Today's Lexington Herald-Leader carries the OpEd, "Suspend state's death penalty lottery." It's by Ernie Lewis, the former Kentucky public advocate, now with the Kentucky Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
When I became Kentucky's public advocate in 1996, one of the first things I did was to call on policy makers to follow the American Bar Association's call for a moratorium on executions. I'd been a public defender for 19 years and, after handling numerous capital cases, had seen firsthand that the death penalty was broken beyond repair.
In 12 years as public advocate, everything I saw reinforced that view. I saw the death penalty was being used against the poor, people with mental retardation and mental illness, as well as people of color. I saw that many lawyers defending capital defendants were not qualified and that the death penalty was used in some counties but not in others.
The problems with the death penalty are once again staring us in the face. A group of prominent Kentuckians, including two former Supreme Court justices, has spent the last two years conducting an in-depth study of how the death penalty works in our state.
What they found has to undermine significantly any confidence we have in this system of life and death.
And:
The Kentucky assessment team recommended "a temporary suspension of executions until the issues identified in this Report have been addressed and rectified."
Gov. Steve Beshear, Attorney General Jack Conway, and Kentucky legislators cannot ignore this report and continue down the road toward another execution. A moratorium should be declared immediately.
AP's Brett Barrouquere files, "Age catching up with Ky. death row population, state's prison medical bills rise." It's via the Republic. Here's the beginning of the report:
Randy Haight wakes every morning to sore hands and a creaking body. The 59-year-old blames the pain on arthritis — something that he describes as rampant at his home for the last 17 years — Kentucky's death row.
"It gets a lot of these guys," Haight told The Associated Press in an interview at the prison in Eddyville.
Other than the recreation time, Haight and the 33 other men housed in the Kentucky State Penitentiary's unit for condemned inmates spend their days in cells that are 6 1/2-feet wide, 13-feet long, and 12-feet high. It's a forced lifestyle that, inmates and experts say, has accelerated age-related health problems for the condemned population — causing hands to ache, knees to pop and hips to degenerate.
Kentucky's 35 death row inmates (including one woman held in a different prison) are an average age of just more than 50 years old — an average of 14 years older than the 23,000 inmates in the Kentucky prison system. Condemned inmates have waited more than 16 years for execution, three years longer than the average prison sentence in the state, and 15 have been on death row for two decades or more.
All that time has been spent living a sedentary life in close quarters in a setting that doesn't change much.
"They don't get any kind of stimulus," said Ronald Aday, a sociology professor at Middle Tennessee State University who has studied death row inmates. "They're aging in place with very little interaction."
Some states are using hospices or medical parole to tackle the aging inmate population. Across the country, Human Rights Watch found, 8 percent of the prison population in 2010 was 55 or older, compared to 3 percent in 1995. That's not an option for inmate sentenced to die in Kentucky, so the state is left housing them and paying increasing medical expenses.
While the state doesn't keep separate statistics for the death row population, medical expenses for the Department of Corrections have risen each year since 2008, from $49.1 million that year to $54.8 million in fiscal year 2011. Corrections Department spokeswoman Lisa Lamb said death row inmates get the same level of care as the other 23,000 inmates in state custody — regular access to doctors and medications when necessary.
Earlier coverage from Kentucky begins at the link.
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