With the firing squad execution of Ronnie Lee Gardner, the death penalty is getting a great deal of attention in Utah.
Earlier this morning, Jennifer Dobner posted, "Clemency decision expected from UT parole board," for AP, via Google News.
A Utah parole board will decide Monday whether to grant clemency to a condemned Utah inmate scheduled to be executed by firing squad.
The last time Utah granted clemency to a condemned man was in 1962.
Convicted killer Ronnie Lee Gardner's execution is set for Friday.
At a two-day commutation hearing last week, the five-member Utah Board of Pardons and Parole heard nearly eight hours of testimony about Gardner's troubled life and history of violent crime.
For more than two hours, they questioned Gardner and heard about his plans for an organic farm and residential program for at-risk youth. He said he believes he could help young people avoid making the kind of mistakes that landed him on death row.
"There's no better example in this state of what not to do," Gardner told the board.
Gardner, was convicted of capital murder and sentenced to die in 1985 for the fatal courthouse shooting of attorney Michael Burdell earlier that year. The shooting came during a botched escape attempt Gardner had planned over several months with an accomplice. He was in court that day to face murder charges for the 1984 shooting death of bartender Melvyn Otterstrom.
Burdell's family opposes the death penalty and has asked the board to spare Gardner's life. The Otterstrom family, and relatives of a bailiff, George "Nick" Kirk, who was shot and seriously injured during the courthouse incident, lobbied against a reduced sentence of life in prison without parole.
Gardner expressed his remorse and said he's spent much of the last 10 years learning to overcome a dysfunctional family situation riddled with physical abuse and drug use.
State attorneys say Gardner's history of relentless violence earned him his death sentence. Assistant Utah Attorney General Thomas Brunker contends that the sentence — which has been upheld in the past by state and federal appeals courts — is fair and should be carried out.
The Salt Lake Tribune has published a string of lengthy articles in the past days. First, Pamela Manson's report, "Money driving capital punishment debate," from this morning's paper.
In the end, the heated debate over the death penalty might come down to cold, hard cash.
With studies estimating a death penalty case costs two to four times more than other homicide prosecutions, some are proposing an end to capital punishment to save money.
San Francisco lawyer Natasha Minsker, death penalty policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, said her financially struggling state spends $125 million a year to maintain its death row of about 700 inmates, paying $90 a day per inmate versus $34 for the general population. Since capital punishment was reinstated in 1976, the state has executed only 13 of the condemned.
A switch to permanent imprisonment, Minsker argues, would free up funds to investigate unsolved murders.
"There is no evidence that [the death penalty] deters murders," she said. "What does deter murders is catching killers and taking them off the streets."
Utahns for Alternatives to the Death Penalty also points to studies showing additional litigation costs and housing expenses amounted to $4.2 million per death sentence in New Jersey and $4.26 million per execution in Kansas. In Maryland, the Urban Institute reported capital cases cost $2 million more to litigate than non-capital murder cases.
In Utah, it's hard to pin down the exact costs; there have been no studies.
But the capital trial defense costs of Troy Michael Kell and a co-defendant for the 1994 slaying of a fellow prison inmate -- between $300,000 and $350,000 -- put Sanpete County in such a financial bind that lawmakers intervened. A trust fund supported by state tax dollars and small property-tax increases now helps participating counties cover capital case expenses.
Kell got a death sentence; his co-defendant got life.
The expenses keep mounting
The complexity of death-penalty law accounts for much of the expense. A defendant must have two experienced lawyers and two trials -- one to determine guilt and the second to decide a sentence.
Defense attorneys must gather a greater level of information about their client -- every school, medical, court, jail and social service record -- and interview relatives, friends, teachers, doctors, employers and anyone else who could help. Jury selection takes longer because jurors must be willing to impose a death sentence. The trial itself has higher expenses for scientific testing and expert witnesses and takes longer.
Information presented to jurors in the penalty phase is "very broad and very deep," according to professor David Dow of the University of Houston Law Center, who also is litigation director of a nonprofit group that helps lawyers represent capital defendants. Dow says a death-penalty trial in Texas can cost $500,000 on the defense side alone, a price tag that has led some prosecutors to forgo capital charges.
Few facing death have money to hire a lawyer or are usually broke by the time they begin appeals, leaving taxpayers to foot the bill. Successful appeals add to the costs. Anna Acreneaux, staff attorney with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project in Durham, N.C., said one study showed that 68 percent of convictions or sentences are overturned because of a serious legal error.
On Sunday, the Tribune has, "Firing squads, lethal injection and the human body," by Kirsten Stewart.
Though terribly botched, the 1879 execution was an anomaly. Most firing squads -- by choice or default, the most popular means of execution in Utah -- have been fast and flawless. Only one other time, in 1951, did shooters miss their mark, leaving the condemned to bleed to death.
If all goes as rehearsed with modern-day law enforcement sharpshooters and the condemned strapped to a chair, the shredding of the heart and lungs by four .30-caliber slugs causes an almost immediate loss of consciousness, said Utah Medical Examiner Todd Grey. Only a shot to the head, rejected for disfiguring the body, would be more lethal, "almost instantaneous,"he said.
Lethal injection, by comparison, is slow and has been more error-prone. It's more expensive, complicated and ethically troublesome for the medical community, leading a pediatrician in Ohio to question the popular assumption that it's more humane.
"I'm personally opposed to capital punishment," said Jonathan Groner, associate professor of surgery at Ohio State University and the director of Trauma Programs at Ohio's Children's Hospital. But "in terms of duration and dependability, the firing squad wins."
Utah lawmakers abandoned the firing squad in 2004, responding to the public's growing distaste for an execution method perceived as a bloody throwback to the Wild West.
Some death row inmates, like Ronnie Lee Gardner -- sentenced to die June 18 by firing squad -- could choose to be grandfathered in. But the method in vogue now, and for the foreseeable future, is lethal injection.
Borrowing from anesthesiology, lethal injection has "medicalized" the process, making it more sterile, distant and publicly palatable, Utah death penalty observer and Weber State University professor Kay Gillespie writes in The Unforgiven: Utah's Executed Men.
"Even the terminology -- gurney, solution, IV -- sounds more like an operation than an execution, more like a surgical procedure than a sentence of the justice system," he said.
There are variations, but in Utah, lethal injection involves strapping an inmate onto a gurney and inserting an IV, or intravenous line, into each arm. An anesthetic, sodium thiopental, is given at massive doses to extinguish consciousness. Then flows a paralytic agent, which stops the inmate's breathing, followed by a fatal dose of potassium chloride, which stops the heart.
Saturday's Tribune carried, "Capital punishment debate renewed: What society demands," by Christopher Smart.
Is it fair?
The U.S. Supreme Court halted capital punishment in 1972, convinced the penalty had been arbitrarily applied in the case of Henry Furman, who shot a Georgia homeowner during a burglary. The same concern will end the practice again, opponents maintain.
They say one well-known Utah case -- that of Dan and Ron Lafferty -- highlights the uneven way the death sentence is applied.
The brothers were convicted of the July 24, 1984, homicides of Brenda Lafferty, their sister-in-law, and her 15-month-old daughter, Erica, in American Fork. Ron Lafferty awaits execution; his brother is serving two life terms in prison.
The brothers, who believed themselves to be prophets, saw Brenda standing in the way of their evolving belief system and were convinced God had commanded the deaths.
They were tried separately. Unlike Ron, Dan represented himself at trial. Two jurors refused to give Dan the death penalty, although he claimed it was he who slit the victims' throats.
"The law is not very good at specifying who should live and who should die," argues Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor at University of California at Berkeley.
Zimring was among those who recently convinced the American Law Institute -- an association of about 4,000 lawyers, professors and judges -- to abandon its support of the death penalty based on arbitrary application.
The American Law Institute was the force that led the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976 to reinstate the death penalty in Gregg v. Georgia. The group established a legal framework of aggravating and mitigating factors to standardize the death penalty.
Without the backing of the professional organization, the death penalty has lost its "intellectual underpinnings," said Roger S. Clark, a law professor at Rutgers University.
"We have to compare crimes and criminals, and we just can't do it very well," he said. "The jury makes the call, but the criteria [upon which they make their decision] doesn't make sense."
The Canadian magazine Macleans reports, "‘I would like the firing squad please. There are no mistakes.’,"written by Rachel Mendleson.
Since lethal injection was first introduced in the late 1970s, it has become the primary execution method in all of the 35 states that still have the death penalty. But in several jurisdictions, those sentenced to death can choose something more primitive: in California, for instance, the condemned can opt for the gas chamber; in Washington state, they can elect to be hanged. The macabre firing squad, however, is the rarest. In 2004, Utah, one of the only states to have ever had it on the books, removed it as an option for all those sentenced to death thereafter. (It’s the fallback method in Oklahoma if lethal injection is deemed unconstitutional.) But for those condemned prior to the change, the firing squad is still on offer—and is proving to be a surprisingly popular choice. Including Gardner, five of the 10 men on Utah’s death row have chosen to die by gunfire.
As most Utahns understand it, the firing squad has its roots in the state’s territorial past, and “blood atonement,” a radical 19th-century Mormon concept believed to have required repentance through the spilling of one’s own blood. (The Mormon Church denies propagating this teaching, maintaining that the “atonement of Jesus Christ . . . makes forgiveness of sin and salvation possible for all people.”) But choosing the firing squad, at least in more modern times, appears to have very little to do with religion. As death penalty opponent Dee Rowland, who represents the Catholic diocese, told the Salt Lake Tribune, death by firing squad “enables [the condemned] to go out in a literal blaze of glory.”
This perception is due, in large part, to the legacy of Gary Gilmore, whose now-infamous 1977 firing-squad execution was the first death sentence carried out in the U.S. in a decade. (Capital punishment was temporarily outlawed after the Supreme Court deemed it unconstitutional.) At the time, Utah gave the condemned a choice between firing squad or hanging; he chose the former, “because he thought it was a better way to go out than dangling at the end of a rope,” says Michael Esplin, the Utah defence attorney who represented him. The notoriety he gained, however, had more to do with his bravado: though he hadn’t exhausted his appeals, he chose to forge ahead to execution. “He wasn’t going to show fear,” says Esplin. “He was very macho to the end.”
Nearly two decades passed before Utah rounded up the firing squad again. By then, Gilmore’s story had been immortalized in popular culture (Norman Mailer’s book, The Executioner’s Song, won a Pulitzer). Meanwhile, the widespread adoption of lethal injection, a decidedly more clinical method, increased the perception of the firing squad as a relic of Old West-style justice. No fewer than 150 camera crews descended on Utah for the 1996 execution of John Albert Taylor, a child-killer who’d chosen gunfire over injection, which had by then replaced hanging as the other option offered to the condemned, because, a reporter recalls him saying, he didn’t want to “lay on the table and flip around like a fish out of water.” (The international attention prompted Utah legislators to amend the law.)
Earlier coverage of the Gardner case begins with the preceding post.
Comments