Judy Woodruff talked to Richard Dieter of the Death Penalty Information Center and Jeff Middendorf of the State of Kentucky's Justice and Public Safety Cabinet about recent lethal injection developments on last night's News Hour on PBS. The transcript and a link to streaming audio and video is here.
Doug Berman at Sentencing Law and Policy also highlights a WashingtonPost.com column by Andrew Cohen, "The Big Needle Stops Dripping."
Memo to Florida officials: Save your time and effort and money. Do not reinvent the wheel. Read and absorb the transcript of the lengthy and painstaking evidentiary hearing conducted earlier this year by Judge Fogel in the California case. And then implement the same changes that the judge has ordered California officials to implement before he will again allow executions in that state. It's clear what happened to Diaz. People who have no business executing someone were in charge of executing someone. And those people will screw up again if they are allowed to persist without proper oversight and regulation.
Golden State officials, too, would be wise to spend their energy now on implementing the judge's recommendations rather than continuing to fight this losing battle out in the federal appeals court system. After Diaz, and after California's lethal injection protocols have been laid bare by Judge Fogel's withering scrutiny, there is nothing left in law or equity to defend about those protocols. The fastest way to gear up the death penalty machine in both places (if that's the goal) is for these officials to accept responsibility for how bad things have gotten, fix the problems, and come back with new procedures that do not violate the "cruel and unusual" punishment clause of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. Governor Schwarzenegger suggested as much on Monday and that's a good thing.
Jurist has this post, including:
Last month, a judge in Kentucky ordered the state to hold public hearings [JURIST report] on changing the Kentucky's lethal injection protocol. Inmates in Missouri and South Dakota [JURIST reports] have also successfully challenged lethal injection methods.
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