s a portion that are never tested,” she said. “We don’t have the resources right now to test every single” rape kit that comes into the department.

And:

Rape victims would not endure the humiliation of a post-assault exam if they understood that the evidence might not be tested and that they did not have the right to decide whether the kit was tested, said Victoria Camp, deputy director of the Texas Association Against Sexual Assault. “All of the kits need to be tested,” Camp said. “That costs money, and I know it takes time, but I think we should prioritize the kits and start working on that backlog until they are all tested.”

Testing the DNA from rape kits in all assaults, Camp said, would give the police a better chance of finding serial rapists.The same perpetrator could attack both someone he knew and a stranger. But if the police test only the DNA in the stranger case, they may not be able to determine that the same person has assaulted someone else.

The testing could do more than help sexual assault victims, advocates say. It could exonerate wrongly convicted prisoners. Earlier this month, Cornelius Dupree Jr. became the latest Texan to be released from prison after DNA evidence proved he did not commit the rape he was convicted of in 1980.

Continued Illinois Coverage

Today's Rockford Register Star carries the editorial, "Our View: Moral, practical reasons to end death penalty in Illinois."

Gov. Pat Quinn says he would like to hear from the people of Illinois before he decides whether to sign a law ending the death penalty in this state.

He can listen all he wants, but all the evidence he needs is already before him. Capital punishment in Illinois must end.

Execution cannot be reversed if a mistake is made — and, in that way, constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. It is also punishment carried out in a breathtakingly reckless manner in this state.

The measure that Quinn is considering signing was passed before the Legislature adjourned two weeks ago. During the fall campaign for governor, Quinn said he supported the 10-year moratorium on executions in Illinois but supported capital punishment “when applied carefully and fairly.”

Carefully and fairly? Illinois knows no such things.

And:

We know some victims’ families feel their losses need to be avenged (although not all families feel that way — some families feel that another death just compounds the illogic and the barbarism).

Quinn has heard all he needs to hear. He needs to sign the bill outlawing the death penalty in Illinois and get on with a fairer, more civil, more humane way of justice in this state.

In today's New York Times, James Warren writes, "The Governor Wrings His Hands on the Death Penalty."  Warren's article is also available at the Chicago News Cooperative.  Like the Texas Tribune, the Coop is a partner with the Times to provide enhanced local news coverage.

The governor supported the death penalty during his campaign last year when few imagined the legislature would get to abolition, and in a lame-duck session no less. Fellow Democrats not only backed it but risked voter retribution after carrying the burden for a Quinn tax increase far stiffer than anything he had broached as a candidate.

Saying he must deal with his conscience, Mr. Quinn and aides are asking various individuals for their take on the bill and abolition. He has 60 days, or until March 18, to keep us in suspense.

And, remember, this is after years of news media revelations, studies and a moratorium on executions that have proved that the system is kaput and should be, as Michael Keaton put it in the film “Beetlejuice,” “dead, dead, deadski.”

“Is this theater?” said Jeremy Schroeder, executive director of the Illinois Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, when I asked about Mr. Quinn’s supposedly probing the innermost recesses of his soul.

“For goodness gracious, he claimed he was a reformer!” declared State Senator Dan Duffy of Lake Barrington, a Roman Catholic South Sider and die-hard Republican conservative who voted for abolition. “Quinn’s always trying to make everybody happy.”

The notion that there’s a bit of a sham under way has crossed minds. Might the governor’s helter-skelter ways include a search for cover before he disappoints death penalty supporters?

“You’d think it would be something he would have signed immediately,” said Senate President John J. Cullerton, a Chicago Democrat. “It would be dumb politically and dumb morally if he didn’t.”

And:

“I don’t begrudge anybody for taking their time to think the issue through,” said Senator Jeffrey M. Schoenberg, Democrat of Evanston, one of the few people I contacted who was not critical.

Mr. Schoenberg grappled with the issue for 17 years after a shocking brush with a 1993 murder. A neo-Nazi killed a Wilmette plastic surgeon not long after showing up at Mr. Schoenberg’s office asking to see the luckily absent politician.

Mr. Schoenberg said “the scales tilted” in his position on the death penalty only recently after he read a law review article by Leigh B. Beinen, a senior lecturer at Northwestern University Law School, who underscored the financial wastefulness of the current system.

“If Quinn reads Professor Beinen’s analysis, he can’t come to any other conclusion,” said Mr. Schoenberg, who voted for abolition.

And how might Mr. Quinn’s Catholicism play into this? “I associate ‘conscience’ with Catholic moral teaching, and Catholic moral teaching finds the death penalty abhorrent,” said Richard Rosengarten, a University of Chicago divinity professor. “The governor’s got his terms and traditions at sixes and sevens.”

Earlier coverage from Illinois begins with the post, "An Illinois Sidebar."

Texans for Public Justice on the Texas Drug Connection

The latest issue of Lobby Watch, the publication of the campaign finance reforem advocate Texans for Public Justice, spotlights Texas connections to the maker and a seller of sodium thiopental.  It's titled, "Who Sells Execution Solutions?  Global Supply Chain Strains Huntsville’s Lethal Injections."  It's in Adobe .pdf format.

Long addicted to lethal injections, Texas is having trouble scoring a fix. In November Britain banned exports of sodium thiopental, one of three drugs that Texas uses in its death-row cocktails.

At the time, the only U.S. producer of the drug was shifting its thiopental production to Italy. On Christmas Eve Italy’s Parliament unanimously demanded guarantees from Illinois-based Hospira, Inc. that no thiopental produced there would be used in executions. Saying it could not make such guarantees, Hospira opted to abandon the product. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini praised the company for helping Italy “prevent the drug from reaching U.S. penitentiaries and being used for capital punishment.”

Hospira makes drugs “to improve or save lives” and condemns lethal, off-label uses of them for executions, says spokesman Dan Rosenberg. The company conveyed this position to the prison systems of all 50 states last March, he says.

And:

Last week death-row defense attorneys smoked out one of Hospira’s distributors when they forced the Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) to disclose the source of its execution drugs. A state judge ordered the agency to release documents that show that it got all three of its execution drugs from Besse Medical, a unit of AmerisourceBergen Corp.3

Maurie Levin of the University of Texas’ Capital Punishment Clinic helped force TDCJ to disclose its supply chain for death-row drugs. She says the documents show that TDCJ ordered “the very three drugs that they use in lethal injections” from Amerisource’s Besse Medical. “It’s implausible that the supplier didn’t know what these drugs were used for,” Levin says.

Amerisource representatives did not return calls about the matter. Spokeswoman Barbara Brungess told Lobby Watch in a written statement that “AmerisourceBergen has no insight into how a licensed provider uses a product.” She added that the company “has no stated position on the death penalty.” Does Amerisource supply lethal-injection drugs to prisons in any other states? “We do not discuss any individual customers,” Brungess wrote.

Earlier news from Texas begins at the link; more lethal injection coverage starts in the preceding post.

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Drugmaker Requests Pentobarbital Not Be Used for Executions

Today's Columbus Dispatch reports, "Drugmaker objects to Ohio's new execution plan."  It's written by Alan Johnson.

With two convicted murderers scheduled to be executed, and 13 others awaiting death dates, Ohio officials plan to use a new lethal-injection drug over the objections of the manufacturer.

Tuesday's announcement by the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction that it will switch to pentobarbital from sodium thiopental for executions beginning in March prompted Lundbeck Inc., the sole U.S. manufacturer of the drug, to send a letter of protest.

Sally Benjamin Young, vice president for communication for the Danish-based company with U.S. headquarters in Deerfield, Ill., declined to release the letter because it is "private communication."

However, Young said the company told state prison officials that it is "adamantly opposed" to the use of its product, sold under the trade name Nembutal, for capital punishment. "We urged them to discontinue using it for this purpose.

"Lundbeck is dedicated to saving people's lives," Young said. "Use of our products to end lives contradicts everything we're in business to do."

Prisons spokesman Carlo LoParo said the state will not heed the company's warning and will use the new drug as planned.

And:

Court spokesman Chris Davey said he does not know when the next round of execution dates will be set. Prison officials have been told to expect the pace of executions to continue monthly in the immediate future.

"Oklahoma plans to continue using sedative in executions despite manufacturer's objections," is the AP report, via the Los Angles Times.  It's written by Tim Talley.

Oklahoma prison officials will continue using a sedative as part of the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol despite objections from the drug's manufacturer, a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections said Thursday.

Denmark-based Lundbeck, Inc., producer of the drug pentobarbital, has said it opposes use of the drug in lethal injections and has sent a letter asking the Oklahoma and Ohio not to use it to put inmates to death.

Oklahoma Department of Corrections spokesman Jerry Massie said prison officials had not seen the letter Thursday but "don't anticipate any changes."

Alex Weintz, spokesman for Gov. Mary Fallin, and Diane Clay, spokeswoman for Attorney General Scott Pruitt, said members of their respective staffs also had not seen the letter and would withhold comment.

Oklahoma has used the drug in three executions, including two earlier this month. No other executions are scheduled in the state, which used the pentobarbital as the first drug administered in its three-drug lethal injection protocol. The other two drugs are vecuronium bromide, which stops respiration, and potassium chloride, which stops heart activity.

Officials in Ohio announced Tuesday that they would switch to pentobarbital as the sole drug used to put inmates to death.

Earlier coverage begins with the editorials in the preceding post.  More on the request from Lundbeck, the drug's manufacturer, at the link.

Editorial Commentary on Lethal Injection

Today's New York Times carries the editorial, "Lethal Injection and the F.D.A."

Sodium thiopental is at the heart of this story. A fast- and short-acting general anesthetic, it has been used to put convicts under and make executions methodical. For more than a year, however, a shortage of the drug has widened the gap between the reality of carrying out executions and support for them in American law. In October, a majority of the Supreme Court wrongly insisted there was no evidence that the shortage had any bearing on whether an execution can be done constitutionally. Now the evidence is impossible to ignore.

We strongly oppose capital punishment on many grounds. Even with judicial blessing, the conduct of executions in this country is a shambles. In Arizona and Georgia, the sodium thiopental used in executions has possibly been ineffective and almost certainly been illegal. It came from Dream Pharma, an unlicensed British supplier, run from a driving school. The batches carried a date of 2006. They were likely made by a company in Austria that went out of business. The drug is said to be effective for only a year. As a foreign-made drug without approval by the Food and Drug Administration, it is prohibited by federal statute.

The F.D.A. initially suspected the drug from Dream Pharma of being adulterated or mislabeled and refused to let it be imported. Then it let the drug enter the country — but with the warning that the agency hadn’t reviewed the drug’s “identity, safety, effectiveness, purity or any other characteristics.”

This month, the F.D.A. stated: “Reviewing substances imported or used for the purpose of state-authorized lethal injection clearly falls outside of F.D.A.’s explicit public health role.”

In the meantime, the only American manufacturer of sodium thiopental — formerly described as F.D.A.-approved — has announced it will no longer make the drug. It planned to produce the drug in Italy, but the Italian government has said it won’t permit the drug’s export for use in executions.

When it reaffirmed the constitutionality of capital punishment three years ago, a splintered Supreme Court said it believed lethal injection carried neither “substantial” nor “objectively intolerable” risk of inflicting serious harm. How can the justices be confident in that conclusion now?

"Demise of a death drug," is the title of a Los Angeles Times editorial.  It appeared in Thursday's edition.

In response to violations of international human rights norms, Western governments are slapping sanctions on a rogue regime by halting exports of a deadly substance. That's nothing new; what is new is that the rogue nation is the United States.

The substance in question is sodium thiopental, a fast-acting anesthetic designed for surgery that has been put to a more sinister purpose in 34 states, which use it to numb condemned prison inmates before injecting another drug that stops their breathing and a third that stops their hearts. Sodium thiopental is very hard to come by because the only U.S. company that makes it has ceased production. Hospira Inc., unable to make the drug in the U.S., had hoped to manufacture it at a plant in Italy, but authorities there demanded assurances that it wouldn't be used for capital punishment. Unable to provide them, Hospira opted to get out of the business. Britain has banned exports of the drug to the U.S.

The United States is an extreme rarity among industrialized democracies for its embrace of the death penalty, which has been abolished in law or practice by 139 nations. That's why European countries are teaming up to stop exports of execution drugs to the U.S. — and that's throwing a wrench into the American machinery of death. Without a supply of sodium thiopental, many states will have to go through the lengthy process of revising their execution procedures. Executions have been delayed for five years in California amid lawsuits over whether the state's lethal injection method — which uses sodium thiopental — constitutes unconstitutionally cruel punishment. The state has an ample supply of the drug because it acquired 90 doses from Britain before London imposed its ban, but when that cache expires, the whole legal nightmare might start over.

And:

Our biggest objection to the death penalty has nothing to do with death drugs. In an excellent but still imperfect legal system, it is impossible to determine guilt with 100% certainty, which is why dozens of death row inmates have been exonerated. Once a convict is dead, it's too late to set him or her free if new evidence materializes. Add to this the expense of the never-ending appeals process and the serious questions about execution methodology raised by the sodium thiopental fracas, and we have to ask: Is the visceral satisfaction Americans derive from killing convicted killers really worth its cost?

Earlier coverage begins with the post, "More Lethal Injection News From the States."  More on the FDA position and its actions, at the link.

Legislation in the States

In New Jersey, the Star-Ledger reports, "N.J. lawmaker introduces bill reinstating the death penalty."  It's written by Megan DeMarco.

A New Jersey legislator has introduced legislation that would reinstate the death penalty in New Jersey.

The bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Singer (R-Ocean), would reinstate the death penalty for those convicted of murdering a child, killing a police officer in the line of duty, or committing a fatal terrorist attack.

Singer represents Lakewood, where officer Christopher Matlosz was shot execution-style. Ten police officers in the United States have been killed by gunfire in the line of duty this year, he said.

And

Former Gov. Jon Corzine repealed the death penalty in New Jersey in December 2007. When Corzine signed the bill into law, New Jersey had not executed anyone in 44 years.

North Carolina's alt-weekly Indy Week reports, "The Racial Justice Act: GOP could repeal or amend landmark legislation."  It's by Samiha Khanna.

With surprising poise for a man who insists he's quite shy, Ed Chapman, 43, stood before an audience of strangers. Smiling, and even joking at times, Chapman recounted the lies and negligence that wrongfully sent him to prison for the deaths of two Catawba County women. The moment of his conviction, Chapman said, "was an out-of-body experience."

A judge later found investigators withheld evidence in Chapman's case. One of the women he allegedly murdered may actually have died of a drug overdose. A police officer lied on the witness stand. And, Chapman said, one of the white men on his jury admitted openly to being racist.

"He didn't hide it," said Chapman, who is black. "And to this day, I respect him for being up front about it."

Chapman has repeated these details dozens of times. He was one of three black death-row inmates cleared between 2007 and 2008 because of incomplete investigations or insufficient evidence. After they were released, the former prisoners became part of a campaign for criminal justice reform, specifically the N.C. Racial Justice Act.

The Racial Justice Act passed in August 2009, propelled through the Legislature by death penalty opponents, civil rights advocates and a coalition of dogged Democrats. The law allows death row defendants to appeal their sentences on grounds of racial discrimination. If defendants can show statistics proving that race played a role in their sentencing or in a prosecutor's decision to seek the death penalty, they would avoid being put to death. The defendants would instead be allowed to serve life sentences without parole.

The legislation has been heralded nationally as a leap for civil rights, notable especially for the South and a state with a history haunted by racial inequity. But erasing part or all of the statute is on the agenda for the new Republican majority when it takes hold of this legislative session on Wednesday. Although other priorities—balancing the budget and easing unemployment—are expected to take precedence, incoming House Majority Leader Paul "Skip" Stam, R-Wake, has said he's pushing to repeal the Racial Justice Act.

From Virginia, AP posts, "Push for Va death penalty expansion advances," via WRIC-TV.

A renewed, scaled-back push to expand the death penalty is advancing in the Senate.

Republican Sen. Mark Obenshain has tried for years to repeal Virginia's triggerman rule, which allows only the person who does the actual killing to receive the death penalty. When it has advanced, the measure was vetoed.

On Thursday, a subcommittee of the Senate Courts of Justice Committee gave preliminary approval to Obenshain's bill to allow the death penalty for co-conspirators only in cases where a victim was raped and murdered. He argued that it shouldn't matter which defendant pulled the trigger.

Opponents argue any expansion of the death penalty increases chances of executing someone who is innocent.

Related posts are in the state legislation index.

More Lethal Injection News From the States

ABC News reports, "Texas Only Has Enough Lethal Injection Drugs to Execute 2 of 317 Death Row Inmates,"  It's by Russell Goldman.

Texas has 317 convicted murderers on death row, but because of a company's decision last week to stop making the key drug for lethal injections, Texas only has enough of the potion to execute two.

Consequently, Texas and 32 other states will be watching closely as Ohio prepares to execute Johnnie Baston. They will be watching not only to see how well the substitute drug works, but how entangling the legal battle is going to be.

And:

Texas, which has the busiest death row in the country, expects to run out of its supply of lethal drugs in March.

"The supply expires in March, so we'll have to look to some sort of alternative," said Texas Department of Corrections spokesman Jason Clarke. "We'll likely end up changing the drug. We'll look to what other states use successfully."

From Mississippi, today's Jackson Clarion Ledger carries the AP report, "State short on death drug Production, stopped in 2009, not resuming," by Holbrook Mohr.

Just weeks before Mississippi had back-to-back executions for the first time in nearly 50 years, officials were scrambling to find enough sodium thiopental to carry out the sentences.

The executions were carried out as scheduled, but the difficulty in finding sodium thiopental shows Mississippi is not immune from a nationwide shortage of the drug.

State Corrections Commissioner Chris Epps said Wednesday the state is looking for a replacement for sodium thiopental, one of three drugs used in Mississippi's executions.

"We don't have a choice. We're wearing out our options," Epps said.

And:

Mississippi Attorney General Jim Hood wrote a letter to Hospira last April, asking if there was anything he could do to help expedite a shipment of sodium thiopental because the state didn't have enough for two executions, scheduled the following month, on May 19 and 20.

In a reply dated May 18, Brian J. Smith, senior vice president, general counsel and secretary for Hospira, told Hood he couldn't help because Hospira does "not support the use of any of our products in capital punishment procedures" and that manufacturing had halted in mid-2009 due to "manufacturing difficulties."

Smith wrote that Hospira was aware its products were being obtained from third parties for executions, but the company didn't agree with that practice and would not ship directly for use in lethal injections. The Associated Press obtained the letters through a public records request.

The Mississippi Department of Corrections eventually got the drug for the two May executions from a pharmacist who doesn't want to be identified, said department spokeswoman Tara Booth.

The article notes that Mississippi's supply, enough for four executions, expires in March.

In Nebraska, the Lincoln Journal Star reports, "Nebraska bought enough lethal injection drug for 166 executions.  It's by Kevin O'Hanlon.

The Nebraska Department of Correctional Services recently bought such a large quantity of a drug used to kill death-row inmates by lethal injection that it now has enough to carry out 166 executions -- even though it has just 12 men on death row.

The state paid $2,056 to Kayem Pharmaceutical Pvt. Ltd. for 500 grams of sodium thiopental from a pharmaceuticals company in India. Corrections spokeswoman Dawn-Renee Smith said that was the minimum amount the company would sell.

And:

Mark Caverly of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration said states can give or sell doses of the drug to other states for use in executions, as long as they are both registered with the DEA and the drug was properly imported.

"Basically, the answer is yes,'' he said. "There are some conditions to any controlled substance transfer."

A doctor, hospital, clinic or, in this case, the Corrections Department, can transfer up to 5 percent of the total controlled substances it buys in a year to another DEA-registered entity.

But Smith said Nebraska prison officials are not looking at doing so, even though the expiration date for the batch Nebraska got is August 2012.

"It will remain in our inventory," she wrote in an e-mail to the Journal Star. "Selling it is not an option we are pursuing."

The Nebraska Attorney General is currently seeking an execution date for one on the state's death row.  Earlier coverage of the state's new supply of sodium thiopental is at the link.

Earlier coverage from Texas is at the link.

Pentobarbital Maker Asks That Drug Not Be Used for Executions

"Drug maker asks Ohio, Oklahoma not to use sedative for putting inmates to death," is the title of Andrew Welsh-Huggins' widely distributed AP report.

The sole U.S. manufacturer of a sedative that Ohio plans to use to execute death row inmates - and that Oklahoma already uses to do so - said Wednesday it opposes the practice and has asked both states to stop using the drug.

Pentobarbital maker Lundbeck Inc. says it never intended for the drug to be used to put inmates to death.

"This goes against everything we're in business to do," Sally Benjamin Young, spokeswoman for the Denmark-based company's U.S. headquarters in Deerfield, Ill., told The Associated Press.

"We like to develop and make available therapies that improve people's lives," she said. "That's the focus of our business."

State prison officials in Ohio and Oklahoma both said they hadn't seen copies of the letter Wednesday and could not comment.

Oklahoma has used the drug in combination with two others in three executions, while Ohio announced Tuesday it is switching to the sedative as the sole drug used to put inmates to death.

Lundbeck does not sell the product directly to end users and has no way of preventing either state from using the drug.

"While we cannot control how our products are administered, it is our intent that our products be used in a safe and appropriate manner and encourage use consistent with the label," the company said in a statement.

Ohio has not yet purchased its first supplies and Oklahoma has said it obtains its supply from a private pharmacy.

Both states switched to pentobarbital as a national shortage worsened of the drug they used previously, sodium thiopental.

And:

Pentobarbital is a barbiturate used to induce comas during surgeries to prevent brain damage when blood flow is interrupted, and to reduce possible brain damage following strokes or head trauma. It is chemically related to the same product used to euthanize pets.

Medical experts say Ohio and Oklahoma's dosages are so big they're lethal by themselves.

The amount that Oklahoma uses and Ohio has proposed — 5 grams (0.18 ounces) — is 50 times the normal dosage used in hospitals, said Howard Nearman, chairman of the Anesthesiology Department at Case Western Reserve University School of Medicine in Cleveland.

Not only would a dosage that size stop someone's breathing, it would also likely cause a drastic drop in blood pressure, all of which would easily lead to a person's death, Nearman said Wednesday.

Experts who testified in a federal lawsuit trying to stop Oklahoma's proposed switch to pentobarbital were split on the drug's effectiveness in putting humans to death.

The size of Oklahoma's dosage "by itself would cause death in almost everyone," Mark Dershwitz, a University of Massachusetts anesthesiologist, said in a report submitted to a federal judge in an Oklahoma hearing last year.

And:

The drug has been used in 200 of the 525 assisted suicides in Oregon since 1998, according to data compiled by the Oregon Public Health Division. It also was prescribed for 5 of 47 assisted-suicide patients in Washington state in 2009, state health statistics show.

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.  Coverage of the Ohio announcement begins at the link

More Questions About the British Sodium Thiopental

"Death row drugs 'may be defective'," is the report from the UK's Press Association.  It's via Google News. Here's an extended excerpt:

Drugs used for lethal injection in the US which were supplied by a west London-based pharmaceutical company may have been defective, leading to potentially agonising deaths for prisoners, according to an expert on execution.

Dream Pharma, a small company run from the back of the Elgone Driving Agency in Horn Lane, Acton, west London, is understood to have supplied the anaesthetic sodium thiopental which was used in the execution of convicted murderer Emmanuel Hammond in Georgia on Tuesday.

Before the execution Mark Heath filed a sworn declaration which raised concerns over whether the thiopental sold to Georgia Department of Corrections "lacked efficacy".

He said it was "extremely troubling" that after triple-murderer Brandon Rhode was injected with thiopental during his execution in September, his eyes remained open. Some reports suggested his eyes darted around the room before staring blankly at the ceiling of the death chamber.

The thiopental used in his execution is also understood to have been supplied by Dream Pharma.

Dr Heath said this was "very unusual and surprising" and raised the concern that either the thiopental was incorrectly administered or the integrity of the drug was "significantly compromised".

Sodium thiopental is used first to induce a coma, followed by pancuronium bromide which paralyses the muscles, and potassium chloride which stops the heart.

Dr Heath said: "If the thiopental was inadequately effective Mr Rhode's death would certainly have been agonising. There is no dispute that the asphyxiation caused by pancuronium and the caustic burning sensation caused by potassium would be agonising in the absence of adequate anaesthesia."

He said the origin of the thiopental used in the executions was "highly unusual". He said the vials were labelled as having come from a company called Link Pharmaceuticals which became Archimedes Pharma in 2006, adding: "This raises the concern that the batch, if it is indeed thiopental, may contain expired thiopental."

Digital Journal reports, "Execution drug sold to US by UK firm may have been ineffective," by Andrew John.

A drug sold from Britain that may have been ineffective and beyond its use-by date was employed in an execution in Georgia, USA, this week, it has been revealed.

The execution of 45-year-old Emmanuel Hammond – who spent 23 years on death row for murder – went ahead shortly before midnight on Tuesday. The drugs used are a combination of three: one to anaesthetise, one to paralyse and one to kill.

It was the first of these, sodium thiopental, that was thought to have passed its shelf life, and defence lawyers put this point in an unsuccessful late appeal.

It was sold to the George Department of Correction by Dream Pharma, a small pharmaceuticals company working from the offices of a driving school in Acton, west London.

The school – Elgone Driving Academy – is run by Mehdi “Matt” Alavi, who would not comment on the case.

The Independent reports: “In a series of last-minute appeals, lawyers for Mr Hammond presented evidence from Dr Mark Heath, a clinical anaesthesiologist at Columbia University Medical Centre, who said evidence from a previous execution of a Georgia prisoner suggested Dream Pharma’s sodium thiopental may not have worked properly.”

The report cites the case of Brandon Rhode, who was killed on 27 September 2010 using sodium thiopental from Dram Pharma. “During the execution,” says the newspaper, “numerous reporters and witnesses noticed that his eyes remained open throughout the procedure, an event Dr Heath described as ‘highly atypical’ as the drug normally ensures an executed inmate’s eyes remain closed.”

Earlier coverage of questions about the British supply of the drug begins at the link.

An Illinois Sidebar

Jon Burge.

For those who have followed developments in Illnois, that name is a major part of the decade-long story of Governor Ryan's moratorium, exonerations, reform initiatives, and the Illinois General Assembly's vote earlier this month to repeal the state's death penalty.

But for many outside of Illnois, it would have been easy to miss the name entirely.

"Cop Gets 4½ Years for Lying About Torture," is the Courthouse News Service report.

Former Chicago police Commander Jon Burge was sentenced to 4½ years in prison for lying about the police torture of suspects. Burge denied that officers ever abused suspects in custody, but evidence at a 2003 trial showed that he suffocated suspects with plastic bags, shocked them with electrical devices and put loaded guns to their heads.

Burge, 63, of Apollo Beach, Fla., was convicted in June 2010 of two counts of obstruction of justice and one count of perjury for his false answers in the 2003 civil case.

Burge, a 23-year veteran of the Chicago Police Department, was fired in 1993 over abuse allegations. More than a decade later, special prosecutors were appointed to investigate police torture; the 4-year investigation found that the abuses were outside the statute of limitations.

And:

The police torture led then-Illinois Gov. George Ryan to place a moratorium on the state's death penalty. Ryan pardoned four of Burge's alleged victims.

I want to highlight Alice Kim's thoughts on the sentence.  She's the Director of The Public Square at the Illinois Humanities Council, where she's produced many programs with Illinois exonerees.  She also writes the blog, Dancing the Dialectic.

In a lengthy meditation, she asks, "Was Justice Served?"

I've had Jon Burge on my mind. He was sentenced to four and a half years yesterday for obstructing justice and lying about the torture of more than 100 African American men and women at Area 2 and 3 Police headquarters in the 1970s and 1980s.

This is far less time than the twenty-one long years that Ronald Kitchen spent behind bars (thirteen of those years on death row), wrongfully convicted as the result of a tortured confession that put him and his co-defendant Marvin Reeves away for a crime they did not commit. And it's far less time than the twenty-eight years of hard time served by Mark Clements, who was beaten repeatedly by police officers under Burge's command when he was only sixteen years old.

Jon Burge was responsible for destroying the lives and livelihoods of over 100 African American men and their families. He abused his power and authority as a commanding police officer. And he got away with it for years.

There's much more on her blog --  which is why I've added it to the left-colmn webroll, Diversions.

Earlier coverage from Illinois begins with the post, "Illinois Lt. Gov. Urges Signing Repeal Law."

Questions Surround British Drug Used in Georgia Execution

Today's New York Times reports, "Murderer Is Executed in Georgia After Losing Stay."  It's by Kim Severson and Robbie Brown.

A convicted murderer in Georgia whose lawyers argued that the painkilling drugs used to help execute him might be ineffective lost an 11th-hour appeal to the Supreme Court on Tuesday night and was put to death shortly before midnight.

Justice Clarence Thomas had briefly stayed the execution of the inmate, Emmanuel Hammond, 45. But the court then allowed it to go forward.

Earlier in the day, a county court and the State Supreme Court both ruled that evidence supposedly showing that a Georgia prisoner who was executed in September had suffered pain because of an ineffective dose of the drug, sodium thiopental, was too speculative to warrant a stay.

Georgia prison officials first injected Mr. Hammond with sodium thiopental ordered from an unlicensed British company that operates from the back of a London driving school.

Mr. Hammond’s public defenders, as well as death penalty opponents, argued that the British company might have shipped batches of the drug that were past the expiration date and possibly ineffective at blocking the pain of paralysis and death that come with execution.

And:

As the shortage became acute last fall, California and Arizona obtained shipments of sodium thiopental from an unlicensed British wholesaler called Dream Pharma, but the British government has since refused to allow exports of drugs for use in capital punishment, a policy that is under consideration by the European Union.

Georgia, too, received supplies of sodium thiopental from the same source and was likely manufactured by a company that has not existed for five years, according to Mr. Hammond’s lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union and Reprieve, a British human rights group. Their evidence is based on public records that contain receipts and e-mails tracing the transactions.

At least two other states might also have received shipments, but only Georgia and Arizona have believed to have used the imported drug.

“Questions about this drug mean some executions are going to be delayed in a lot of states,” said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

The imported drug was at the heart of arguments in three hearings on Tuesday. Mr. Hammond’s lawyers wanted the execution delayed until the provenance and quality of the drugs could be verified.

The Food and Drug Administration initially did not allow the drug into the country because it was suspected to be adulterated or mislabeled. The drug, which usually expires in about a year, carried a 2006 date. For reasons that are unclear, the F.D.A. eventually did allow it into the country.

“The origin and irregularities of these drugs raise serious questions as to whether they are adulterated, expired or counterfeit,” Mr. Hammond’s lawyers wrote in their appeal to the State Supreme Court. “Without the requested relief, Mr. Hammond will suffer irreparable harm in that he will be executed in an unconstitutional manner.”

Today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution carries the AP report, "Georgia man executed for 1988 killing of teacher."

His execution came amid a nationwide shortage of sodium thiopental, a part of the three-drug cocktail used in Georgia's lethal injections. His attorneys had sought time to gather more information on how the state obtained the drug, claiming in court filings it came from a "fly-by-night supplier operating from the back of a driving school in England."

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas delayed the execution briefly Tuesday night until the full court could consider Hammond's appeal. The appeal was rejected late Tuesday night in a one-page ruling.

And:

"We wouldn't allow a dying pet to be euthanized using drugs with such dubious origins," said Sara Totonchi of the Southern Center for Human Rights, which filed the lawsuit. "That Georgia would carry out its business of extinguishing a human life in this manner is outrageous and embarrassing."

It was the fourth execution in the nation this year; the 1,238th post-Furman execution in America since 1977.

Earlier coverage of the British supplier of sodium thiopental begins at the link; more of the FDA's involvement in the post, "FDA Helps States Get Execution Drug."

Additional News Coverage of Ohio Drug Switch

The latest version of the AP report is, "Ohio to use assisted-suicide drug in executions," written by Andrew Welsh-Huggins.  It's via the Washington Post.

States across the country have scrambled to find supplies of sodium thiopental after Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., the drug's lone U.S. manufacturer, stopped producing it more than a year ago.

Hospira, which produced it for medical purposes and not for executions, announced Friday it would not resume production after authorities in Italy refused to allow its production if the company couldn't guarantee it would not be used for capital punishment.

Hospira said its plant in Italy was the only viable facility where it could be manufactured.

Arizona, Arkansas, California and Tennessee are among states that found a supply of sodium thiopental in England, but that source dried up after the British government banned the drug's export for use in executions.

Today's Cleveland Plain Dealer reports, "Ohio switching to a new drug for lethal injections," by Reginald Fields.

"They ceased production of the drug and that drug is very hard to come by," said DRC spokesman Carlo LoParo. "The new drug will be manufactured in the U.S., and there is sufficient quantity."

Of the 39 states using lethal injection, nearly all use sodium thiopental but are also likely to have to find other drugs to carry out executions.

Hospira, in suburban Chicago, had already begun a slowdown in production of the drug, which caused a national shortage last year that threatened to postpone several executions here and in other states.

Ohio will use its remaining supply on Spisak, a self-proclaimed Nazi who killed three people at Cleveland State University in 1982.

LoParo said DRC officials will administer 5,000 mg -- about six times more than doctors use during surgical procedures -- to produce a humane death by first rendering the inmate comatose and then stopping the respiratory system.

"It will be impossible for a person to be revived," LoParo said.

Oklahoma currently uses pentobarbital as one of three drugs to carry out an execution. Fordham Law Professor Deborah W. Denno said that because Oklahoma uses three drugs, no one really knows how pentobarbital will work until Ohio becomes the first state to use it as a solo agent.

"It is pretty much going to be an experiment because they don't know what is going to happen," Denno said. "Oklahoma will say they have not had a problem, but they are also using these other two drugs with pentobarbital. This drug might act differently when you only use this drug alone."

Denno also questions where Ohio will purchase its supply of the drug. She said a Denmark drug maker that exports pentobarbital to the United States has already expressed concern the drug will be used for executions.

LoParo said Ohio does not reveal its drug suppliers for lethal injections. He also disputed Denno's claim that pentobarbital is used to euthanize animals, saying its suppliers sell only to hospitals.

"It may not be used in Ohio to euthanize animals but it is used to euthanize animals elsewhere," Denno said. "I think what they are trying to do is distinguish the execution of humans from the euthanasia of animals."

Alan Johnson writes, "Ohio switching its execution drug," for the Columbus Dispatch.

For the second time in 15 months, Ohio will execute a prisoner with a drug never before used alone to kill a human being.

The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction said yesterday that it will switch to pentobarbital, a fast-acting barbiturate, from sodium thiopental for lethal-injection executions, beginning with Johnnie Baston of Lucas County, on March 10.

Prisons officials said the change was necessary because of a national shortage of sodium thiopental, the single drug Ohio used for the past nine executions, beginning with Kenneth Biros on Dec. 8, 2009. Before that, the state used a three-drug combination.

And:

The state, through Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine's office, communicated the drug switch in a motion filed yesterday with U.S. District Court Judge Gregory Frost, who is considering a lawsuit filed by several inmates challenging the state's lethal-injection procedures.

The announcement was greeted with skepticism by Ohio Public Defender Tim Young, whose office represents Baston.

"I find it disconcerting that you have prominent people like Ohio Supreme Court Justice (Paul) Pfeifer and former prisons director Terry Collins who have called repeatedly for a review of the death penalty. ... Instead of listening to those voices, we are charging ahead with an untested drug, an untested protocol as part of the machinery of death."

Fordham University Law Professor Deborah W. Denno, a death-penalty and lethal-injection expert, said Ohio's change is "predictable but disturbing. ... It is regrettable that Ohio is blindly following in Oklahoma's muddy footsteps. Further problems are inevitable."

Dr. Jonathan Groner, a Columbus pediatric surgeon and death-penalty opponent, said pentobarbital is an anti-convulsant drug often used to control seizures and in dealing with traumatic brain injuries. He said it has a "high rate of reactive airway problems, meaning the person has the possibility of suffocating to death."

"Animal euthanasia drug to be used on death row," by Tom Beyerlein in the Dayton Daily News.

Corrections officials have notified U.S. District Judge Gregory Frost of Columbus, who is presiding over an ongoing class-action federal challenge to the constitutionality of Ohio’s execution methods.

The suit is prompted by the 2009 attempted execution of Rommell Broom, which was called off after executioners couldn’t find a viable vein for the insertion of intravenous lines.

Attorneys for the inmates in the case also were notified.

Oklahoma in December became the first state to use pentobarbital, in conjunction with other drugs, and has used it in three executions.

LoParo said pentobarbital will be used in the same dosage as sodium thiopental, which has been in increasingly short supply.

Earlier coverage of the Ohio drug switch begins at the link; earlier coverage of the state's 2009 botched execution attempt involving Romell Broom, at the link.  Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Lethal Injection Rumblings From Other States

In Florida, the Orlando Sentinel reports, "Lack of lethal-injection drug means Florida must develop new execution procedure." It's by Anthony Colarossi.  The article notes that the state currently has no scheduled exeuctions.

On Friday, Lake Forest, Ill.-based Hospira Inc. announced in a statement that it "will exit the sodium thiopental market and no longer attempt to resume production of its product, Pentothal."

That company was the sole American producer of the drug.

"We do use that drug in our lethal-injection process," state Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger said. "We are exploring other options. At this point, we're looking at making changes to the procedure. If we change one drug, we might have to change another drug."

She also anticipates a legal challenge with the change because the old sequence of drugs had the approval of the courts.

Florida's most-recent execution occurred nearly one year ago, on Feb. 16, when inmate Martin Grossman was put to death by lethal injection after more than 24 years on death row for a 1984 Pinellas County murder.

Since then, a halt in production of the drug has delayed executions in other states, according to a New York Times report.

It's not clear, however, whether the shortage influenced decisions not to carry out death sentences here. In Florida, death-row inmates must elect whether their execution comes by lethal injection or electrocution soon after their first appeal is denied.

Every current Florida death-row inmate at that stage has elected the lethal-injection option, Plessinger said.

Some of the drug was on hand "as of a couple of weeks ago," Plessinger said, but she added: "I know there is a shelf life on the drug."

And:

As the lethal-injection-drug issue plays out, the state Department of Corrections awaits its new secretary, Edwin Buss, set to take the job in mid- to late February, to offer guidance when he arrives, Plessinger said.

Sodium thiopental has a shelf life of about two years. With the last batch made in 2009, the remaining supplies of the drug are set to expire this year.

Florida changed its lethal injection procedure following a botched execution in 2006.

"Nebraska considers 1st execution since 1997," is the AP report via today's New York Times.

Nebraska is inching closer to its first execution in more than 13 years and its first since retiring its electric chair in favor of lethal injection.

Less than a week after obtaining the hard-to-find anesthetic called for in Nebraska's lethal-injection plan, state officials asked the Nebraska Supreme Court Monday to set an execution date for Carey Dean Moore.

But Moore, who came within a week of being executed in Nebraska's electric chair in 2007, plans to fight, his attorney Alan Peterson said Tuesday. So several years may pass before an execution is carried out because the courts haven't yet evaluated Nebraska's new execution procedures.

The state's last execution occurred in 1997, when Robert Williams was electrocuted for killing three women. Eleven men remain on Nebraska's death row. Besides Williams, Harold Otey and John Joubert also have been electrocuted since the state resumed executions in 1994.

And:

For nearly four decades, former state Sen. Ernie Chambers, who opposed the death penalty, held up any effort to change Nebraska's method of execution because he believed the electric chair eventually would be banished by the courts. Chambers' departure from the Legislature in 2008 because of term limits made it possible for lawmakers to pass the lethal injection bill.

On Friday, the state received the third drug needed to carry out an execution by lethal injection. A worldwide shortage of the drug, sodium thiopental, has made it hard to acquire, and the only U.S. manufacturer of the drug announced last week that it would stop making it.

"New execution date sought for Moore," by Martha Stoddard is from the Omaha World-Herald.

Attorney General Jon Bruning asked the Nebraska Supreme Court on Monday to set a new execution date for convicted killer Carey Dean Moore.

Bruning made the request three days after state corrections officials reported they were prepared to carry out a lethal injection.

The officials said Nebraska received a shipment this month of a chemical needed for an execution. The chemical expires in August 2012.

But expected legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection law and its three-drug protocol could delay any execution, potentially beyond that date.

Alan Peterson of Lincoln, Moore’s longtime attorney, said there are still legal matters to be decided in Moore’s case.

He said he has not had a chance to talk with Moore since the new filing to find out what direction Moore wants to take.

In the meantime, ACLU Nebraska attorneys will meet Tuesday to consider a challenge to the rule-making process used by state officials to set the lethal injection protocol.

“This is potentially a long row to hoe for the killing machine,” said Amy Miller, legal director for the group.

No executions have been set and no courts have reviewed Nebraska’s lethal injection law since lawmakers passed it in 2009.

Earlier coverage from Nebraska begins with posts noting the state's lack of execution drugs and the state's renovated death chamber.

From Kentucky, the AP report, "Kentucky debated back-to-back executions," by Brett Barrqouquere is via the Lexington Herald-Leader.

While Kentucky prison officials searched for an essential drug needed to carry out capital punishment for three longtime death row inmates, they also considered holding back-to-back executions.

Kentucky Corrections Commissioner LaDonna Thompson asked program administrator Brad Adams in August to research if any states had performed multiple executions in one day within the last five years, according to e-mails obtained by The Associated Press under Kentucky's open records law.

"I need it as soon as possible (day before yesterday)," Thompson wrote on Aug. 24.

The answer was that no state had done it within the last five years. Kentucky has performed three executions since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, compared to 464 in Texas, 108 in Virginia and 40 in Ohio.

Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway in November 2009 had requested warrants on three death row inmates, all of whom had been awaiting execution for more than a decade an a half.

The state had 6 grams of sodium thiopental in stock, enough to carry out a single execution. Kentucky lethal injection protocal calls for using 3 grams during the execution and keeping 3 grams on reserve in case something goes wrong. The state's supply of sodium thiopental was set to expire on Oct. 1, setting off a national search for more of the drug, which had become scarce.

And:

Justice Cabinet spokeswoman Jennifer Brislin said Monday Hospira's decision shouldn't have an immediate impact in Kentucky, which is barred from executing inmates because of an injunction unrelated to the drug that went into effect in September, putting Wilson's and all remaining executions on hold.

More on the Kentucky stay and its attempt to obtain drugs, at the links.

Finally, New Scientist has a Q&A on the topic, "Drug shortage delays US executions."  It's by Ferris Jabr.

Why not perform lethal injection without sodium thiopental?

The drug's role is to prevent the prisoner from feeling pain, so that lethal injection does not violate the US constitution as a "cruel and unusual punishment". But doctors have questioned whether prison staff have the training required to properly administer the drug – in medical communities, anaesthetists undergo years of training before they can practise.

Are we certain that lethal injection is painless?

No. A 2007 study in PLoS Medicine suggested that, were the anaesthetic to fail, inmates may die from painful asphyxiation caused by the other drugs in the cocktail. Because inmates are paralysed by pancuronium bromide, they are unlikely to be able to express any discomfort.

"Despite the fact that support for lethal injection rests on the argument that it is a humane procedure, it is probably anything but humane," says Teresa Zimmers, one of the authors of the only two peer-reviewed studies on lethal injection.

What are alternatives to sodium thiopental?

At least one state, Oklahoma, had already switched from sodium thiopental to another anaesthetic, pentobarbital, which is more easily acquired.

The most commonly used general anaesthetic in US hospitals and veterinary clinics is propofol, which has almost entirely replaced sodium thiopental in US clinical settings. It is not clear why, when the medical community switched to propofol, prisons did not follow suit. Propofol has, however, been in short supply since 2009, when two US-based manufacturers stopped production.

Related posts are in the lethal injection category index.

The Tyrone Williams Case Ends With Resentencing

It started as a high visibility 2006 federal death penalty prosecution, following a horrific 2003 episode in which 19 illegal aliens died after being smuggled into Texas in the back of a tractor trailer.  

"Texas: New Sentence in Smuggling," is the AP brief from Tuesday's New York Times.

A truck driver was resentenced to nearly 34 years in prison on Monday after a federal appeals court last year overturned the life sentences he received in America’s deadliest human smuggling attempt, in which 19 illegal immigrants died. The new sentence for the driver, Tyrone Williams, is equal to the longest prison term he had received in the case, for another count that was upheld on appeal. Prosecutors said that Mr. Williams heard the immigrants screaming as they were succumbing to heat inside his tractor trailer, but that he refused to free them.

"Driver in 2003 smuggling deaths resentenced," is the Victorial Advocate report by Gabe Semenza.

A federal judge on Monday resentenced Tyrone Williams to 34 years in prison for his role in the 2003 deaths of 19 illegal immigrants.

Because Williams, 40, likely will appeal the sentencing, the case is far from closed. Monday's hearing only added another twist to a landmark trial.

In May 2003, Williams abandoned his sealed tractor-trailer in Victoria. Inside: dead or dying illegal immigrants, the byproduct of a botched smuggling attempt.

The 40-year-old became the first person federal prosecutors targeted for the death penalty under a 1994 immigration law.

That law states if anyone transports, smuggles or harbors illegal immigrants in this country, and the act results in death, the convicted can face execution.

Of the 64 human smuggling tragedies that ended in death between 1994 and 2002, however, no smuggler ever faced the death penalty until Williams.

And:

Craig Washington, a 68-year-old former Texas state senator and Houston congressman, represents Williams.

Washington, who was in Victoria the morning law enforcement found the bodies, later stepped away from the case because of health reasons and rejoined it in November. He is widely credited for steering the second jury away from the death penalty.

"The government has spent $7.2 million prosecuting and attempting to get the death penalty for one man," Washington said after the hearing on on Monday. "It turns out that money was all wasted. Today's sentencing was the best that we could have hoped for."

Susan Carroll writes, "Trucker gets 34 years in immigrant deaths," for the Houston Chronicle.

U.S. District Judge Lee Rosenthal sentenced 40-year-old Tyrone Williams to a 405-month term in connection with the deaths of 19 illegal immigrants in Williams' insulated tractor-trailer truck in May 2003.

Williams broke down before Rosenthal pronounced the sentence, crying and calling the deaths an "accident."

"I live with regret every day of my life," Williams said.

Earlier coverage begins the post, "Fifth Circuit Overturns Tyrone Williams' Sentence."  Related posts are in the federal death penalty index.

More Ohio News - State to Switch Lethal Injection Drug

AP reports, "Ohio to use surgical drug in lethal injections."  It's via Google News.

Ohio is set to become the first state to use a surgical sedative as its sole means of executing condemned inmates, a switch made as the shortage of the drug normally used for executions has worsened.

Beginning in March, the state execution team will use a single, powerful dose of pentobarbital, a drug sometimes used to induce surgical comas, the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction announced Tuesday.

The drug, which is chemically related to a version of pentobarbital used to euthanize pets, replaces sodium thiopental, which was already scarce when its only U.S. manufacturer announced last week it would no longer produce it.

Ohio is following the lead of Oklahoma, which switched to pentobarbital last year and has since used it three times. However, Ohio, which used only a single dose of anesthetic to execute inmates, would become the first state to use pentobarbital alone, without two additional drugs that paralyze inmates and stop their hearts.

Chemically speaking, the pentobarbital used by veterinarians and the product used for human surgeries is the same, said Rich Bednarski, professor of veterinary anesthesia at Ohio State University.

But vets use a far more concentrated version marketed only for euthanasia and often combined with other drugs, Bednarski said.

Ohio is buying its supply from a manufacturer that only produces the drug for use in hospitals, said DRC spokesman Carlo LoParo.

The prisons department said it will use its remaining supply of sodium thiopental for the scheduled execution Feb. 17 of Frank Spisak, who killed three people at Cleveland State University in 1982.

The first use of pentobarbital is planned for March's scheduled execution of Johnnie Baston of Lucas County, condemned to die for shooting the owner of a Toledo store in the back of the head during a 1994 robbery.

And:

The switch was not unexpected. Ohio has said for weeks that while it had enough sodium thiopental for the Spisak execution, it would not comment about its supply beyond that.

The state nearly ran out of the drug last spring and almost had to postpone an execution before obtaining some at the last moment.

Ohio has no more executions currently scheduled, but prosecutors have asked the Ohio Supreme Court to set additional dates for 14 men whose appeals are concluded.

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.  More on the Oklahoma drug switch, at the link.  It's now been used three times in that state.

Justice System Can Be Improved by Removing Ultimate Penalty

That's the title of an OpEd by Terry Collins in today's Columbus Dispatch.  He's the retired director of the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction.  Here are extended excerpts from this must-read:

For more than 32 years I had the honor of working at the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction. During my career I held various positions, including warden, regional director, assistant director and then director. In carrying out the responsibilities of my positions and the law of this great state, I personally observed the execution of 33 men from 2001 to 2010.

All 33 times, in the back of my mind I questioned: Had all the reviews and appeals got this case right? Did the process make certain, absolutely, there was no mistake or error? I wondered that because I had previously walked people out of prison who were found not guilty after years of incarceration. What if we got it wrong for those we executed?

Our judicial and corrections system is among the finest in the world. We provide some of the best attorneys, judges and corrections personnel anywhere. I know, have met and have worked closely with so many of them. Our judicial system is the envy of nations. Yet, we continue to be one of the few industrialized nations to carry out the death penalty when we know mistakes happen.

I respect Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer's concerns about the death penalty. He wrote the law as a legislator and observed its implementation in the state's highest court. His conclusion that it is exceedingly difficult for the death penalty to be administered in a fair and just way is worthy of public debate and scrutiny.

And:

I am convinced that the death penalty is not a fiscally responsible policy for Ohio. It costs millions of dollars to execute people in Ohio, more than life imprisonment. Those costs begin at the trial phases and continue through appeals to pay for lawyers, judges and prisons. The expense of county and state resources that go into two separate trials in death penalty cases (one to decide innocence or guilt and the second to decide life or death) adds up quickly before anyone spends a single day on Death Row. Then the appeals begin, compounding these enormous costs. It is also expensive to maintain Death Rows once offenders begin to serve their time there. Costs related to the death penalty should be of serious concern, given our state's need for cost-effective judicial reform.

There is another cost that we do not always consider: that borne by victims' families. It is emotionally traumatic for the families of victims to be recalled into courts year after year because of so many death-penalty appeals. I observed firsthand the emotions of the victims' families. An increasing number of families ask the state not to pursue the death penalty so that they are not faced with the painful task of attending appeals hearings, and so they can achieve closure. Life imprisonment without parole offers justice that is swift, certain, effectively severe and perhaps more sensitive to the needs of healing victims' families.

Finally:

The reasonable course of action for state officials is to begin to have serious and thoughtful conversations about whether Ohio's death penalty remains necessary, fair and effective. My experience tells me that our justice system can be even more effective and fair without Death Rows and the death penalty.

Earlier coverage of Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Pfeifer's call for repeal begins at the link.

Illinois Lt. Gov. Urges Signing Repeal Law

"Simon urges Quinn to sign death-penalty repeal," is the title of Chris Wetterich's report for Springfield's State Journal-Register.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Gov. Pat Quinn may not have decided whether Illinois should have the death penalty, but his No. 2 has made up her mind: Abolish it.

In a letter dated Monday, Lt. Gov. Sheila Simon, who served as a prosecutor in Jackson County, urged Quinn to sign Senate Bill 3539, which would abolish the death penalty in all future criminal cases.

Simon cited the fact that 20 people who were sentenced to death in Illinois have been freed “because they were found innocent or the cases against them collapsed.”

“Today, our state is at a crossroads in terms of the use of capital punishment as a deterrent to and punishment for serious crimes,” Simon wrote. “Even in the best of circumstances, our system allows for error. …

“As a matter of public respect for our justice system, we cannot tolerate errors in execution. As a former prosecutor and your Lt. Governor, I urge you to end the death penalty in Illinois.”

In an interview Monday night, Simon said she shared her views recently with Quinn, and he asked her to put them in writing.

“Maybe not every former prosecutor is opposed to the death penalty, but I am and appreciate that he has been seeking opinions and experiences from different people,” Simon said.

Simon did not try a murder case while she was an assistant state’s attorney.

Simon wrote that she is concerned that death penalty defendants may not have “an active, alert attorney” and that the accused themselves may not have the capacity to “ably assist an attorney in their defense.”

Prosecutors, law enforcement officials and legislators who oppose abolition have argued that the death penalty is needed to induce cooperation from murderers in plea bargains and in cases where the body of a murder victim has not been recovered. They have also said the death penalty should be reserved for mass murderers, such as John Wayne Gacy, or those who commit heinous crimes against children.

“I think that comes the closest to being a persuasive argument, but it still does not persuade me that the state should be the agent to kill someone -- particularly in a circumstance where we’re not sure that our system gets to the right answer,” Simon said.

The Daily Herald reports, "DuPage judge: Quinn ‘grossly irresponsible’ for stalling on death penalty."  It's written by Robert Sanchez.

A DuPage County judge said it’s “grossly irresponsible” for Gov. Pat Quinn to remain silent on whether he’ll sign legislation that would abolish the state’s death penalty.

Circuit Judge John Kinsella made a plea from the bench Monday for Quinn to end the uncertainty over Illinois’ death penalty.

“He’s got to tell us if he’s going to sign the bill and make it law,” Kinsella said.

The judge’s remarks came as he scheduled a May trial for an Addison man accused of killing his mother and a prostitute five years ago. Gary Schuning, 28, may face the death penalty if he is convicted of the Feb. 26, 2006, double-stabbing.

Schuning’s attorney said he would be better prepared for trial if it were known that the bill recently passed by the Illinois General Assembly would abolish the death penalty as of July 1. The bill awaits Quinn’s signature.

Kinsella said jury selection will be more complicated and the trial will take twice as long if it remains a death penalty case. Still, he said, it has been prepared for years as a death penalty case and will proceed that way.

And:

Quinn spokeswoman Annie Thompson disagreed. The governor is in the process of reaching out to individuals on both sides of the issue “to try to gather as much information as possible” to make an informed decision.

“Given the importance and significance of this legislation and what this law would mean for Illinois, we think it would be irresponsible not to be reviewing it before acting on it,” Thompson said.

Quinn has until mid-March to sign or veto the legislation. If he doesn’t act by that date, the legislation becomes law. While Quinn hasn’t said when he will make a decision, Thompson said it will happen sometime before the deadline.

Illinois Progress posts, "Legal Community Pushes Quinn To Sign Death Penalty Bill."

It's been nearly two weeks since Illinois lawmakers passed a bill to abolish the death penalty in the state, and Gov. Pat Quinn has yet to decide on whether or not he will sign the legislation. Since its passage, he has solicited advice and opinions from citizens and heard from U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, who changed his mind and now believes states should not put criminals to death.

This weekend, a group of 65 high-profile legal professionals, wrote to Quinn urging him to sign the bill. The letter, which was signed by former Gov. James Thompson and former Illinois Supreme Court Chief Mary Ann McMorrow, said, "There simply is no credible evidence that the death penalty deters crime."

Mary Shaw writes, "Why Illinois Governor Should Sign Death Penalty Abolition Bill," for OpEd News. She's a Philadelphia-based writer and activist.

For those of you who follow the Christian faith, consider the commandment that "Thou shalt not kill." That commandment bears no caveat indicating that it's acceptable to kill a killer.

Clearly, the death penalty does not represent justice. It represents revenge -- sometimes misdirected revenge.

Shouldn't we as a society be above that sort of thing?

Shouldn't the State of Illinois be above it?

I hope Governor Quinn will ultimately agree.

Earlier coverage from Illinois begins at the link.

President Nominates New Solicitor General

The White House announcement is at the link.

Lyle Denniston posts, "Verrilli chosen for SG post," at SCOTUS Blog.

President Obama has turned to his White House legal staff for a new U.S. Solicitor General, selecting associate counsel Donald B. Verrilli, Jr., to be the government’s top advocate before the Supreme Court, the White House was telling various news organizations on Monday.  A veteran of 12 arguments in the Court, Verrilli has had a key role in several important legal initiatives in the Obama Administration – perhaps most significantly, an attempt to put some limits on the government’s use of the controversial “state secrets” doctrine.

By choosing Verrilli, the President passed over Neal K. Katyal, the Deputy SG, who has been heading the SG’s office on an acting basis since Obama’s first SG – Elena Kagan – was named to the Supreme Court.  Katyal has argued a number of major cases for the Administration as Acting SG — most recently, in fact, a “state secrets” case involving a Pentagon warplane contract.

Marcia Coyle posts "Obama Names Verrilli for Solicitor General Post," for Law.com/ The BLT.

Verrilli is a veteran Supreme Court advocate. He has argued 12 cases before the justices and participated in more than 100. His cases have ranged from the intricacies of intellectual property, such as his defense of music industry copyrights in 2005, to the complexities of the death penalty, such as his pro bono work in Wiggins v. Smith.

Besides his work in the Supreme Court, Verrilli also has participated in about 90 cases in federal and state appellate courts, arguing more than 30 appeals. While at Jenner, he was a member of the firm’s governing policy committee and chair of its diversity committee.

A former clerk to Justice William Brennan Jr., Verrilli is a graduate of Columbia Law School.

"Obama Nominates a Deputy Counsel for Solicitor General," by Charlie Savage for the New York Times.

Before joining the Obama administration, Mr. Verrilli spent two decades with the law firm of Jenner & Block, where he led its Supreme Court practice, while also teaching as an adjunct professor at Georgetown law school.

He played a role in several important cases about the Internet era. He represented the music industry in a lawsuit against the file-sharing service Grokster, and Viacom against Google.

He has also pressed for greater criminal defendant rights. In 2003, he won a Supreme Court ruling that overturned a convicted killer’s death penalty on the grounds that his legal representation at trial had been incompetent. But in 2008, he lost a case challenging the form of lethal injection many states use to carry out executions.

"Obama chooses solicitor general," by Jerry Markon for the Washington Post.

Lawyers said Verrilli is among the most respected members of the Supreme Court bar.

"He's an excellent choice,'' said Theodore B. Olson, who was solicitor general in the George W. Bush administration. "He is a hard-working, very intelligent, very well informed, thoughtful and articulate lawyer.''

Walter Dellinger, who was acting solicitor general in the Clinton administration, said Verrilli will be effective because "he is well known to the Supreme Court justices" and is respected within the administration. "That will ensure that the views of the solicitor general's office carry great weight,'' Dellinger said.

"Verrilli Selected by Obama to Be Solicitor General," by Greg Stohr at Business Week.

Verrilli, 53, would fill a position that has been formally vacant since Obama picked Elena Kagan to join the Supreme Court last year. Neal Katyal has been serving as solicitor general on an acting basis since Kagan’s nomination in May.

As a private attorney at Jenner & Block in Washington, Verrilli represented the music and movie industries, winning a 2005 Supreme Court ruling that lets them press copyright suits against Internet file-sharing networks.

"Obama nominates White House lawyer Verrilli to replace Kagan," by David Jackson for USA TODAY.

Mr. Verrilli received the Frederick Douglass Award from the Southern Center for Human Rights in 2006, and the Arthur Von Briesen Award from the National Legal Aid and Defenders Association in 2004. He also served as a law clerk to the Hon. William J. Brennan, Jr. of the United States Supreme Court and to the Hon. J. Skelly Wright of the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Mr. Verrilli received his J.D. from Columbia Law School where he was a Kent Scholar and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia Law Review, and received a B.A. with honors from Yale University.

Related posts are in the Supreme Court index.

Pennsylvania Reaction to Gov. Rendell's Call for Review

Today's Philadelphia Inquirer carries the editorial, "Life is the better choice."

Ed Rendell was half right when he talked about the problems surrounding the death penalty in his waning days as governor.

Rendell called on the General Assembly to either streamline the process or do away with capital punishment.

Eliminating the death penalty is the part Rendell got right. Rendell's point that the lengthy appeals process effectively renders death row meaningless is understood. He signed 119 death warrants in his eight years as governor, but no one was executed.

Rendell's suggestion of swifter executions, however, is not the answer. In fact, such a move is in direct conflict with the main problem concerning capital punishment: A person can be put to death for a crime he did not commit. Speeding up the process could lead to more wrongful executions.

Thanks to the increased use of DNA evidence, 265 people have been exonerated since 1989 of crimes they did not commit. Seventeen of the people who were wrongfully convicted spent time on death row.

That includes Nicholas Yarris, who spent 22 years on death row for a murder in Pennsylvania before DNA evidence proved he was not the killer. He was released in 2003.

If the execution process had been streamlined, as Rendell advocates, then Yarris might have been put to death for a crime he did not commit. Others have not been as lucky as Yarris, who "only" spent more than two decades behind bars after his wrongful conviction.

And:

Rendell, who supports the death penalty, is right in saying the endless appeals process revictimizes victims' families and too often wastes money.

A 2009 study by the Death Penalty Information Center found states spend hundreds of millions of dollars on capital punishment, but police chiefs say the death penalty does little to reduce violent crime.

In fact, some states saw their murder rates go up after the death penalty was implemented.

New Jersey eliminated the death penalty in 2007. Pennsylvania should do the same. It will save taxpayers' money, and it may save innocent lives.

The Monessen Valley Independent takes a different position in its editorial, "Revise death penalty system."  It's via Pittsburgh Tribune-Review.  It notes:

Pennsylvania is holding 213 men and four women on death row, supporting the existence of such convicts and paying for all those appeals.

Rendell, in his eight years in office, signed 119 death warrants. He and his five predecessors have signed off on 386 such warrants. Still, the commonwealth has executed just three people since 1962, and all of them willingly exited the appeal process.

Gov. Tom Corbett supports the death penalty but attributes the lack of executions to the 3rd U.S. Court of Appeals. However, the state Supreme Court has overturned considerably more of the commonwealth's death sentences than has the federal system.

Some attorneys said underfunded criminal defense efforts lead to flawed convictions, and that cutting the appeals process would lead to greater problems.

On January 20th, the Harrisburg Patriot-News carried an OpEd, "Pennsylvania should end the death penalty."  It's by Spero T. Lappas, an attorney and OpEd contributor to the paper.

The study requested by Gov. Rendell should nonetheless proceed under Gov. Tom Corbett, who also campaigned as a death penalty supporter. A good place to start would be with the American Bar Association’s 2007 Pennsylvania Death Penalty Assessment report that found a raft of procedural, forensic and funding problems with our capital justice system. The analysis also would benefit from the experience of other states. The Illinois Legislature recently sent the governor a bill to abolish capital punishment, as New Jersey did in 2007.

There are many reasons for these authorities and others to condemn the death penalty. It is cruel and random, it is often discriminatory, its presumed advantages are doubtful, and it places America in the company of nations that we should not want to emulate. But the best reason to oppose it is this: Killing another human being is a wicked thing, we should no longer let it be done in our name.

Governor Rendell made his call for a review on January 14, while I was traveling -- which is to say, I'm still playing catch-up.  His news release was, "Governor Rendell Urges General Assembly to Review Effectiveness of Pennsylvania's Death Penalty."

The time lapse between conviction and execution generally results from capital defendants' efforts to exhaust every legal challenge to their conviction and death sentence that is available to them under state and federal law.  That is the way it should be; every meritorious issue must be raised and addressed.  While Congress and this body have enacted laws to help curtail and streamline the appellate process in capital cases, the length of time between the imposition of the sentence and actual execution, if it occurs at all, can be decades and is still too long.  Victims' survivors are frustrated; the police are frustrated.  The lengthy appeals process not only costs taxpayers substantial money, but it also robs the victims' families and friends of peace of mind, and they get no closure.

Therefore, it seems to me that the time has come to re-examine the efficacy of the death penalty under these circumstances.  I would ask you to explore whether there can be any additional steps taken that allow for a thorough and exhaustive review of the facts and the law in each case, but that would significantly shorten the time between offense and carrying out the sentence.  If you conclude that there is no avenue to achieve this, then I ask you to examine the merits of continuing to have the death penalty on the books – as opposed to the certainty of a life sentence without any chance of parole, pardon or commutation.

The AP report was, "Rendell asks Pa. lawmakers to review death penalty," written by Mark Scolforo, and appears via the Centre Daily Times.

Pennsylvania's death penalty should either be revamped so that more murderers are executed or replaced with a life sentence without the possibility of pardon, Gov. Ed Rendell said Friday.

Four days before his eight-year tenure ends, Rendell signed six more death warrants, bringing his total to 119. None of those convicted murderers are close to potential execution, which the Democratic governor attributed to "a system of endless appeals."

Pennsylvania has put to death three people since its last contested execution in 1962, and all three had willingly given up on the appeals process.

There are currently 213 men and four women on the state's death row, housed at the Graterford, Greene and Muncy state prisons. Sixteen of them were prosecuted in Philadelphia while Rendell was district attorney from 1978 to 1986.

Additional Lethal Injection News

"Ga. court rejects condemned man's lawsuit," is the AP report via WRCB-TV.

A judge rejected an attempt to delay a Georgia death row inmate's execution after his attorneys raised questions about the supply of a lethal injection drug.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Michael Johnson rejected a claim on Monday by attorneys for Emmanuel Hammond that Georgia's supply of sodium thiopental could be substandard.

Hammond's attorney, Brian Mendelsohn, said he wanted more time to look at the expiration dates of the drug, which is in short supply.

Defense attorneys say Georgia officials released documents that show the drugs could come from a London-based firm and need more investigation.

From Nebraska, JoAnne Young writes, "Nebraska gets drug it needs to do lethal injections," for the Lincoln Journal Star."

The Nebraska Department of Corrections said Friday it has received a shipment of the last of three drugs needed to carry out death penalty executions.

The department got the supply of sodium thiopental, used to cause unconsciousness, on Jan. 7 from a pharmaceuticals company in India. A sample of the drug was tested by an independent U.S. laboratory and confirmed to be the correct drug, the department said.

Corrections Director Robert Houston said that, with the drug, the department is ready to carry out an execution if called upon to do so.

And:

Nebraska approved lethal injection as its method of execution in 2009. The state hasn't executed an inmate since 1997. There are 11 men on death row, but there is no set execution date at this time for any of those inmates.

"Germany: No Death Penalty Drug To US," is the AP report via NPR.

The leading medical association and key pharmaceutical companies in Germany, where anti-death penalty sentiment is strong, said Monday they would not support exporting a drug to the U.S. that is needed for lethal injections there.

The German Medical Association, the country's association of Research-Based Pharmaceutical Companies and officials from the three companies producing or distributing sodium thiopental in Germany said they oppose selling it to the U.S. for fear it could be used in executions.

And:

Germany, Italy and Britain banned capital punishment after World War II. In 2008, the EU issued a declaration against the death penalty and has lobbied for its abolition worldwide.

Frank Ulrich Montgomery, vice president of the German Medical Association, told The Associated Press the nation's doctors are throwing their support behind a call by the Health Ministry for German drug companies and distributors to reject U.S. requests for the drug.

"We are calling on the German pharmaceutical industry to send a clear signal that it recognizes its ethical responsibility and refrain from selling any drugs to the United States that could be used in carrying out the death penalty," Montgomery said.

Earlier coverage from Georgia, Nebraska, and the German announcement, at the links.

Additional Coverage of Friday's FSC Meeting

The Austin American-Statesman reports, "Willingham probe takes unexpected turn," by Chuck Lindell.

Adding an unexpected twist to its investigation of the science used to convict and execute Cameron Todd Willingham for arson murder, the Texas Forensic Science Commission voted Friday to seek an attorney general opinion on the limits of its jurisdiction.

The commission is examining allegations, made by fire scientists and the Innocence Project of New York, that investigators relied on bad science and poor techniques to conclude that Willingham intentionally set fire to his Corsicana home in 1991, killing his three young daughters.

The City of Corsicana and the state fire marshal's office, however, have long complained that the commission lacks the authority to examine their investigators' actions and conclusions.

On Friday, as they contemplated drafting a final report in the Willingham matter, the nine commission members voted unanimously to ask Attorney General Greg Abbott's office to determine whether Corsicana and the fire marshal are correct.

"It's been the elephant in the room the entire time," Commissioner Lance Evans said after the meeting in downtown Austin. Evans made the motion to seek Abbott's opinion.

In the meantime, commissioners vowed to continue working toward a final report.

"I certainly think we could make findings ... on the state of fire investigation back at that time, the evolution of fire investigation up to the present day and where mistakes might have been made," said Evans, a Fort Worth defense lawyer.

However, two of the most contentious questions will have to wait for Abbott's written opinion before they can be addressed:

• Did Willingham's investigators act negligently?

• Did the fire marshal's office have an obligation to correct old arson findings based on evidence now discredited by scientific advancements?

And:

In related action Friday, commissioners changed how the Willingham report will be written.

Originally, a four-member subcommittee was to draft a report during a public meeting and then present it to the full committee of seven forensic scientists, a defense lawyer and a prosecutor.

Now, commissioners will submit suggestions to the agency's general counsel, who will compile a draft report. Final language will be hashed out by the full commission in a future open meeting, Evans said.

"Texas forensic panel delays final decision in Willingham arson case," by Erin Mulvaney for the Dallas Morning News.

Friday, the panel decided to ask the attorney general’s advice on whether it has jurisdiction in the disputed case.

“I don’t want this to be interpreted as something that is going to prevent us from proceeding,” said Commissioner Lance Evans. “I want to continue making progress and not stay at a standstill.”

Since the panel took on the Willingham case in 2006, questions have been raised about its authority to assess the reliability of forensic evidence, in this case fire science. Its work was delayed in 2007 when Gov. Rick Perry replaced three members of the commission, before it planned to hear expert testimony.

At the meeting, the commissioners also decided to move forward with a draft report, but it will not touch on the questions referred to the attorney general. They next meet on April 15.

Willingham’s mother, Eugenia, said she was disappointed but not surprised that the panel did not make a final determination.

“I was very encouraged last time by the experts, but, of course, we have heard about 10 other experts say the same thing,” she said.

The final AP post, "Panel looking into Willingham arson inquiry will proceed with report," by Michael Graczyk, is via the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

"I want the commission to find a way where we can continue making progress so things do not come to a standstill," Commissioner Lance Evans said. "I would like us to move forward with all speed."

State law lets the commission make recommendations on overall practices and procedures performed by investigators but not sanction the practices or procedures, Evans said.

The panel's investigation started in 2006. It became politically charged in September 2009 when Gov. Rick Perry, who appoints its members and did not stop Willingham's execution, replaced the chairman and two other commissioners days before they were to hear from fire expert Craig Beyler of Baltimore.

He testified two weeks ago that the fire's cause should have been listed as undetermined.

In the original investigation, the lead investigator with the state fire marshal's office ruled that the fire was caused by arson started by an accelerant, and a local investigator concurred.

The assistant director of the fire marshal's office, who also appeared before the commission two weeks ago, stood by those 1991 findings despite contrary conclusions reached by Beyler and John DeHaan, a consultant from Vallejo, Calif. They described the original investigation as deficient and inadequate.

"Willingham panel will seek ruling on authority," is the Houston Chronicle report by Allan Turner.

At the center of questions about the commission's power to handle the Willingham case is the legislative language creating the body. The commission may consider cases regarding "forensic analysis" related to agencies accredited by the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Evans said after Friday's meeting that whether such disciplines as fire science and arson investigation are legitimately "forensic analysis" is unclear. Also of concern is the fact that the DPS did not begin accrediting forensic labs until 2005 - 14 years after the Corsicana fire.

The accreditation question, Evans said, "is not a new issue. It's been the elephant in the room the entire time."

Evans said he is uncertain how long it might take to obtain the attorney general's ruling.

Nonetheless, he said, the commission can move forward with a final report on at least some aspects of the case such as the state of arson investigation in 1991 and how the discipline has evolved.

It is possible that the commission could issue a subsequent report considering whether early arson investigators were guilty of professional negligence.

Earlier coverage begins with Friday's post,"An Update on the FSC Meeting."

All Willingham coverage is available through the Todd Willingham index.

The Beyler report prepared for the Forensic Science Commission is here in Adobe .pdf format.

David Grann's September 2009 New Yorker article is noted here.    Steve Mills and Maurice Possley first reported on the case in a 2004 Chicago Tribune series on junk science.  The December 9, 2004 report was titled,"Man executed on disproved forensics."

The Innocence Project has a Todd Willingham resource page which provides a concise overview of the Willingham case with links to all relevant documents.

Hospira Decision Viewed From Other States

From Illinois, the Chicago Tribune reports, "Hospira ceases production of anesthetic used in executions."  It's written by Bruce Japsen.

"These discussions and internal deliberation, as well as conversations with wholesalers — the primary distributors of the product to customers — led us to believe we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections for use in capital punishment procedures," Hospira said in a statement to the Tribune. "Based on this understanding, we cannot take the risk that we will be held liable by Italian authorities if the product is diverted."

The drug is not approved in the U.S. for use in executions but has been used "off-label" for years for such purposes by state prison officials. Physicians are known to prescribe many drugs in a common practice called off-label use. While a doctor is allowed to prescribe drugs for off-label uses, a company cannot market them for unapproved uses

Hospira said Pentothal is an anesthetic used by hospitals to sedate patients and that the company has "never condoned" its use for capital punishment. The drug is not a big seller for Hospira, generating less than one-quarter of 1 percent of the company's nearly $4 billion annual sales. Hospira would not disclose a specific figure.

There are three reports from California.  AP reports, "California gets shipment of drug for executions," via the San Francisco Chronicle.

While many states are running short of a drug necessary to carry out executions, California just received a major shipment.

California prison officials said Friday they received 514.5 grams, or a little more than a pound, of sodium thiopental, the first of three drugs administered during a lethal injection to knock out an inmate.

The state was forced to call off its first execution in more than five years in September in part because its entire stock of the drug had expired.

The state paid $36,415 to an overseas company to purchase the drug made by Archimedes Pharma of Great Britain after the sole U.S. manufacturer stopped delivering sodium thiopental.

The Los Angeles Times has, "Maker of anesthetic used in executions is discontinuing drug," written by Carol Williams.

Discontinuance of the drug that has been in short supply nationwide for the past year portends long-term complications for death penalty states. Some, like California, might have to revise laws governing executions and those seeking supplies from foreign makers may be turned away by countries that condemn capital punishment.

In California, the legal guidance for carrying out executions was amended in August after three years of debate and deliberation. The state's new protocols specify use of sodium thiopental as the first drug in the three-injection sequence, and any substitution would require the state to again revise the protocols, said Elisabeth Semel, a UC Berkeley law professor and director of the law school's Death Penalty Clinic.

Legal challenges to lethal-injection procedures have kept executions on hold for five years in California, where 718 prisoners are on death row. Corrections officials' attempt to carry out the execution of murderer Albert Greenwood Brown in September was thwarted by the litigation, as well as by the expiration of the state's last few grams of sodium thiopental.

And:

California corrections officials imported a large quantity of sodium thiopental — enough for about 90 executions — from a British distributor in November, before a public outcry in Britain led to a ban on export of the drug to the United States. All European states have renounced the death penalty and many have legal restrictions against knowingly facilitating executions elsewhere.

U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel has been reviewing California's new lethal injection procedures and is expected to rule soon on whether they comply with the Constitution's ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

Sam Stanton writes, "Only U.S. supplier to stop making execution drug," for the Sacramento Bee.

California's attempts to obtain the drug were the subject of a lawsuit late last year by the Northern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, which won release of internal corrections documents showing officials had sought the drug from hospitals, other states and from sources abroad, including Pakistan.

State corrections officials say the supply of the drug they now have – batches that expire in 2014 and are capable of executing roughly 86 inmates – were obtained legally.

The state attorney general's office filed documents in federal court Friday indicating the shipment of the drug from overseas was not received until Thursday and that 6.5 grams of the 521 grams were sent out for testing, a move aimed at removing doubts that the drug is appropriate for use in executions.

Thornton said the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation does not believe it will need to seek different ways to execute inmates because of Hospira's decision.

"We will continue to seek other sources of the drug," she said.

The ACLU contends drugs obtained from overseas cannot be used in executions in the United States. The group, which opposes the death penalty, believes that if courts uphold that stance corrections officials would have to undertake a lengthy and complex process to design a new set of execution protocols using a different drug.

"We don't know if they'll be able to continue bringing it in from outside the country because we believe it's illegal to bring it in," said Natasha Minsker, death penalty project director for the ACLU in San Francisco. "It's very much an open question whether the Department of Corrections will be allowed to use the drugs from outside the U.S."

From Florida, it's, "Drug shortage could delay executions in Florida," in the Miami Herald.  It's by Adam Beasley.

The nearly 400 men and women sitting on Florida's Death Row may have received a stay of execution -- at least temporarily -- from an unexpected source.

And:

While it is not clear what step the state will take next, it has several options. Florida could find alternatives to sodium thiopental in the international market. It could scrap the three-drug cocktail altogether for a one-drug method.

And one other, long-shot option exists: Florida could return to the primary use of the electric chair, which is still an possibility left open to condemned inmates.

``It will affect different states differently,'' said Richard Dieter, an anti-death penalty advocate based out of Washington. ``I don't think anybody's going back to hangings. They're going to have to recalculate things.''

Lethal injection has been the state's preferred method since 2000, when the Florida Legislature changed the law.

But issues remain. The state's lethal injection practices have been scrutinized since Angel Diaz's botched execution in December 2006, a procedure that took 34 minutes when the needles went straight through his veins.

That prompted a death-penalty moratorium in Florida; then-Gov. Jeb Bush called for an investigation. Changes in the state's lethal injection protocol were made, and former Gov. Charlie Crist began signing death warrants again in July 2007.

The next spring, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of lethal injection, the nation's leading method of execution, in a 7-2 ruling.

Still, executions in the state have been few and far between. The state has put to death just five convicts in the last five years, most recently Martin Grossman last February. Grossman, convicted of murdering Wildlife Officer Margaret ``Peggy'' Park in 1984, was the 69th person executed in Florida since the death penalty was reinstated here in 1979. He was the 25th killed by lethal injection.

"Drug sold in UK to be used for execution in Georgia," is the BBC News report.

Emmanuel Hammond will be executed with anaesthetic sodium thiopental, which Reprieve UK says was supplied by Dream Pharma, based in Acton, west London.

The firm's sole shareholder, wholesaler Mehdi Alavi, 50, declined to comment.

Business Secretary Vince Cable introduced a ban on the export of sodium thiopental in December.

Documents obtained by Reprieve UK, which campaigns on behalf of death row prisoners, show that Georgia received a shipment of the anaesthetic sodium thiopental used in executions from Dream Pharma - which is based at a west London driving school - late last year.

In Ohio, Alan Johnson writes, "US manufacturer of execution drug to stop its production," for the Columbus Dispatch.

Officials with the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction have said they have enough of the drug for the scheduled Feb. 17 execution of Frank Spisak of Cuyahoga County. They will not comment on the supply availability after that.

The Nebraska State Paper reports, "Nebraska Executions: State Obtains Hard-To-Get Drug For Death Cocktail."

An unnamed company in India provided 500 grams of the drug earlier this month to the Department of Corrections at a cost of $2,056. One quick Google check indicated there’s no shortage of suppliers in India. Apparently, three grams of sodium thiopental is usually enough to render someone unconscious in less than a minute.The drug is used to knock out the condemned person before two “killer drugs” are administered.

A lawsuit has been filed in Arizona challenging the use of drugs from overseas suppliers, saying they may be substandard and could lead to problems during executions. The Nebraska Department of Corrections said an independent lab in the U.S. tested a sample of its new supply and confirmed it was, at the least, the correct drug.

The expiration date on Nebraska’s supply is August 2012. That might become an issue since there are 11 men on death row but no executions are currently scheduled. Nebraska adopted lethal injection in 2009 but has yet to execute anyone via the needle.

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Our extended coverage begins with national and Texas links:

• Extended Coverage of the Hospira Announcement
• Texas Coverage of the Hospira Decision

Earlier coverage from California begins with the post, "FDA Helps States Get Execution Drug."

Texas Coverage of the Hospira Decision

Brandi Grissom posts "Texas Seeking Execution Drug," at the Texas Tribune.

Texas officials have enough execution drugs to carry out the death sentences for two inmates scheduled for lethal injection in February. But they will have to find another sodium thiopental supplier or a different drug to use after March, said Texas Department of Criminal Justice spokeswoman Michelle Lyons. "We will have to explore some other options," Lyons said.

And:

Lyons said Texas' supply of sodium thiopental — used to anesthetize a person before lethal drugs are injected — expires in March. The next execution after that, she said, isn't scheduled until May. The agency, she said, will have time to search for another manufacturer of sodium thiopental or to find an alternative drug. TDCJ could consider using alternative drugs that other states have used, Lyons said.

Last year, Oklahoma used the drug pentobarbital, which has been used in veterinary euthanasia, in the execution of an inmate.

Lyons said it's too soon to speculate on what the state will do if it can't find more sodium thiopental or another drug by May. "Really, at this point, we’ll be exploring all options," she said.

The Austin American-Statesman carries, "Texas no longer has access to execution drug," by Mike Ward

Texas prison officials on Friday started a search for a new supplier of a key drug used in the nation's busiest death chamber after the sole U.S. manufacturer permanently halted production, a surprise move that could delay executions across the United States.

Earlier in the day, Illinois-based Hospira Inc. announced that it would not resume production of the drug sodium thiopental — one of three used alone or together in executions in 34 states, including Texas — because authorities in Italy, where production was to take place, demanded a guarantee that the drug would not be used for executions, a promise the company said it could not give.

Hospira earlier had decided to switch production of the drug from a plant in North Carolina to Liscate, Italy.

Italy does not allow executions, and politicians and activists there for years have protested Texas' use of capital punishment as barbaric. In December, its parliament voted to require Hospira to guarantee that the drug would not be used in executions.

And:

One execution scheduled in May and one in July will require a new supply of the drug, Lyons said.

Even though Texas has enough of the drug on hand to carry out more than 35 executions, Lyons said, there is no plan to sell any to other states.

In recent months, after Hospira had suspended production of sodium thiopental, several states, including California, Arizona, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Ohio, obtained several doses for executions. British officials banned further exports of sodium thiopental from its sole manufacturer after that.

China and Pakistan reportedly still manufacture the drug without export restrictions.

Oklahoma has conducted two executions using phenobarbital, an anesthetic normally used to euthanize pets.

Earlier, some Texas officials privately suggested that the state might consider following suit if sodium thiopental became unavailable.

"Company will stop making key death penalty drug," by Mike Tolson for the Houston Chronicle.

Texas and most other states that permit capital punishment soon will need to come up with a different formula to use in lethal injections because the sole U.S. manufacturer of one of the three drugs currently in use has decided to stop making it.

The Texas Department of Criminal Justice has enough of the anesthetic sodium thiopental on hand to handle executions for the next several years, but a looming expiration date means it cannot be used past February. Two executions have been scheduled before then, including Timothy Adams of Harris County, and two others are slated for May and July.

"We will explore other options, either in obtaining this drug or modifying our current protocol to allow for the use of an alternate drug," said TDCJ spokeswoman Michelle Lyons.

In Texas, the choice of which drug or drugs to use in lethal injection is left to the TDCJ's discretion, Lyons said. Some other states will require statutory change, meaning the lack of sodium thiopental potentially could delay scheduled executions.

The extended coverage begins with the preceding post; related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Next, coverage from other states.

Extended Coverage of the Hospira Announcement

I'm going to break coverage into three posts.  First, the national coverage; second, Texas coverage; and, other state coverage.

The New York Times report is, "States Face Shortage of Key Lethal Injection Drug."  It's written by Erik Echholm and Katie Zezima.

The sole American manufacturer of an anesthetic widely used in lethal injections said Friday that it would no longer produce the drug, a move likely to delay more executions and force states to adopt new drug combinations.

The manufacturer, Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Ill., had originally planned to resume production of the drug, sodium thiopental, this winter at a plant in Italy, giving state corrections departments hope that the scarcity that began last fall would ease.

But the Italian authorities said they would not permit export of the drug if it might be used for capital punishment. Hospira said in a statement Friday that its aim was to serve medical customers, but that “we could not prevent the drug from being diverted to departments of corrections” and the company did not want to expose itself to liability in Italy.

Hospira does not have domestic facilities that can make sodium thiopental, said Daniel Rosenberg, a spokesman, and has decided to “exit the market.” No other American companies manufacture the drug, which has largely been supplanted by alternatives in hospitals but is used by 34 of the 35 states that use lethal injection to carry out the death penalty. An average of 55 executions have taken place annually over the last 10 years, with 46 last year and 52 in 2009, virtually all of them by lethal injection.

During what had been described as a temporary halt to production last year, scarcity of sodium thiopental led to delays in scheduled executions in at least two states, California and Oklahoma.

The extent to which execution schedules will be further disrupted by the drug shortage is not yet clear, but it could be considerable. In many states, adopting a new protocol for lethal injections requires formal proposals, public comment and often challenges in court — a process that can take months or more, said Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. But in others, switching drugs might be done more quickly, by administrative fiat.

And:

Texas, which carries out more executions than any other state, has an aging stock of sodium thiopental that will expire in March, leaving it unusable.

“There currently are four executions scheduled in Texas — two in February, one in May and one in July,” said Michelle Lyons, director of public information at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. “At this time, we have enough sodium thiopental on hand to carry out the two executions scheduled in February. In March, our supply of this particular drug is set to expire.”

“The Texas Department of Criminal Justice will explore other options, including possibly seeking an alternate drug for use in Texas’ lethal injection process,” she said in an e-mail.

"Company to stop making drug commonly used in executions," by Rob Stein for the Washington Post.

The decision by Hospira of Lake Forest., Ill., was prompted by demands from Italy, which does not have capital punishment, that no sodium thiopental - which the company had planned to make at its plant outside Milan - be used for executions, officials said.

"We determined we could not prevent the drug from being diverted for use in capital punishment," said Dan Rosenberg, a Hospira spokesman. He noted that the company never condoned the drug's use for lethal injection and had hoped to continue making it for medical use.

Hospira's move will force states and the federal government to look for alternatives to the drug, which could require lengthy approval processes and result in costly, long-running legal challenges.

"This is clearly going to cause a problem for a lot of states," said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington-based group that does not take a position on the death penalty. "It's not clear how this is going to play out, but for some states it's going to put things into limbo or continue a limbo."

The announcement was praised by opponents of the death penalty for raising new questions about the procedures used for lethal injection.

"It's more evidence the house of cards is crumbling on this system," said Diann Rust-Tierney, executive director of the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty.

And:

Oklahoma last year became the first state to switch to another method, replacing sodium thiopental with pentobarbital, which is widely used to euthanize animals. After winning a court challenge to that decision, the state has executed three inmates since December.

In Virginia, which has carried out 108 executions - the second-highest number in the nation - since the reinstatement of the death penalty in 1976, officials said they were looking for alternatives. The state uses both the three-drug combination including sodium thiopental and the electric chair.

"We are in the same position as many other states and are looking into all options," said Larry Traylor, a spokesman for the Virginia Department of Corrections. Ten men are on death row in Virginia, but no execution dates have been scheduled by the courts, authorities said.

In Maryland, where lawmakers have debated in recent years whether to abolish capital punishment, the use of the death penalty has been on hold since December 2006, when the state's highest court ruled that the procedure for carrying out executions had been improperly adopted. State lawmakers have scheduled a Feb. 16 hearing on new proposed regulations.

After shortages of the drug emerged, several states, including California and Arizona, obtained supplies from a manufacturer in Britain. But officials in Britain, which also does not have the death penalty, have demanded that any future shipments to the United States not be used for executions.

Boomberg reports, "Hospira Decision to Drop Death-Penalty Drug May Disrupt Executions in U.S.," by Pat Wechsler.

The Lake Forest, Illinois-based company said in a statement it would discontinue manufacturing the anesthetic after Italian government authorities asked for a guarantee that the drug, slated to be produced for the first time at a plant in Italy this year, wouldn’t be used in executions. Hospira said it can’t control the ultimate end use of the medicine, marketed as Pentothal.

Hospira is the lone U.S. producer of the drug used worldwide to sedate patients undergoing medical procedures, said Dan Rosenberg, a Hospira spokesman. It is included as part of a cocktail of drugs used by correctional institutions in the U.S. as a fast-acting sedative in lethal-injection executions.

“This drug is intended for medical use and we would never condone the use of the drug for lethal injections,” Rosenberg said yesterday in a telephone interview. “Even if we and our suppliers didn’t sell to departments of corrections, there was no way we could guarantee that the drug might not be diverted for that use.”

The Richmond Times-Dispatch reports, "Germany won't send drug for executions."

Germany's health minister is urging the nation's leading drug companies and distributors to ignore requests from the United States for sodium thiopental, used to anesthetize inmates being executed.

"Sole firm to halt drug for US lethal injection," from AFP, via Google News.

Some states including Kentucky have delayed executions due to a lack of sodium thiopental. But Arizona, according the the American Civil Liberties Union, has imported the drug from Britain.

Oklahoma decided to use a drug normally used to euthanize animals, pentobarbital, as a substitute.

The last doses of sodium thiopental made by Hospira are nearing their expiration dates, which could pose issues in states active in capital punishment including Texas and Ohio.

The Guardian reports, "Lethal injection drug production ends in the US."  It's written by Chris McGreal in Washington.

The governor of Missouri last week spared a man who had been scheduled to die on Wednesday amid speculation about its supply of drugs for lethal injection.

Tennessee obtained a supply for an execution in October but it is unclear whether it will be able to carry out others.

Oklahoma has started using pentobarbital, a drug used in doctor-assisted suicides in Oregon and by the Swiss euthanasia group, Dignitas.

Earlier coverage of the Hospira decision begins at the link.  Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Next, Texas coverage.

An Update on the FSC Meeting

"Texas panel to issue report on convicted arsonist who was executed," is the title of Michael Graczyk's
AP post, via the Houston Chronicle.

A Texas commission looking into an arson investigation that led to the execution of the man convicted of starting the fatal fire decided Friday to move ahead with a report on the case even though its authority is not clear.

The Texas Forensic Science Commission has been looking into the investigation of a 1991 house fire that killed three small children. The children's father, Cameron Todd Willingham, was convicted of setting the fire and executed in 2004. But the commission said it's not sure it has authority in cases that started before it was created in 2005 and has asked the Texas Attorney General's Office for advice on that matter.

The commissioners also have asked whether they have authority over investigators or agencies who may have not been accredited before 2005.

Still, commissioners decided to move ahead with their report without waiting for the attorney general's response.

"I want the commission to find a way where we can continue making progress, so things do not come to a standstill," Commissioner Lance Evans said. "I would like us to move forward with all speed."

State law gives the commission the authority to make recommendations on overall practices and procedures performed by investigators, but it does not have the power to sanction them, Evans said.

The panel's investigation started in 2006. It became politically charged in September 2009 when Gov. Rick Perry, who appoints its members and refused to stop Willingham's execution, replaced the chairman and two other commissioners days before they were to hear from a fire expert who later testified that he thought the fire's cause should have been listed as undetermined. That man, Craig Beyler of Baltimore, Md., finally testified two weeks ago.

The Texas Tribune has, "Commission Frustrated With Willingham Investigation," posted by Aziza Musa.

Members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission expressed concerns today about the progress — or lack thereof — in the case of convicted arsonist Cameron Todd Willingham before ending yet another meeting without a decision about the evidence used to send the Corsicana man to the death chamber in 2004.

After spending nearly an hour in executive session, the commission voted to compile a list of the commissioners' recommendations and draft a report. Commission members also unanimously voted for Chairman John Bradley to seek an opinion from Attorney General Greg Abbott on three issues: the broadness of the term "forensic analysis" and whether it applies to the Willingham case; if the case was in the commission's jurisdiction; and the Legislature's interpretation of an "accredited lab." 

Commission member Lance Evans said there are some issues the commission can address independent of the attorney general's opinion.

"Let me give you a hypothetical, and I'm not saying this is how it's going to turn out," Evans said. "Part of what we're doing is analyzing whether or not they followed the best practices of the time, and if those best practices of the time are still the best practices. There's nothing to stop us from writing a report and commenting on that. Hypothetically, I can see a situation where we go through a preliminary report that goes through all of those things, and then maybe a subsequent report that touches on the finding of whether there was or was not negligence."

And:

The commission is scheduled to reconvene on Apr. 15, but it is unclear whether Willingham will be on the agenda.

"I just don't want to see this sit," commission member Norma Farley said. "I want to see this move forward."

Earlier coverage begins with previews of the FSC meeting posted this morning.

Hospira to Stop Manufacturing Sodium Thiopental

Nathan Koppel posts, "Hospira to Stop Making Lethal-Injection Drug," at the Wall Street Journal.

The sole U.S. maker of a key execution drug has decided to permanently halt production of the drug, which could lead many states to face delay in carrying out the death penalty.

The decision made on Friday by Hospira Inc. caps months of controversy over thiopental sodium, an anesthetic that has long been used by states as a part of a cocktail of drugs administered during a lethal injection.

Hospira's decision puts a wrench in the nation's capital-punishment system. States can attempt to use another anesthetic in place of thiopental, but such a switch likely would need to be approved by courts and possibly state legislators.

Many states have run out of thiopental, forcing prison officials to delay executions. The drug shortage followed a 2009 decision by Hospira to suspend production due to manufacturing issues.

The Lake Forrest, Ill., company had planned to resume producing thiopental in the first quarter of 2011 at a company plant in Liscate, Italy. But in December, the Italian parliament issued an order binding the government to ensure that Hospira's Italian-made thiopental would not be used in lethal injections.

In the face of that opposition, Hospira ultimately decided to exit the thiopental market, said company spokeswoman Tareta Adams. "This will be a challenge for [medical] customers and we regret that," Ms. Adams said. "But we don't want to put our Italian facility at risk that the product will be misused" by U.S. prisons.

Hospira, she said, has had discussions with its drug distributors to see if the companies could block the drug from being sold to prisons, but Hospira ultimately decided there was no way to ensure the drug would not be "misused" by prisons.

The AP report is, "US drug manufacturer to discontinue production of key lethal injection drug," by Andrew Welsh-Huggins.  It's via Google News.

The sole U.S. manufacturer of a key lethal injection drug says it's discontinuing the drug's production because it couldn't guarantee Italian authorities that it wouldn't be used in executions.

Hospira Inc., of Lake Forest, Illinois, said Friday that its plant in Italy was the only viable place where the company could produce sodium thiopental.

Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg told The Associated Press that Italian authorities insisted the company prove the drug would never end up being used by states to execute condemned inmates. Rosenberg said the company determined after discussions with Italy and Hospira wholesalers that it could not make such a guarantee.

"Hospira plots to block anesthetic from executions," is the Fierce Pharma Manufacturing post by George Miller.

Sodium thiopental maker Hospira says it is working to prevent use of the anesthetic in capital punishment. As the sole manufacturer of the drug in the U.S., the company is considering such tactics as selling it only through wholesalers and working with trading partners to restrict distribution to departments of corrections.

"We historically did not prohibit sales to departments of corrections or penitentiary hospitals because the product did have use in medical treatments or surgical procedures provided by these institutions," says Hospira spokesman Dan Rosenberg in an email. "The company for years has periodically advised corrections departments that it markets the drug "solely for medical use as indicated on the product labeling."

Rosenberg adds that this is Hospira's position globally.

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Galveston Hearing

Today's Galveston Daily News reports, "Judge rejects death penalty challenges."  It's by Chris Paschenko.

A judge refused Thursday to declare the state’s death penalty unconstitutional, rejecting motions by the defense team of an accused child killer who faces a capital murder trial March 7.

Travis James Mullis, 24, could face the death penalty if a jury convicts him of capital murder in the alleged Jan. 29, 2008, stomping death of his 3-month-old son, Alijah.

Day 3 of pretrial motions concluded Thursday in Judge John Ellisor’s 122nd District Court in Galveston.

Mullis’ defense team of Robert K. Loper and Gerald Bourque filed 10 motions in March, claiming, among other things, the Texas Code of Criminal Procedure involving the death penalty was unconstitutional.

And:

Individual jury selection, from a panel of possibly 1,600 people, is expected to begin Feb. 7

The motion was similar to one Loper filed in the Harris County case of John Green.  The Court of Criminal Appeals stopped that hearing and ruled it improper in that instance.  Earlier coverage of the Harris County hearing begins at the link.

Maryland Lethal Injection Regulations

"Hearing on Md. death penalty rules set next month," is John Wagner's Washington Post report.

Maryland lawmakers have scheduled a hearing on proposed death penalty regulations, a long-delayed step along the way to the possible resumption of executions in the state.

Use of the death penalty was halted by the state's highest court in December 2006, a month before Gov. Martin O'Malley (D) took office, pending new regulations from the administration spelling out procedures for lethal injection and other issues.

O'Malley instead lobbied the legislature to repeal capital punishment, and his administration waited until 2009 -- after those efforts fell short for a third year in a row -- to propose new regulations.

A legislative review panel headed by two Democrats opposed to capital punishment has now scheduled a hearing on the regulations on Feb. 16. Several powerful lawmakers, including Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) have urged the panel -- known as the Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive and Legislative Review -- to act.

Any action by the review panel does not need approval of the House or Senate, and technically the panel's role is only advisory. If he wanted to, O'Malley could put the recommendations in place over the panel's objections.

Earlier lethal injection coverage from Maryland is at the link.

Let me also note Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks latest, "If death penalty is wrong, why keep it?  More than talk, the governor needs to demand repeal again."

"The line of history sometimes zigs and zags," the governor of Maryland said in an interview with a Washington Post reporter. "I think the big picture is our country is moving away from the death penalty, and I think as time goes on, more and more states will realize that it's not an effective tool for reducing violent crime or homicides. It's not a deterrent, it's very, very expensive, and the dollars could be used for other things, and it's ultimately inconsistent with the sort of nation we aspire to be."

So why doesn't the governor of Maryland, who three months ago handily won re-election, call again for repeal of the death penalty here? Why doesn't he commute the sentences of Maryland's last five death row inmates, all convicted and sentenced under a woefully flawed system, and be done with it? Why the oration about what's going on in the rest of the country and what people will come to think? He sounds like a presidential candidate (surprise!) — not a governor.

Here's an idea for the state's chief executive: Show some brass and call on every member of the legislature to certify in writing that they've read the Civiletti commission report that came out two years ago, then dare them to vote against repeal.

And:

Handed this report by the governor in 2009, a majority in the House of Delegates supported repeal. However, the Senate, led by a president who once said he'd eagerly insert the needle into a death row inmate, balked. Legislators struck a compromise toward eliminating the possibility that Maryland would execute an innocent person — a laudable goal, but not the main concern of the Civiletti commission. The problems that led the commission to call for abolition of the death penalty in Maryland remain; they were not fixed by the compromise, and the commission said one of them — jurisdictional disparities — was beyond reform.

And now we have the 68-year-old Senate president, who has been in the legislature since the Baltimore Colts beat the Dallas Cowboys in Super Bowl V, calling for blood. He wants the state to resume executions. He's the Maryland political leader out front on this issue — not the governor, who only two years ago called for repeal.

Of course, this is the same governor who has refused to commute the life sentence of Farley Grant, a 43-year-old inmate who has been in prison since he was 15 and whose innocence in a 1983 Baltimore murder has been established by law professors and students at the University of Maryland. A report on Mr. Grant went to the governor's office in 2008, and no action has been taken. If the newly re-elected Democratic governor won't act on the Farley Grant case, he can't be expected to commute sentences of those on death row. And he seems to be content to say, "I oppose the death penalty" and, with that established, do nothing else.

The Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment issued it's final report, in December 2008, urging abolition.  Coverage of the Commission's work begins with the post, "Maryland Commission Issues Final Report."

Coverage of the 2009 Maryland General Assembly's consideration of repeal legislation and eventual compromise law begins with the post, "The Maryland Legislation."

Hearing Today in Georgia Lethal Injection Challenge

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, "Julie Love killer to attend hearing on execution method."  It's written by Bill Rankin and Rhonda Cook.

A Fulton County judge will hold a hearing Friday on condemned killer Emmanuel Hammond's claim that his scheduled execution next week should be stopped until the state provides records concerning the drugs they will use to carry out the lethal injection.

Judge Michael Johnson has asked that Hammond be brought to Atlanta  from his cell on Death Row at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson 50 miles away for the 1 p.m. hearing.

Hammond's lawyers have decided not to ask the state Board of Pardons and Paroles to stop his execution, scheduled for Tuesday at 7 p.m., for the 1988 abduction and murder of Julie Love in a case that gained wide publicity at the time. Instead, his lawyers are focusing on the courts, according to Atlanta lawyer Brian Mendelsohn.

That strategy includes a lawsuit filed Thursday seeking a stay of execution and contending that the state has failed to provide requested information about the drugs to be used for Hammond's execution by lethal injection.

The issue of drugs used in lethal injection is national. Some states have found the drugs they have in stock have expired. There also is a shortage of the sedative that Georgia and other states administer at the beginning of the process.

Prison officials have said Georgia has an adequate supply of the drugs.

The AP report by Greg Bluestein is, "Condemned Ga. man wants lethal injection details," via the Macon Telegraph.

A condemned Georgia man scheduled to die next week asked a judge Thursday to delay the execution because his lawyers claim the state won't hand over key details about a lethal injection drug that has been hard to track down amid a nationwide shortage.

The lawsuit, filed in Fulton County Superior Court by the Southern Center for Human Rights, asks the judge to halt Emmanuel Hammond's execution until the Georgia Department of Corrections details the cost, inventory and expiration dates for the drugs used in executions.

And:

The lawsuit contends that state officials denied the request because they claimed it could "compromise security against sabotage, criminal or terroristic acts." But the suit says those records are of "high public interest" and should be subject to inspection. Refusing to release them violates Georgia's sunshine laws, it said.

"The state has hid from public view critical records about whether the lethal injection process is medically and constitutionally acceptable," said Gerald Weber, an attorney with the Atlanta-based center. "If the state does not have the necessary chemicals, or is using expired ones, it cannot hide those facts from Georgians."

State officials declined to comment on the lawsuit. But corrections spokeswoman Peggy Chapman said that Georgia has "an appropriate supply of sodium thiopental and is prepared to carry out the order of the sentencing court."

The lawsuit is just one of Hammond's legal avenues in the run-up to the execution. Hammond's attorney Brian Mendelsohn said Thursday he won't be seeking clemency at a Board of Pardons and Paroles hearing scheduled for Friday, and instead will focus on "litigating his case in the courts."

Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Where Texas Obtains Its Lethal Injection Drugs

The next three posts all relate to lethal injection news.  First, Texas.

"Ohio company supplies state with lethal drugs," is the title of Mike Ward's report in today's Austin American-Statesman.

Texas, which runs the nation's busiest prison death chamber, buys the three lethal drugs it uses to execute its condemned convicts from an Ohio pharmaceutical supplier, officials disclosed Thursday.

The revelation came after state prison officials had for months fought the release of the information, in unsuccessful arguments to Attorney General Greg Abbott and to a Travis County state district judge.

At several points, prison officials had argued that the safety of prison employees and the employees of the supplier might be jeopardized if the supplier's name was made public. Additionally, they insisted that the supplier might stop shipping the drugs to Texas, and executions could be stopped.

Michelle Lyons, a spokeswoman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice, said all three drugs are purchased from Besse Medical, a supplier based in West Chester, Ohio .

She said she did not have additional information about the supplier or whether the disclosure could affect future deliveries of the drugs.

She said an Austin judge ordered the agency on Jan. 11 to reveal the name of the supplier as part of a court challenge filed by condemned killer Cleve Foster. He was scheduled to die Jan. 11, but the U.S. Supreme Court delayed his execution just before it was to take place. The high court rejected Foster's latest appeal Tuesday.

Officials at Besse and Pennsylvania-based AmerisourceBergen Corp., its corporate owner, could not immediately be reached for comment.

And:

Abbott had ordered prison officials to make public some information about the lethal injection drugs after the American-Statesman and other groups requested records about the inventories and suppliers of lethal injection drugs.

In response, Texas prison officials announced last fall that they had enough doses to execute 39 prisoners, but that all doses of the sodium thiopental expire in March.

Earlier coverage begins with the post, "Texas Lethal Injection Drugs."  Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

FSC to Resume Willingham Consideration Today

The Forensic Science Commission meets today in Austin, and the Todd Willingham case is on its agenda.  The Innocence Project will be webcasting the meeting, which begins at 9:30 a.m.

Yamil Berard reports, "Forensic science panel set to deliberate Willingham case," in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

They've heard from the science experts and the lawyers. They've pored over instructional manuals about fire safety and quizzed investigators.

Now it's time for the state panel tasked with rooting out bad forensic science to roll up its sleeves and begin deliberations in the case of the Corsicana mechanic executed for setting the house fire that killed his three children.

Expectations are high from those who have closely watched the Texas Forensic Science Commission work for more than a year on the Cameron Todd Willingham murder case. At issue is whether faulty science led to investigators' conclusion that the fire was arson.

"What we really plan is for the commission really coming to a final decision to bring this to a close," said Stephen Saloom, policy director for the New York-based Innocence Project, which filed a 2006 complaint urging panel members to review the work of the arson investigators.

"I would hope they would do this in short order," Saloom said.

Commission members will meet today, but they haven't indicated how they will proceed. The agenda states that members are expected to consider the Willingham case and "assign report."

They will likely provide more details at the meeting, commission coordinator Leigh Tomlin wrote in an e-mail in response to questions. Also likely is that members will seek advice from new general counsel Lynn M. Robitaille.

"The agenda contains the full amount of information released prior to the meeting," Tomlin wrote. "All further details will be handled at the meeting."

That could mean that commissioners will dive into public discussion, now that fact-finding is done and other information has been presented. The discussion may include members' expressing independent opinions about the case.

"I don't think they've yet established how they feel," Saloom said.

Also, the commission could agree, as a whole, to ask the four-member investigatory panel it established months ago to write a report based on the commission's discussions. The panel is made up of Chairman John Bradley, a prosecutor; and members Sarah Kerrigan, a forensic science professor and chemist; Fort Worth defense attorney Lance Evans; and Tarrant County Medical Examiner Nizam Peerwani. If the commission does that, the panel would have to meet independently, then report back.

The AP report is, "Fire that led to execution returns to Texas panel," is by Michael Graczyk.  It's via the Houston Chronicle.

The disputed case of Cameron Todd Willingham, who was convicted of the arson deaths of his three small children and executed, returns to the Texas Forensic Science Commission.

The panel Friday is considering testimony it heard earlier this month from experts who differed on whether the investigation of the 1991 fire in Corsicana was botched. The commission also is to order a report written about the case.

Earlier coverage begins with the post, "Commentary on the FSC Meeting," following the Commission's meeting earlier this month.

All Willingham coverage is available through the Todd Willingham index.

The Beyler report prepared for the Forensic Science Commission is here in Adobe .pdf format.

David Grann's September 2009 New Yorker article is noted here.    Steve Mills and Maurice Possley first reported on the case in a 2004 Chicago Tribune series on junk science.  The December 9, 2004 report was titled,"Man executed on disproved forensics."

The Innocence Project has a Todd Willingham resource page which provides a concise overview of the Willingham case with links to all relevant documents.

Additional Coverage of Justice Pfeifer's Call for Ohio Repeal

"Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer wants to scrap the death penalty," is the title of Reginald Fields' report for today's Cleveland Plain Dealer.

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul Pfeifer, who helped write the state's death penalty law, now wants Gov. John Kasich to end capital punishment in Ohio.

But a spokesman for the governor said Kasich will continue to support the death penalty.

Pfeifer, a Republican, was a state senator and chairman of the Senate's Judiciary Committee in 1981 when the death penalty became the law.

But safeguards lawmakers put in place to prevent inequities have not worked, said Pfeifer, citing racial and geographical disparities in how the penalty has been administered. Pfeifer called the use of capital punishment a "lottery."

"It has bothered me from the beginning," Pfeifer, who won a new term in November, told reporters on Wednesday. He made his initial comments about the death penalty on Tuesday during his swearing-in ceremony at the court.

"To my surprise, the next thing I know I'm at the Supreme Court having to deal with these cases where people are sentenced to death under a statute I was very involved in writing," he said.

Pfeifer said an option for life in prison without parole was wrongly excluded from the earlier legislation. He said justices have never used the discretion the law gives them to look beyond legal arguments and use their own common sense to determine whether a person should be on death row.

With 157 people on Ohio's death row and the state executing people at rapid clip, the justice said it's too late to fix the system.

"I think the best answer is for the governor to just commute them all and that we do what Illinois has done and say we don't need the death penalty in Ohio any longer," Pfeifer said.

Alan Johnson writes, "Pfeifer: Revise constitution, end death penalty," for the Columbus Dispatch.

The Ohio Constitution is "a mess," clogged with casinos and livestock standards, and should be streamlined and revised, Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer said yesterday.

Pfeifer, a maverick Republican who began his 19th year on the court this week, also said the death penalty should be abolished in Ohio and laws should be passed requiring more transparency in campaign finance.

And:

Pfeifer, the senior justice on the Supreme Court, also reiterated remarks he made Tuesday at his swearing-in ceremony in which he urged fellow Republican Gov. John Kasich to commute all death sentences to life without the possibility of parole.

Pfeifer, who as a state senator was a co-author of Ohio's 1981 capital-punishment law, said he now feels it should be abolished, primarily because it's being used for cases for which it was never intended.

"I think the time's right on this one. Politically it's right. ...You have Republicans in every direction. ... With that political configuration, it would be the most opportune time to seriously debate and discuss whether or not we have the death penalty."

Pfeifer said he will talk to both the governor and legislative leaders about his position.

Kasich faces the first execution on his watch Feb.17, when Frank Spisak of Cuyahoga County is scheduled to die by lethal injection.

Asked about the governor's response to Pfeifer's comments, Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said, "Gov. Kasich supports capital punishment." He declined to elaborate.

The Ravenna Record-Courier has, "Ohio justice: It's time to abolish death penalty," by Marc Kovac.

Is it time for Ohio to consider abolishing the death penalty?

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Paul E. Pfeifer thinks so, telling an audience in Columbus Tuesday that the existing state law on capital punishment makes it “exceedingly difficult for this statute to be administered in a fair and just way.”

He added, “Gov. [John] Kasich and the governors after him, I believe, need to consider commuting all of those sentences to life in prison without the possibility of parole, and I think it’s time for Ohio to at least entertain the discussion of whether or not we are well served by having a death penalty.”

Pfeifer made the comments Tuesday, after he and fellow Justice Judith Ann Lanzinger took their ceremonial oaths of office. Both won new terms to the state’s high court in November.

Pfeifer said most of the 157 people currently serving on Death Row were sentenced prior to a law change that allows judges to issue sentences of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

And since the latter, few death penalties have been handed down.

He cited Illinois as a recent example of a state where lawmakers have moved to end capital punishment. Ohio lawmakers should consider doing the same.

And:

He added, “I encourage all in the Legislature, all who have a responsibility on this, to entertain a thoughtful discussion and to look at the question in a serious way. I think the time has come for us to make that change.”

Earlier coverage of Justice Pfeifer' call for repeal is at the link.

Indigent Defense Facing Texas Budget Cuts

Texas legislative leaders rolled out the draft budget for the two year period beginning September 1, 2011.  Legislators are facing a projected $27 billion shortfall, and the governor has pledged not to increase revenue through taxes.  The Texas Legislature's 140-day session will end on May 30.  The House Appropriations Committee and the Senate Finance Committee will be working on the budget throughout the session.  A final budget will be approved before the legislative session ends.

Indigent defense is facing cuts.

"Preliminary state budget leaves less funding," is Kathleen Thurber's report for the Midland Reporter-Telegram.

The plan released in Austin Tuesday and posted online by the House Legislative Budget board on Wednesday is preliminary, local lawmakers said. But, they stressed, it does accurately reflect the shifts that are going to have to take place.

And:

Funding for the indigent defense program was slashed from the more than $29 million allotted statewide this year to just more than $783,000 for the whole state during each 2012 and 2013, according to the bill. The fund helps provide legal representation to suspects who can't afford their own defender.

The Fort Worth Star-Telegram has, "Highlights of proposed state budget cuts," compiled by staff writers Aman Batheja, Alex Branch and Anna M. Tinsley.

Judiciary
Indigent defense : Officials propose cutting $8.6 million for programs statewide.

And:

Criminal Justice
Community support: More than $9 million would be cut from youth education programs, environmental cleanup and State Military Tuition Assistance.

Parole release processing, supervision and residential facilities: More than $27 million would be cut from halfway houses, intermediate sanction facilities, and parolee assistance and supervision.

Correctional managed healthcare : More than $200 million would be slashed from providing mental and physical care and prescriptions for inmates.

Community supervision funding : More than $110 million would be slashed from programs, services and supervision for offenders on probation. Cuts would be made to impact treatment initiatives, misdemeanor supervision, treatment alternatives to incarceration programs and more.

Earlier coverage of proposed budget cuts begins at the link.

There more news coverage on the state budget at the Austin American-Statesman, Dallas Morning News, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Houston Chronicle, Texas Observer, and Texas Tribune.

TCRP Files Grievance Against Sharon Keller

The grievance and the narrative explanation filed by the Texas Civil Rights Project are available in Adobe .pdf format.

This morning's San Antonio Express-News reports, "Rights group wants judge’s law license yanked."  It's written by Guillermo Contreras.

A civil rights group is asking the state to revoke the law license of a judge who has been a lightning rod in debates over the death penalty.

The Austin-based Texas Civil Rights Project filed a grievance Wednesday with the State Bar of Texas against Justice Sharon Keller, the presiding judge of the Court of Criminal Appeals, saying she is unfit to retain her license to practice law. Records show Keller has been licensed since graduating from SMU's law school in 1978.

The group alleges she is untrustworthy and dishonest, citing:

• A review by the Texas Ethics Commission that found she failed to disclose several sources of income, as required by law.

• Her refusal in 2007 to keep the court open after 5 p.m. at the request of lawyers drafting an appeal on behalf of death row inmate Michael Richard, who was executed that evening.

• Statements she made in a federal lawsuit filed by Richard's widow that purportedly contradict what she told the State Commission on Judicial Conduct.

Keller, who recently said she'd seek reelection in 2012, had no comment. Her lawyer, Chip Babcock, could not be reached for comment Wednesday.

The state Commission on Judicial Conduct, which publicly warned her after investigating her actions on the day Richards was executed, also had no comment.

In April, the Texas Ethics Commission fined Keller a record $100,000 for failing to report stock, honoraria and more than $2.4 million in real estate holdings on her 2007 and 2008 personal financial disclosure statements. Keller filed amended reports with the commission in 2009 after news reports revealed her missing holdings.

And:

In 2009, the judicial conduct commission filed misconduct charges against Keller and issued her a “public warning.” The disciplinary body said she brought discredit to the judiciary by closing the court to Richard's appeals in 2007 just hours before he was executed.

In October, a special panel of three Republican judges said the commission issued her the wrong discipline, but the panel did not set aside the commission's misconduct findings.

Earlier coverage begins with the post, "Special Court of Review Rejects Keller Ruling Reconsideration."

The Special Court of Review's Order is here; its Final Opinion is in Adobe .pdf format.  The Commission's Findings, Conclusions and Order of Public Warning is here.

Other key documents in the case include:

• Examiner's Objections and Responses filed by attorney John McKetta
• Objections filed by attorney Chip Babcock
• Findings.by Special Master David Berchelmann
• Charges brought by the Commission on Judicial Conduct

Some of the critical early reporting is noted in these posts:

• More on the CCA's Refusal to Consider Richard Stay Request
• Editorial Outrage at CCA Closed Door
• More on the CCA Closed Door
• Ethics Complaint Filed Against CCA Presiding Judge
• More on the Ethics Complaint Against Judge Keller
• Continued Criticism of Presiding Judge Sharon Keller

Keller was also issued a record fine by the Texas Ethics Commission over her financial disclosure filings, noted here.

Supreme Court Lifts Stays in Two Texas Cases

"Justices lift stay in Fort Worth slaying, with new execution date to be set soon," is the report in today's Fort Worth Star-Telegram.  It's by Tim Madigan.

Within the next several days, a Fort Worth judge is expected to set a new execution date for Cleve Foster, who was set to be put to death last week before the U.S. Supreme Court granted a last-minute stay.

Supreme Court justices lifted the stay Tuesday, denying Foster's claims that he lacked legal representation during part of the appellate process. The justices did not comment.

And:

Also Tuesday, the high court denied an appeal in a Dallas death penalty case.

In October, Justice Antonin Scalia granted a reprieve to Gayland Bradford, who received a death sentence for the fatal shooting of a Dallas grocery store security guard more than two decades ago.

Foster's stay of execution last week was noted at the link.  According to TDCJ, there are currently three executions scheduled in Texas.

Department of Justice Creates Office Targeting Prosecutorial Misconduct

"Justice Dept. office to punish prosecutors' misconduct," is the USA Today report by Brad Heath and Kevin McCoy.

The Justice Department created a new internal watchdog office on Tuesday to make sure federal prosecutors face swifter and more consistent punishment if investigators find that they committed misconduct.

The change follows a USA TODAY investigation that identified 201 criminal cases in which federal courts had found that Justice Department prosecutors had broken laws or ethics rules — violations that put innocent people in jail and set guilty people free. Although each of the cases was so serious that judges overturned convictions or rebuked the prosecutors for misconduct, USA TODAY found that the department often took years to investigate what went wrong, and that prosecutors faced little risk of being fired.

Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement Tuesday that while most federal prosecutors meet their ethical obligations, the current procedures for disciplining those found to commit misconduct "consume too much time, and risk inconsistent resolution." He said the new unit "will help change that by providing consistent, fair, and timely resolution of these cases."

The unit, called the Professional Misconduct Review Unit, will be responsible for disciplining career prosecutors when the department's ethics investigators conclude that they engaged in intentional or reckless misconduct. Until now, those decisions had been made by the prosecutors' supervisors, most often U.S. attorneys. The department has faced criticism for not doing enough to investigate and punish misconduct.

And:

The new unit, which will make referrals to state bar association disciplinary authorities, will handle all findings of professional misconduct that occur after the unit is fully staffed, the memo said. "This is serious business. It's a sign of a lack of faith in the behavior of U.S. attorneys around the country," said Joseph diGenova, a former U.S. Attorney in Washington, D.C. "If things have gotten so bad that the department finds willful misconduct and you haven't been able to figure that out, you're out of the ballgame. The message is, 'Manage your office and impose discipline, or we will.' "

Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who's now a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, applauded the effort to segregate and speed the handling of the most serious misconduct cases. "Not all prosecutorial misconduct cases are alike," she said.

Kathleen Ridolfi, director of the Northern California Innocence Project, said the Department of Justice should go further by adding independent legal experts to the disciplinary process.

"You still have this systemic problem of a mentality that prosecutors have to win," said Joe Lawless, author of one of the first legal textbooks on prosecutorial misconduct. "You have to change that mentality."

The announcement is the latest step Holder has taken over the past two years to address ethical lapses by the attorneys in charge of enforcing the nation's laws. Those efforts came after the government's failed corruption prosecution of former Alaska senator Ted Stevens, which ended in 2009 after the department conceded it had hidden evidence that could have undermined the case against him.

The New York Times reports, "New Justice Department Office Will Discipline Prosecutors," by Charlie Savage.

The Justice Department announced on Tuesday the creation of a unit that will decide how to discipline career officials who commit prosecutorial misconduct, including whether to refer them to state bar associations for punishment. The unit will review cases whenever the department’s internal ethics watchdog, the Office of Professional Responsibility, finds that a prosecutor intentionally or recklessly violated the rules to which he is subject.

Savage also posted, "A Step to Deal With Prosecutors’ Misconduct," to the Caucus blog at the Times.

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. appointed Kevin Ohlson, who until recently was his chief of staff, to be chief of the new unit. In a statement, Mr. Holder said that the new process was necessary in order to speed up disciplinary review and to make sure such cases are treated the same way, no matter where in the department they arise.

“In the vast majority of cases, department attorneys meet their professional obligations but when allegations of misconduct occur, all parties deserve a fair and timely resolution,” Mr. Holder said. “This unit will be instrumental in achieving that goal and will also further the department’s mission of meeting its ethical obligations in every case.”

"Attorney General Creates Professional Misconduct Review Unit, Appoints Kevin Ohlson Chief," is the DoJ news release announcing the office.

The Professional Misconduct Review Unit (PMRU) will be responsible for all disciplinary and state bar referral actions relating to OPR findings of professional misconduct against career attorneys.

“The current procedures for resolving these disciplinary matters consume too much time, and risk inconsistent resolutions, but this new Unit will help change that by providing consistent, fair, and timely resolution of these cases,” said Attorney General Holder. “In the vast majority of cases, Department attorneys meet their professional obligations but when allegations of misconduct occur, all parties deserve a fair and timely resolution.   This Unit will be instrumental in achieving that goal and will also further the Department’s mission of meeting its ethical obligations in every case.”

Earlier coverage of the USA Today series is noted in the post, "Justice in the Balance."  Related posts are in the prosecutorial misconduct index.

Companies Won't Sell Kentucky Lethal Injection Drug

That's the title of Brett Barrouquere's AP report via Google News.  It's also available via ABC News.  Here are extended excerpts.  Those following the issue will want to read the entire article

Amid a nationwide shortage of a lethal injection drug, documents obtained under a freedom of information request show two pharmaceutical companies declined to sell Kentucky a supply of the sedative.

The state e-mails obtained by The Associated Press show one firm, KRS Global Biotechnology of Boca Raton, Fla., explained its refusal by saying there was no doctor involved in the purchase of sodium thiopental, even though Kentucky law bars physicians from being involved in administering executions.

No reason was given in the e-mail traffic between state officials and pharmacists for a canceled order from the other company, Spectrum Chemical and Laboratory Products of Gardenia, Calif. A Spectrum official told the AP the ordered was scrapped when it sold that part of its business last year.

At least seven other states that use sodium thiopental for lethal injections have had trouble in recent months finding enough of the drug, whose main U.S. manufacturer has cited supply problems. The shortage has not delayed any executions in Kentucky because they have been on hold since a judge's order in September over an unrelated issue.

The Kentucky e-mails are the first public record of companies declining to sell the drug to states for executions.

They show a massive search for any stock of unexpired sodium thiopental. Kentucky prison officials contacted more than two dozen states, more than a half-dozen chemical companies and even the federal Bureau of Prisons. Kentucky also couldn't find any states willing to share their limited supplies, even after giving Ohio 3 of the 6 grams it needed for an execution in June.

"I am beginning to think drug companies and suppliers are not real happy to have to supply us for this use," Phil Parker, warden of the Kentucky State Penitentiary that houses the state's death chamber, wrote in a July e-mail.

Kentucky started searching for sodium thiopental in January 2010, about six weeks after the state Attorney General's office asked the governor to set execution dates in three cases.

By June, it had focused on Spectrum Chemical as the only company with the drug in stock. The state placed an order with Spectrum on June 14 for 50 grams of the fast-acting sedative, enough to conduct eight executions. But in July, Spectrum called off the deal.

State officials wrote in e-mails that the cancellation came after Spectrum found out the customer was the Kentucky Department of Corrections, not a hospital or clinic, as listed on the department's federal license allowing the drug purchase.

A pharmacist at Fredonia Pharmacy Corner, an outlet 15 miles from the prison that the state used to buy other drugs, offered to order the sodium thiopental for Kentucky as long as he could tack on a 15 percent markup. Spectrum rejected the order, saying they don't sell to pharmacies. The state penitentiary's Parker speculated that Spectrum figured out why the department wanted the drug.

"Bottom line is, they are not going to sell to anyone or any entity associated with us," Parker wrote on July 19 to Kentucky Corrections Commissioner LaDonna Thompson.

And:

Kentucky then negotiated a $16,000 order with KRS-GBT in September to cover enough of the drug for six executions, but the deal fell through because the company insisted that a doctor take part in the acquisition, said Jennifer Brislin, a spokeswoman for the Kentucky Justice Cabinet.

Having a doctor participate in buying the drug could have violated state law, which forbids physicians from having a role in an execution.

"The Department of Corrections couldn't comply with that request," Brislin said.

Also:

Sodium thiopental has been used as an anesthetic in surgery, but many hospitals have switched to propofol to render patients unconscious, leaving very few medical uses for sodium thiopental.

Officials with Hospira have written to at least two states — Ohio and Mississippi — saying the drug is produced with medical uses, not executions, in mind.

"As such, we do not support the use of any of our products in capital punishment procedures," Dr. Kees Gioenhout, vice president of clinical research and development, wrote to Ohio prison officials in March.

More on states' scramble for execution drug begins with the post, "FDA Helps States Get Execution Drug."  Related posts are in the lethal injection index.

Ohio Supreme Court Justice Calls for Repeal of State's Death Penalty

"Justice opposes death penalty; Pfeifer helped write law, but now says state should halt executions," is the title of the AP report by Andrew Welsh-Huggins.  It's via the Akron Beacon Journal.

An Ohio Supreme Court justice who helped write the death penalty law three decades ago and has more recently questioned its interpretation called Tuesday for an end to capital punishment in the state.

Justice Paul Pfeifer also said Gov. John Kasich and any future governor should consider commuting the sentences of Ohio's death row inmates to life without parole.

''These are important matters that need all of our thoughtful attention — need the attention of the legislature to consider seriously whether we're well-served by this statute any longer,'' he said in remarks following his swearing-in ceremony.

''The time has come for us to make that change,'' Pfeifer said.

Pfeifer, a moderate Republican, was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee as Ohio debated the capital punishment bill that became law in 1981.

Ohio has 157 men and one woman on death row. Of those, 43 were sentenced to death before a 1996 law gave juries the option of sentencing defendants to life without the possibility of parole.

Death sentences in Ohio began to drop after that law was passed, and they dropped further following a 2005 law that allowed prosecutors to seek life sentences without first pressing death penalty charges.

Ohio courts sentenced three men to death in 2008 and just one in 2009, before a spike in sentences last year brought the number up to seven. That's still below pre-1996 levels when a dozen or more were sentenced to death each year.

Kasich, a Republican, continues to support capital punishment, spokesman Rob Nicholas said.

And:

Pfeifer's remarks were his strongest to date, but for a decade the justice has questioned the law's use in Ohio. He has often said prosecutors were using it for cases, such as domestic violence slayings, that didn't merit a death sentence.

Pfeifer said he didn't want to be misunderstood when it came to the crimes death row inmates were convicted of.

''There are no nice people on death row. They all committed heinous crimes,'' he said. ''But every murder is a heinous crime. Every murder is impossible for any sane person to understand what would motivate someone to do something like that.''

Last May, Justice Pfeifer made headlines when he called for a systematic review of those on Ohio's death row because of sentencing disparities.  More in the posts:

• Ohio Supreme Court Justice Calls for Review of All on State's Death Row
• More From Ohio
• More on the Ohio Review Proposal

 

Texas Lawyer Sued by State Bar Over Dealings With Exonerees

"Lawyer for Texas Exonerees Faces Misconduct Suit," is the title of Jeff Carlton's AP report this morning.  It's via Law.com.

The State Bar of Texas has filed a lawsuit against an attorney who collected millions of dollars from wrongly convicted ex-inmates, saying he committed professional misconduct by charging fees that were illegal and unconscionable.

Lubbock attorney Kevin Glasheen has been credited by lawmakers and advocates as the driving force behind a 2009 law that made Texas the most generous state in the nation in compensating the wrongly convicted. He has said he acted appropriately in charging his clients a 25 percent contingency fee.

But the Bar's disciplinary counsel office found evidence Glasheen overcharged his clients or charged fees that violate the Bar's professional code of conduct, Bar spokeswoman Maureen Ray said Tuesday. It filed the lawsuit in an effort to sanction him.

If a court determines Glasheen committed misconduct, he could face punishments ranging from a public reprimand to disbarment.

The State Bar filed the lawsuit last week in Lubbock County but asked the Supreme Court of Texas to assign a state judge from another district to handle the case. Glasheen had asked the State Bar to file the lawsuit in open court, rather than conduct a private evidentiary hearing.

"The judicial review of these complaints gives them more careful scrutiny, more careful examination," he said.

Glasheen, who represents 15 exonerated inmates, has collected about $5 million in fees from his clients. He kept $3.5 million for his firm and paid the rest to Jeff Blackburn, the chief counsel for the Innocence Project of Texas.

The windfall came after Glasheen lobbied the Texas Legislature two years ago to pay exonerees $80,000 for each year they were wrongly imprisoned, plus a lifetime annuity. The most recent exoneree in Texas, Cornelius Dupree, served 30 years in prison for a sexual assault and robbery he did not commit. Under the new law, he is eligible to receive a $2.4 million lump sum, plus the annual payment.

Glasheen convinced his clients to hold off on lawsuits and instead pursue the state compensation, ensuring a quicker and more certain result. He then took 25 percent of what they received.

Two former clients who spent decades in prison for crimes they did not commit, Patrick Waller and Steven Phillips, have since sued Glasheen, arguing his fees were excessive because they hired him to be their lawyer -- not their lobbyist. Phillips said Glasheen has tried to charge him $1 million, even though the attorney never filed any court motion on his behalf.

"It sucked the life out of me," Phillips said. "There could be some sort of reasonable fee for lobbying. The gist of my complaint is I didn't hire him to lobby. I hired him to sue the city of Dallas."

And:

Randy Turner, who sued Glasheen on behalf of Waller and Phillips, said his clients are grateful for the state compensation money. But he called the fees "grossly unfair" and "obscene."

"It makes me sick to my stomach," Turner said.

Earlier coverage of the issue begins with the post, "Profiteering at the Expense of the Exonerated or Cost of Business?"

Texas Innocence Clinics Facing Budget Cuts

"Texas Innocence Clinics Under the Budget Knife," is the news report from the newly formed Texas bureau of the Public News Service.

State budget woes could spell the end of the Texas Innocence Clinics. It's expected the base budget will eliminate all funding for the project's law school programs, where students work on cases free of charge in order to gain experience. More than 40 Texans have been exonerated as a result of the students' work over the years.

A panel featuring those who want to see the clinics receive priority in the budget meets today (Wednesday), hoping to get the Legislature's attention. Scott Henson, policy expert for the Innocence Project of Texas, says the clinics have been at the forefront of ensuring that innocent Texans do not languish behind bars.

"Even people who are the most tough-on-crime imaginable don't want innocent people in prison, because that means the guilty person was not prosecuted."

There are four clinics at law schools, and each usually receives $100,000 a year.

Corey Session's brother, Timothy Cole, was the first Texan granted a posthumous pardon for innocence. Sessions says the clinics will close if state funding disappears, while there are still hundreds of cases that need to be reviewed.

"Innocent people do go to jail – and in the case of my brother, innocent people do die in prison. The State of Texas should be increasing the funding for these law school clinics."

The state of Texas is facing a $27 billion budget shortfall for the next two-year state budget that will begin September 1.  Legislators are under enormous pressure to cut costs. 

Earlier this month, the post, "Texas' Office of Capital Writs," noted efforts to trim that new office's budget.

Let me note the new presence of Public News Service in Texas.  The organization joins other non-profit journalism ventures in Texas, such as the Texas Observer , now in its 57th year, and the one-year old Texas Tribune.  PNS operates in more than half of the states.  There is already a link to PNS on the National News Links in the left column.  I'll add a link to the Texas News Service, next.

A Meeting of Houston Religious Leaders

"Houston religious leaders pledge to fight death penalty," is the title of Jeannie Kever's report in today's Houston Chronicle.

Seven of Houston's best-known religious leaders publicly pledged to fight the death penalty Tuesday night, saying it damages the society it seeks to protect.

"When an execution happens, who dies?" asked the Rev. Mike Cole, General Presbyter of the New Covenant Presbytery. "All of us."

Several other speakers called for the abolition of the death penalty in Texas, drawing applause from a packed auditorium at the Hobby Center for the Performing Arts.

The discussion was scheduled to coincide with the Houston Grand Opera's production of Dead Man Walking, which opens Saturday. It is based upon Sister Helen Prejean's book, Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States.

Prejean, who served as moderator, has been a leading opponent of the death penalty since before her book was published in 1994. It became an Oscar-winning movie before it was turned into an opera, but she said getting other religious leaders to speak out has been more difficult.

"The silence has been deafening," she said in an interview before the panel discussion. "It's taken years and years to get them to be active. The idea that someone could be Christian and for the death penalty, it's the very opposite of what Jesus stood for."
Not new to the fight

But many of the leaders said they have long been involved in the fight.

Cardinal Daniel DiNardo, leader of the Archdiocese of Galveston-Houston, described touring the death chamber in Huntsville after leading an anti-abortion march through the city.

"There was an unmistakeable feeling of coldness, of everything that is opposed to the dignity of the human person, even a guilty person," he said.

Other panelists were Bishop Janice Riggle Huie of the Texas United Methodist Church Conference; Rabbi David Lyon, senior pastor of Congregation Beth Israel; Bishop Mike Rinehart of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod, Evangelical Lutheran Church; the Rev. Harvey Clemons Jr., pastor of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church; and the Rev. Daniel Melendez, director of Pastors in Action.

And:

Several speakers talked about the advances in scientific and investigative techniques that have led to the exoneration of people previously found guilty.

Rinehart mentioned the case of Anthony Graves, recently freed after 18 years on death row.

"That should be as offensive to us as the original crime," he said. "The state just gets it wrong too often."

Prejean said she hopes the event will be just the beginning of a renewed focus by religious leaders on the death penalty.

"It's controversial, and it's hard to pick up as a religious leader," she said. "The hope is that those who stand publicly will also give a much more serious effort to educating the people in the pews."

Earlier notice of the event is at the post, "Next Week in Houston."

The Houston Grand Opera performances of Dead Man Walking begin this weekend.

The Houston Press reports, "Joyce DiDonato Plays Sister Helen Prejean in HGO's Dead Man Walking."  It's written by Margaret Downing.

Maryland - A Push for Lethal Injection Regulations

"More death penalty talk in Md.," is the AP report today via the Washington Post.  Here's an extended excerpt:

Within a month, a state panel will take up proposed rules on how lethal injections are administered in Maryland, a lawmaker who co-chairs the committee said Monday.

State Sen. Paul Pinsky, D-Prince George's, said in an interview he believes the General Assembly's Joint Committee on Administrative, Executive and Legislative Review could hold a hearing and vote on the state's execution protocols.

"We are going to take it up in some way, shape, or form, I expect, over the next month," Pinsky said.

Capital punishment has been on hold since the state's highest court ruled in late 2006 that the committee hadn't properly approved Maryland's lethal injection protocols.

Pinsky said on the Senate floor that he had spoken to the panel's other co-chair, Delegate Anne Healey, D-Prince George's, and that there would be a committee meeting later this month or early next month on a "controversial issue before us." Pinsky said in an interview after session that the death penalty protocols are the other issue.

Pinsky and Healey oppose the death penalty.

Gov. Martin O'Malley, also a death penalty opponent, submitted new protocols for review in June 2009. They came after legislation he backed to repeal capital punishment failed. The committee, however, found several flaws with the proposal, including a lack of detailed medical training requirements for executioners to ensure the state doesn't have a failed lethal injection attempt. Healey and Pinsky asked for more details.

The O'Malley administration submitted protocols again in November, after time on the first proposed changes expired without panel action.

The Washington Post's John Wagner reported, "Md. again looking at death penalty," in the paper's Sunday edition.

Maryland lawmakers, who during Gov. Martin O'Malley's first term repeatedly debated whether to abolish the death penalty, are wrestling with a far different proposition at the outset of his second: whether to start using it again.

Maryland Senate President Thomas V. Mike Miller Jr. (D-Calvert) said he will push for action in coming weeks on regulations needed to resume executions in the state.

Use of the death penalty was halted by the state's highest court in December 2006, the month before O'Malley (D) took office, pending new regulations from the administration spelling out procedures for lethal injection and other issues.

O'Malley instead lobbied the legislature to repeal capital punishment, waiting until 2009 - after those efforts fell short for a third year in a row - to propose new regulations. A legislative review panel headed by two Democrats opposed to capital punishment has yet to take action on the proposal, which they say is flawed.

"To allow this to continue to sit in the drawer is to make a mockery of the democratic and legislative process," Miller, a capital punishment supporter, said in an interview last week. "We swear to uphold the law of the state, and the death penalty is the law."

O'Malley said he, too, thinks the legislative panel "should do something one way or another on this" and acknowledged it is possible that executions could resume during his second four-year term, which starts Wednesday.

And:

Although the legislature stopped short of repealing the death penalty in 2009, it passed a bill tightening evidentiary standards in capital cases.

To be eligible for the death penalty, there must be biological or DNA evidence, a videotaped confession or a videotape linking the defendant to the crime. If the standards are not met, prosecutors can seek life without parole.

Zirkin, who helped craft the compromise, said in an interview last week that he sees no reason to revisit that.

"I think what we did is very good," he said. "I think what we did should be a model for other states."

Earlier coverage of lethal injection regulations in Maryland, at the link.

Repeal News Coverage From Illinois

The National Law Journal reports, "The death knell for capital punishment? Will Illinois' effort to end capital punishment help kill the death penalty nationally?" It's by Tony Mauro.

Until a month ago, Chicago lawyer and best-selling author Scott Turow chalked up the chatter about repealing Illinois' death penalty to "the eternal optimism of the abolitionists that they were 'close.' "Then a legislator asked Turow, a partner at SNR Denton and a death penalty critic himself, to call other lawmakers. "In one of those conversations, I realized this actually might occur," Turow said.

It might very well. On Jan. 11, the Illinois Senate passed a repeal measure by a 35-22 vote, five days after the state house approved the measure, 60-54. Gov. Pat Quinn, a Democrat, is weighing whether to sign or veto the bill, with his timetable and ultimate decision uncertain. But death penalty opponents are already allowing themselves to contemplate that a major

"This is the state people were watching for a long time," said Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes capital punishment. "It's a turning-point state. It's not the South, but not New England either. It's middle America."

And:

But the news from Illinois is crucially important nonetheless, said Shari Silberstein, executive director of Equal Justice USA, a grassroots group against the death penalty. "Illinois was in many ways a catalyst for changing the conversation about the death penalty" nationwide, she said.

For the past decade, most of the arguments in the death penalty debate have played themselves out in Illinois. In 2000, Gov. George Ryan declared a moratorium on executions, humbled by the number of death row inmates who were being freed on new evidence of innocence — much of it dug up by students at Northwestern University. Two commissions looked at the capital punishment system, and the legislature enacted reforms. But exonerations continued, and now the legislature has, in effect, thrown up its hands.

"Illinois tried to make the system work, and decided it could not be fixed," Silberstein said. If that is the lesson drawn from Illinois' actions, she said, then other states may also decide the death penalty is not worth saving.

Other factors were at work in Illinois as well, Turow said. "With the state $15 billion in debt, we simply can't afford a remedy with no proven benefit that can double or triple the cost of prosecution."

The higher litigation costs caused by lengthy death penalty appeals have enabled legislators in other states as well to frame it as a practical, economic issue and to avoid the moral dimensions.

In addition, Turow said, the Illinois murder rate has dropped since the moratorium, "putting the lie to the canard that the death penalty is a general deterrent." He added, "The voting public seems to have realized that there is no magic about having a death penalty. The world does not seem any worse" without it.

Jenner & Block litigation co-chairman David Bradford, who has represented Illinois inmates with innocence claims, agreed that "the sky has not fallen," crediting the moratorium as helpful in getting legislators to vote for repeal. But the drumbeat of innocence claims and exonerations may have been the most powerful factor, said Bradford, who is also counsel to the Roderick MacArthur Justice Center, which litigates and speaks out against the death penalty.

"The economics of it are secondary to the fact that there are so many innocent people on death row," Bradford said.

The Chicago Tribune carries an AP report, "Illinois death penalty decision leaves uncertainty," by  Karen Hawkins.

Quinn's decision could come any time after the law is certified by the General Assembly, and he's being lobbied hard by death penalty opponents, prosecutors and victim's rights groups. The situation has created a period of uncertainty for prosecutors and defense attorneys with pending death penalty cases, as well as those on death row.

Chicago's suburban Daily Herald reports, "Falsely accused fathers urge mandatory DNA testing, death penalty repeal," by Barbara Vitello.

The most terrible of accusations united Jerry Hobbs and Kevin Fox, and the most fundamental scientific evidence exonerated them.

Hobbs, formerly of Zion, was charged with the 2005 murder of his 8-year-old daughter, Laura, and her 9-year-old friend Krystal Tobias. Fox, of Wilmington, was charged with the 2004 death of his 3-year-old daughter, Riley.

And:

DNA testing eventually cleared both men. Hobbs was released last year after spending five years in a Lake County jail while Fox was released from his Will County cell after eight months in custody.

On Friday, the men met for the first time at the Oak Brook office of their attorney, Kathleen Zellner. United in a common cause, they expressed their support for the repeal of Illinois' death penalty and to advocate for mandatory DNA testing they say would ensure that no one else endures a false accusation and incarceration.

Earlier Illinois coverage begins with the preceding post

In Illinois, Calls for Governor to Sign Repeal

"Gov. Quinn should empty Death Row," is the title of an editorial in today's Chicago Sun-Times.

If Gov. Quinn signs the bill that would abolish Illinois’ death penalty, what happens to the 15 men already on Death Row and perhaps others whose cases are working their way through the system?

Those cases wouldn’t be derailed by the new law, which would go into effect July 1, but Quinn would be wise to follow the lead of New Jersey’s governor when that state abolished the death penalty in 2007 — commute every existing death sentence to life in prison without parole.

One of the most damning criticisms of the death penalty is that it is arbitrary; some people are dispatched to Death Row and executed while others who commit similar crimes are not. That was a primary reason the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972 overturned all death sentences and told states to revise their laws.

But the new laws proved to be no less capricious. The last man to be executed in Illinois was Andrew Kokoraleis in 1999, who participated with three other men in gruesome murders of women. But the alleged ringleader of that group was sentenced to 120 years.

If Quinn fails to act, Illinois could well embark on a new era of disparate justice. People who were sentenced before 2003 — when former Gov. George Ryan commuted all death sentences — or who committed their crimes after July 1 of this year would be immune from capital punishment, while those sentenced in between still could be executed if Quinn or some future governor allows the state’s current moratorium on executions to lapse.

That level of arbitrariness can’t be permitted in a civil society.

Attorney, author, Illinois resident Andrea Lyon posts, "Governor Quinn: Sign the Abolition Bill," at Huffington Post.

After over thirty years defending death cases in Illinois, I never thought I would see this day: the Illinois Senate joined the House in voting to repeal the state's death penalty and re-allocate funds remaining in the Capital Litigation Trust Fund to a fund for murder victims, services and law enforcement. This will become the law if Governor Quinn signs the bill, and he should.

And:

As to deterrence, well, that simply doesn't happen. It might seem that the prospect of receiving a death sentence would deter would-be murderers from committing such offenses. However, many studies on deterrence and the death penalty do not support this idea, nor does the rate of murders in states with the death penalty. The murder rate in states that do not have the death penalty is consistently lower than in states with the death penalty. The South, which carries out over 80% of the executions in the United States, has the highest murder rate of the four regions. If you think about it, this makes sense: A person who is likely to commit a violent act is not the sort of person who does a cost benefit analysis. These crimes tend to be impulsive, or, as we have seen this week, the product of mental illness -- and as Pima County Sheriff Clarence Dupnik has said, a climate of violent divisive rhetoric.

I have written before about the difficulty in defending death cases. I won't reiterate those points here, but I will say this; the people have spoken, and this bill should be signed as soon as possible. Let us spend our precious resources on crime prevention, adequate policing, and community development and seek peace.

Abolishing the death penalty is good for citizens of Illinois, good for our budget, good for families of victims and good for our court system. It may even make our state safer.

Sign the bill now, Governor Quinn.

The Peoria Journal Star carries an OpEd, "In the Spotlight: Repealing death penalty is being smart on crime."  It's by Donald R. Jackson, President of the NAACP Illinois State Conference.

Illinois’ Legislature has passed Senate Bill 3539 to not only repeal the state’s broken death penalty but also to promote community safety by using the funds set aside for the Capital Litigation Trust Fund to provide assistance to victims’ families and training for law enforcement officials.

And:

One of the sectors that has suffered as a result of the economic crisis is law enforcement. In 2010, jurisdictions across the state downsized their police departments in order to meet budget restrictions. Last year, Peoria laid off more than 30 police officers, while the state battled with a budget that put the jobs of some 400 state troopers at risk.

Money saved by eliminating the death penalty could be used to boost law enforcement. They are first responders with the proven ability to deter crimes.

Retired federal judge H. Lee Sarokin, another regular contributor to Huffington Post, has written, "Is It Time to Execute the Death Penalty?"

I want to see the Tucson shooter suffer pain, be killed, executed. I feel the same way about the persons who raped and murdered that family in Connecticut. I am certain we could all list persons who committed outrageous and despicable crimes that we would want executed. Many of us want revenge, retribution and the ultimate punishment in those cases, but, nonetheless, I am opposed to the death penalty. The discussion is relevant now because Governor Pat Quinn has it within his power to end the death penalty in Illinois.

The arguments for and against have raged for years, but here is my personal view:

And:

Exonerations: However, the most compelling argument for me is the fact that we have executed innocent persons and others are scheduled for execution and others undoubtedly will be in the future. Thanks to the Medill Innocence Project and others like it, and persons like Barry Scheck and his work with DNA, innocent persons have been snatched from lethal injections or other forms of execution, sometimes just moments before they were to die. If none of the forgoing arguments are persuasive, this should and must carry the day. If we permit innocent people to be executed are we any better than the man who took that little girl's life in Tucson. I suppose one could argue that the comparison is not apt because he was acting knowingly and intentionally in killing an innocent person, and the state is not, but in both cases the victims would be innocent and that is something no civilized nation should allow or tolerate.

Be brave Gov. Quinn! Sign the bill. The time has come to execute the death penalty!

Earlier coverage of the Illinois repeal legislation is at the link.

U.S. Senator Dick Durbin on the Death Penalty

Today's State Journal-Register of Springfield, Illinois reports, "Durbin changes stance on death penalty."  It's written by Bernard Schoenburg.

U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin, the second-ranking member of the U.S. Senate, said Monday he has come to believe that states should not impose the death penalty.

However, he said he doesn’t want to abolish all federal authority to employ capital punishment.

“When it comes to those national crimes involving terrorism, treason, which endanger the lives of many Americans, those, I think, should be the compelling exceptions,” Durbin said.

Following a breakfast Durbin attended in Springfield to honor Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., he told The State Journal-Register he has always supported the death penalty, but also believed “we have to be very careful to avoid discrimination.”

The Springfield Democrat said that, in the process of examining the issue over the years, including his role as a senator in questioning nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court, he has also noted the views of the late Justice Harry Blackmun and newly retired Justice John Paul Stevens, both of whom came to believe the death penalty could not be administered fairly.

“They both at the end of their careers came to the same conclusion,” Durbin said, “that after a lifetime of supporting the death penalty and trying to make it fair, that we had largely failed as a nation, and I cannot escape their wisdom on this issue. I really believe that on reflection, the burden is now on those supporting the death penalty to prove its fairness.”

“Life in prison is penalty enough,” Durbin added. “I believe that we have to bring an end to the death penalty.”

And:

Last week, the Illinois General Assembly sent Gov. Pat Quinn a bill to end the death penalty for future cases in Illinois. Durbin said he is not telling fellow Democrat Quinn what action to take.

“I will not lobby him, because I think it’s a matter of conscience,” Durbin said. “But I believe that we should put an end to the death penalty.”

You can listen to Durbin's comments about the death penalty at the link.  You can also look at earlier coverage on the Illinois Legislature's repeal votes.