Sentencing Law and Policy

Noting that nearly all Democratic candidates are against the death penalty

This lengthy new San Francisco Chronicle article, headlined "Nearly all Democratic candidates oppose death penalty as public opinion shifts," reports on the new political reality surrounding death penalty view of leading candidates.  Here are excerpts:

Not so long ago, opposing the death penalty was pretty much a death knell for a presidential candidate.  Michael Dukakis, for one, sank his remaining hopes in 1988 when he told a debate questioner he would oppose execution even for someone who had raped and murdered his wife.

Now, in what appears to be another sign of a public turnabout on the issue, nearly all of the Democratic presidential hopefuls — with the notable exception of former Vice President Joe Biden — say they are against capital punishment....

If candidates “thought they were going to hurt themselves by coming out against the death penalty, I really think very few would do it,” said Jessica Levinson, a professor at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles who specializes in election law and governance.  “I think the consensus (among candidates) is, this is where public opinion is or is about to be.”

Opinion polls indicate a decline in nationwide support for the death penalty, from 80% in a 1994 Gallup survey to 56% in October 2018.  A Quinnipiac University poll in March 2018 found that respondents favored life without parole over the death penalty for murder by 51% to 37%. And the polls say Democrats, who will vote in next year’s primaries, are more than three times as likely as Republicans to oppose the death penalty.

The president ... has direct authority over only the federal death penalty, which accounts for a fraction of the more than 2,700 death sentences now pending in the United States, including 735 in California.

Condemned federal prisoners include a few notorious cases — like Tsarnaev and Dylann Roof, the white supremacist who slaughtered nine African Americans at a South Carolina church in 2015 — but most of the 62 were convicted of murders that came under federal jurisdiction because they took place in federal prisons or other U.S. property or were connected to federal drug crimes.  The last federal execution took place in 2003.

Somewhat relatedly, Nicholas Kristof has this lengthy essay in the New York Times proving arguments for death penalty opposition unde the headline "When We Kill: Everything you think you know about the death penalty is wrong."

"The Myth of Bipartisan Death Penalty Abolitionism"

The title of this post is the headline of this notable recent commentary by Charles Fain Lehman at the Washington Free Beacon. I recommend the whole piece, which is a response in part to a recent Atlantic commentary noted here.  Here is how Lehman's piece starts and ends (with links from the original):

Did you know that Republicans are "quietly turning against the death penalty"?  So sayeth the Atlantic, in a lengthy story published Sunday in the wake of New Hampshire's abolition of the death penalty.  Sunday's article is just the latest in "conservatives who oppose the death penalty" coverage.  Google some combination of "death penalty," "conservative," and "oppose" and you will find similar stories from outlets like the Guardian, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.

The Atlantic piece neatly summarized the tenor of such stories: "death-penalty reform has quietly broken through as a bipartisan issue — one that could portend a shaky future for capital punishment in the U.S."

The basis of this argument is that a handful of Republican state legislators have authored or signed on to legislative proposals to end the death penalty.  But the implication is that conservatives are slowly but steadily getting in line behind the liberal consensus against the death penalty.  That's total nonsense.  Let's look at the data.

The General Social Survey, a major survey of public opinion administered by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, has routinely asked respondents about their views on the death penalty since 1974; it also tracks respondents' political views.  The results are pretty clear: Roughly three in four conservatives support the death penalty, and have done so at at least that rate since the 1970s....

To be sure, there are self-identified conservatives who oppose the death penalty, in much the same way that there are self-identified conservatives who call themselves pro-choice or reject the right to keep and bear arms.  But the survey data show that abolition has been and remains a clear minority view, among conservatives and indeed among Americans generally.

Why, then, does the mainstream media keep pushing the narrative that there is some emerging conservative consensus against the death penalty?  Why do they keep regurgitating the talking points of the same few advocates?  (The Atlantic article conspicuously lacks a quote from any expert who represents the majority of Americans who support the death penalty.)

On this we can only speculate.  But one thing is clear: When it comes to the death penalty, most of the media is on one side, and most conservatives — indeed the majority of Americans — are on the other.

Interesting new data on declining capital habeas petitions in federal court

The folks at TRAC recently produced this interesting little data report under the heading "Death Penalty Prisoner Petitions Fall Sharply."  Here is part of the text:

The latest available data from the federal courts show that during April 2019 the government reported only 5 new prisoner petitions challenging their death penalty sentence. According to the case-by-case court records analyzed by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University, there were just 62 death penalty challenges for the first seven months of FY 2019.  They have fallen over fifty percent (51.6%) over the last two years. Petitions are on pace to be the lowest number filed in over a decade.

The comparisons of the number of civil filings for death penalty-related suits are based on case- by-case federal court records which were compiled and analyzed by TRAC...  Since FY 2008, death penalty petitions reached a peak during FY 2009 when they totaled 245. The previous low was five years ago in FY 2014 when they fell to 162. If the current pace of filings continues during the remaining months of FY 2019, filings are projected to be only slight above one hundred this year.

Absent some other data or distinctive explanation, this seems like a pipeline story: in the 198-s and 1990s, there were lots of state death sentences imposed, resulting in lots of capital habeas challenges reaching the federal courts decades later. In years, the number of state death sentences have declined (see DPIC data here), meaning that the number of subsequent federal habeas challenges have declined.

SCOTUS grants cert in new capital case from Arizona concerning death sentence review procedures

The Supreme Court's new order list this morning includes new cert grants in five cases, one of which will interest sentencing fans.  Specifically, McKinney v. Arizona, No. 18-1109, involves questions of how a death sentence is to be reviewed.  SCOTUSblog coverage of the case has all the cert stage briefs linked (including a number of amici briefs), and here is the Questions Presented from the cert petition:

1. Whether the Arizona Supreme Court was required to apply current law when weighing mitigating and aggravating evidence to determine whether a death sentence is warranted.

2. Whether the correction of error under Eddings v. Oklahoma, 455 U.S. 104 (1982), requires resentencing.

And here is how Arizona's brief in opposition describes the issues in the case:

1. Whether the Arizona Supreme Court erred in concluding that, because Petitioner’s convictions and sentences on two counts of first-degree murder became final several years before this Court decided Ring v. Arizona, 536 U.S. 584 (2002), that Ring did not apply to Petitioner.

2. Whether the Arizona Supreme Court erred in conducting an independent review of Petitioner’s death sentences.

Any Supreme Court decision about how Ring claims are to be sorted through on appeal should impact not only death sentence in Arizona, but also in Florida and perhaps a few other states. So McKinney could end up a pretty big deal.

Has death penalty reform "quietly broken through as a bipartisan issue"?

About four years ago, I asked in this 2015 post "Is there really a "growing conservative movement" that will create "bipartisan coalition opposing" the death penalty?".  That post was prompted by a commentary noting various anti-death penalty movements in various red states.  This new Atlantic piece, headlined "GOP Lawmakers Are Quietly Turning Against the Death Penalty," is written in this same spirit and inspired by the repeal of the death penalty in New Hampshire.  Here are excerpts:

Though law-and-order conservatives have long championed the death penalty, New Hampshire is one of a growing number of states where Republicans ... are joining Democrats to push for a ban.  Last week, New Hampshire became the 21st state to outlaw capital punishment, one of 11 states this year — including GOP strongholds such as Kansas, Wyoming, Kentucky, and Missouri — where Republican lawmakers have sponsored bills to end the practice.  The movement is the result of several political factors, including Republican and Democratic concern over the country’s criminal-justice system.  But it’s also been motivated by lawmakers’ personal experiences....  Death-penalty reform has quietly broken through as a bipartisan issue — one that could portend a shaky future for capital punishment in the U.S.

Lawmakers in New Hampshire had tried and failed to outlaw the death penalty for two decades.  In 2018, they got close: The GOP-controlled state legislature passed a repeal bill, though it didn’t have enough votes to override Republican Governor Chris Sununu’s quick veto.  This year was different.  A repeal bill, co-sponsored by Welch, passed both chambers with just enough bipartisan support to narrowly best the governor.

Of course, many Republican state lawmakers — not to mention the president — still support the death penalty.  So does their base: A 2018 Pew Research Center poll found that three-quarters of Republican voters favor capital punishment, compared with just 35 percent of Democrats.  And the overwhelming majority of executions take place in red states: Of the 25 prisoners put to death in the United States last year, 13 were in Texas alone.  Democrats still continue to lead the charge to abolish the death penalty throughout the country, and starting in 2016, the national party included it in its official platform.  Nevertheless, like other states, New Hampshire wouldn’t have been successful without the support of dozens of Republicans in the legislature....

It wasn’t always this way.  Politicians from both parties have historically used the death penalty as a wedge issue to show that they were “tough on crime,” says Robert Dunham, the executive director of the nonpartisan Death Penalty Information Center.  A rise in the number of executions in the 1990s coincided with a push toward mass incarceration. While calls for reform escalated in the 2000s, as late as 2008, the then–presidential candidate Barack Obama voiced his disagreement with a Supreme Court ruling limiting the use of the death penalty in Louisiana.

One significant reason the tide has started to shift is the rise in conservative support for criminal-justice reform in the past few years.  Conservative groups such as Right on Crime and the Charles Koch Institute have advocated for reforms, including the First Step Act, a bipartisan bill President Donald Trump signed into law in late 2018 that changed some sentencing laws and targeted recidivism....

“As conservatives, we know the government’s flawed. We hate the government,” says Hannah Cox, the national manager of the advocacy group Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. “Why would we give it power over life and death?”...

Overall, the opposition to the death penalty among Republicans represents a genuine, if slim, fault line in the party, one that could grow in parallel with concerns about the criminal-justice system as a whole. State lawmakers seem like the ones to watch: From 2000 to 2016, the number of GOP legislators sponsoring death-penalty-repeal bills increased by more than a factor of 10, according to Cox’s group. Repeal efforts have made it strikingly far in some conservative states. In February, Wyoming’s repeal bill passed the House and came within seven votes of passing the Senate. In Utah, a 2016 repeal effort passed the Senate but was just eight votes shy in the House. And in 2015, Nebraska lawmakers successfully overrode the governor’s veto to ban the death penalty, although it was later reinstated....

But for conservatives in New Hampshire who were key in getting death-penalty repeal past his veto, their concerns about capital punishment were too hard to ignore.  Bob Giuda, a Republican state senator, told me he also used to support the death penalty, but then slowly changed his mind.  “What do we accomplish by executing people?” he said.  “What statement do we make?” Giuda’s wife lives in a vegetative state, and he told me that he aspires to view all lives as equal, whether it’s his wife’s or Addison’s. “We don’t get to assign that value,” he said.

That type of deeply intimate answer may be why Republicans and Democrats in New Hampshire, and in other states, are joining together to scrap death-penalty laws, even as they remain deeply polarized on a whole set of other issues.  “I never hear, ‘Well, my caucus thinks’ or, ‘My party says,’” Hruska said. “It’s always a personal answer.”

"Recording the Pain of Others: Lethal Injection's Visibility Problem"

The title of this post is the title of this new piece authored by Christen Hammock and now available via SSRN, Here is its abstract:

In July 2011, Georgia executed Andrew DeYoung for murdering his parents and sister.  Pursuant to a motion to preserve evidence brought by counsel for Gregory Walker, another man on Georgia’s Death Row, DeYoung’s execution produced the only existing video of a lethal injection in the United States, which remains under seal in a Georgia courthouse.  This effort to record an execution reverses the historical trend of making executions less visible by bringing them inside prison walls and limiting eyewitnesses.  Unlike similar cases, the successful motion to preserve DeYoung’s execution and autopsy on video did not litigate the public’s right to see executions, but instead argued that visual evidence of a botched execution was necessary to support another condemned man’s Eighth Amendment claim.

This project evaluates this strategy’s assumption that video representation is less mediated and thus more effective and accurate as evidence than traditional eyewitness and expert testimony.  This evaluation proceeds by examining the rhetorical strategies used in death penalty abolition litigation and judicial opinions that have, in turn, upheld and struck down methods of capital punishment.  Part I examines lethal injection’s “invisibility problem” and argues that this problem stems from secrecy surrounding state execution protocols and the overwhelming metaphor of healing that lethal injection’s “weapons” project.  Part II explores a potential solution to this problem — creating visual records of lethal injections — using the litigation surrounding DeYoung’s execution as an example.

"How to Convince Americans to Abolish the Death Penalty"

The title of this post is the headline of this New Republic commentary authored by Austin Sarat. Here are excerpts:

When New Hampshire abolished the death penalty on Thursday, the reaction to the news — at least nationally — was rather muted.  Here was a New England state, after all, whose machinery of death had rusted long ago.  “This debate has been largely symbolic, because New Hampshire has neither an active death penalty system nor any executions on the horizon,” The Washington Post reported.  “The state has only one person on death row … and last carried out an execution in 1939.”...

But there is greater significance here than it seems.  For starters, New Hampshire joins a growing trend.  Now, since 2007, seven states have abolished capital punishment by legislative action, and three by judicial decree.  (Nebraska abolished it legislatively, but voters subsequently reinstated it in a referendum.)  Four other states have a moratorium in place preventing anyone from being executed.  This period has been one of the most successful in the modern history of death penalty abolitionism.

And the politics of New Hampshire are not those of, say, Massachusetts.... While the state Senate and House are both controlled by Democrats, they needed votes from across the aisle to reach the two-thirds threshold to override Republican Governor Chris Sununu.  There are thus important lessons from New Hampshire about how abolitionists can be successful across the country — namely, by shifting the grounds of the debate so as not to be painted as soft on crime or out of touch with mainstream American values....

Traditionally, opponents of the death penalty have responded to [soft-on-crime] arguments by claiming that even the most heinous criminals are entitled to be treated with dignity or that there is nothing that anyone can do to forfeit their “right to have rights.”  Each of these arguments rejects the simple and appealing rationale for capital punishment: retribution.  But in doing so, it puts opponents of the death penalty on the side of society’s most despised and notorious criminals, of cop killers and of child murderers.  It is not surprising, then, that such arguments, while popular in philosophical and political commentary, have never carried the day in the debate about capital punishment in the United States.

New Hampshire abolitionists avoided this pitfall, changing the argument in ways that can and do appeal to a broader range of citizens.  They allied themselves with the plight of the families of murder victims.  “I am grateful to the many survivors of murder victims who bravely shared their stories with the Legislature this session, many of whom told us that the death penalty, with its requisite long legal process, only prolongs the pain and trauma of their loss,” said Democratic Senator Martha Hennessey in explaining her vote to override the veto.

They also avoided the soft-on-crime label by noting that the death penalty does not make citizens safer and that it is “archaic, costly, discriminatory and violent.”  And they enlisted conservative allies.  As one New Hampshire abolitionist said, “more conservatives than ever know the death penalty is a failed government program that does not value life, threatens innocent people, and wastes money.”

The campaign to abolish capital punishment succeeded in New Hampshire, just as it has succeeded elsewhere, because abolitionists resisted the temptation to engage with the red meat arguments of many death penalty supporters.  They appealed to American values of fairness, equal treatment, and pragmatism.  In so doing, they formed a coalition of legislators, political leaders, and citizens who shared the late Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun’s view that it is time to “stop tinkering with the machinery of death.”

Prior related post:

• With legislative override of Gov veto, New Hampshire formally repeals its death penalty 

Alabama completes execution of Christopher Price seven weeks after delay based on dispute over execution methods

As reported in this prior post, Alabama was planning to execute Christopher Price seven weeks ago as punishment for his 1991 killing of a minister.  But the execution was called off that day because his death warrant expired before the Supreme Court vacated a lower court stay.  Tonight, as reported in this AP article, the execution was completed.  Here are the basics:

A man convicted of using a sword and knife to kill a country preacher during a 1991 robbery was put to death by lethal injection in Alabama on Thursday, weeks after he was initially scheduled to die. Christopher Lee Price, 46, became the second inmate put to death in Alabama in two weeks. The execution was carried out at Holman prison and he was pronounced dead at 7:31 p.m.

Price, who was nearly put to death in April before an execution warrant expired, sought a stay from the U.S. Supreme Court based on a challenge to the state's method of using three drugs during lethal injections. The nation's high court, by a 5-4 vote, refused to halt the execution Thursday night. The conservative majority did not give a reason for denying the stay.

Price had asked to instead die by nitrogen hypoxia, an execution method Alabama has legally authorized but not developed. His lawyers argued the method, which kills by depleting the body of oxygen, would be less painful than lethal injection.

Price sued the state over Alabama's current practices, and the inmate's attorneys contend the state is rushing to execute him two weeks before the trial date.... In a dissent Thursday, Justice Stephen Breyer wrote that the court should have delayed the execution until the trial could take place.

Justice Breyer's dissent from the denial of an execution stay, which was joined in full by Justice Ginsburg and in part by Justices Sotomayor and Kagan, is available at this link.

With legislative override of Gov veto, New Hampshire formally repeals its death penalty

As reported in this local press piece, "New Hampshire became the 21st state to repeal its death penalty Thursday, after a vote in the Senate to pass legislation over the objections of Gov. Chris Sununu." Here is more:

In a 16-8 vote after unusually brisk debate, senators passed an override measure with the necessary two-thirds of support to override Sununu’s veto, issued earlier this month. In a series of emotional pleas, some senators sided with governor, arguing that the prohibition served as a deterrent for the murder of law enforcement and provided justice that life imprisonment cannot.

But others argued repealing the punishment was a matter of humanity. “This question will be answered but not by political philosophy or alliances but by lifetimes of individual experiences that we all carry with us,” said Sen. Harold French, a Franklin Republican who voted to override Sununu's veto. “Today I will vote to voterride the veto of our governor. Because this vote is about our state and about what kind of state we are all going to be a part of.”

The vote followed an equally narrow vote in the House, which voted this month to override the veto with no votes to spare....

The repeal takes effect immediately, and according to the statute applies only to convictions from May 30, 2019 and onward.

“I have consistently stood with law enforcement, families of crime victims, and advocates for justice in opposing a repeal of the death penalty because it is the right thing to do,” Sununu said in a statement after Thursday’s vote. “I am incredibly disappointed that the Senate chose to override my veto."

As noted in prior posts linked below, supporters of this repeal claims the law would not be applied retroactively to the benefit of the one person on death row in the state, namely Michael Addison who was sentenced to death for the 2006 killing of a Manchester police officer.  But I am pretty sure no state in the modern era has yet to execute a previously condemned person even after a "prospective only" repeal of the death penalty, so Michael Addison is surely among those celebrating this capital repeal.

Prior related posts:

• After veto-proof vote, New Hampshire appears poised to be first state to repeal death penalty legislatively since 2013
• Will New Hampshire legislature this time override veto to finally repeal state's death penalty?

Ohio officials apparently seeking to avoid any paper trail as it tries to reboot its machinery of death

It has been a full quarter century since Justice Harry Blackmun famously stated in Callins v. Collins, 510 U.S. 1141 (1994), that he would "no longer tinker with the machinery of death."  But in the last 25 years, a whole lot of states have done a whole lot of tinkering with death machinery, and I have been especially well-positioned to observe Ohio's unique machinations.  And this new local article about the latest Buckeye tinkering, headlined "DeWine, prisons have no documents on Ohio’s new execution protocol," has me yet again amazed at what law, policy and practice looks like in this space.  Here are the details:

The Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction has been working for months on Gov. Mike DeWine’s order to revamp Ohio’s execution protocol. But the department says it hasn’t generated a single email or other written communication related to the work.

The governor’s office suggests the lack of such documentation is intentional.  And that has critics accusing the administration of trying to avoid transparency in an endeavor that in the past has been riddled with problems carrying out the death penalty and obtaining the drugs to perform executions. “The execution process across the United States has been plagued by secrecy and a lack of transparency,” said Robert Dunham of the Death Penalty Information Center, a national group that gathers information about how capital punishment is practiced.

In Ohio, problems go at least as far back as 2014, when Dennis McGuire choked and gasped for about 10 minutes before dying after being administered a new, two-drug protocol. That prompted a three-year moratorium as prison officials came up with a three-drug protocol that still used midazolam — which has been used in botched executions in at least four states — as the first in the procedure.

Since 2017, Ohio has conducted four more executions and abandoned a fifth when prison workers couldn’t inject drugs into a man’s veins.  Then, earlier this year, U.S. Magistrate Judge Michael Merz issued a ruling that likened the Ohio protocol to “waterboarding” and said it “would feel as though fire was being poured” into a prisoner’s veins.

In response, DeWine postponed one execution and then three more as he ordered the corrections department to devise a new lethal injection protocol.  But as corrections officials did, they had to contend with accusations that the state was using subterfuge to obtain earlier execution drugs from manufacturers who were adamantly opposed to their use in carrying out the death penalty.

Seeking to get an idea of what drugs the state is thinking of using and how it plans to get them, The Dispatch filed an open records request in April with the corrections department for all of its internal and external communication regarding DeWine’s order and the development of the new protocol.  Hearing nothing, the paper last week asked about the status of the request.  It received a response the same day. “After investigation and review of our agency records, we have determined that we have no responsive records. Thank you for your patience,” spokeswoman Sara French said in an email.

While it might seem implausible that such a weighty matter as devising a new death-penalty protocol could be undertaken by a state agency without a single email or memo being generated, DeWine spokesman Dan Tierney seemed to say that was by design.  “Gov. DeWine agrees that execution protocol is a very sensitive issue, and that sensitivity may not be appropriate for general email or common written correspondence,” Tierney said in an email.  “The governor speaks with Director (Annette) Chambers-Smith regularly, and he will be receiving a full briefing on this issue soon. ″(The Department of Rehabilitation and Correction) remains focused on researching a new protocol using drugs that the state of Ohio can actually obtain.”...

Monica Nieporte, president and executive director of the Ohio News Media Association, said the state should not try to devise something as important as a new lethal injection protocol in secret. “Since it appears that the work done on this issue has largely been done through verbal conversation and, according to DRC, there is no supporting documentation that is public record, it makes it very difficult for journalists or citizens to determine what progress has been made on this topic,” she said in an email. “Hopefully as their research winds down and they are at the point of making recommendations, they will be providing some detailed explanations, including documentation about how they made their conclusions.”

At the risk of bad taste, I am tempted to joke based on the lack of any protocol paper trail that perhaps Ohio officials think it is important to avoid killing trees while they try to figure out a better way to kill people.

A few (of many) prior recent related posts:

• New Ohio Gov puts halt to all executions until Ohio develops new execution method 
• Ohio's new governor delays first scheduled execution under his watch based on concerns about lethal-injection drugs
• Highlighting, through Ohio's remarkable recent experience, a possible tipping point on midazolam as a lethal injection drug 
• "Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States"
• Reviewing Ohio's (now-suspended) execution realities

Florida completes execution of killer of 10 women in 1984

As detailed in this AP article, a "serial killer who terrorized Florida with a murderous spree that claimed 10 women in 1984 was put to death Thursday, his execution witnessed by a woman who survived one of his attacks and aided in his capture."  Here is more:

Bobby Joe Long, 65, was pronounced dead at 6:55 p.m. Thursday following a lethal injection at Florida State Prison.  Long had no last words, simply closing his eyes as the procedure began, witnesses said.

The killer terrified the Tampa Bay area for eight months in 1984 as women began showing up dead, their bodies often left in gruesome poses.  Most were strangled, some had their throats slit, and others were bludgeoned.  Law enforcement had few clues until the case of Lisa Noland, who survived one of Long's attacks.  She witnessed Thursday's execution from the front row.

Just 17 in 1984, Noland was abducted by Long outside a church that year.  He raped her but ultimately let her go free.  She left evidence of his crimes on the scene and gave police details leading to his capture.  Long confessed to the crimes, receiving 28 life sentences and one death sentence for the murder of 22-year-old Michelle Simms. 

Noland positioned herself in the witness room where she hoped Long would see her.  "I wanted to look him in the eye. I wanted to be the first person he saw.  Unfortunately, he didn't open his eyes," she said.  "It was comforting to know this was actually happening."  She said she began to cry after she left the room once it was over.  “The peace that came over me is a remarkable feeling,” she said.

Another witness wore a polo shirt with a photo of one victim on the front and the words "Gone But Not Forgotten."  On the back were photos of all 10 slaying victims and the words, "The Ones That Matter."...

Investigators were baffled by the trail of bodies Long left around Tampa Bay.  Artiss Ann Wick was the first killed, in March 1984.  Nine others followed.  Law enforcement had few clues until Noland told her story. 

Noland said beforehand that she knew what she would have said if she could have addressed Long. Said Noland: "I would say 'Thank you for choosing me and not another 17-year-old girl.'"...

The execution was the first under Gov. Ron DeSantis, who took office in January.

Spotlighting racial divides in perceptions of crime and punishment

Just about every serious study of US criminal justice systems shows a different form of justice applies to black and white Americans.  And John Gramlich at Pew Research Center has this interesting new piece spotlighting many of the different perceptions of justice among black and white Americans.  I recommend the piece in full, and here are excerpts with a sentencing emphasis  (and with links from the original):

Black Americans are far more likely than whites to say the nation’s criminal justice system is racially biased and that its treatment of minorities is a serious national problem.  In a recent Pew Research Center survey, around nine-in-ten black adults (87%) said blacks are generally treated less fairly by the criminal justice system than whites, a view shared by a much smaller majority of white adults (61%).  And in a survey shortly before last year’s midterm elections, 79% of blacks — compared with 32% of whites — said the way racial and ethnic minorities are treated by the criminal justice system is a very big problem in the United States today.

Racial differences in views of the criminal justice system are not limited to the perceived fairness of the system as a whole.  Black and white adults also differ across a range of other criminal justice-related questions asked by the Center in recent years, on subjects ranging from crime and policing to the use of computer algorithms in parole decisions....

A narrow majority of Americans (54%) support the death penalty for people convicted of murder, according to a spring 2018 survey.  But only around a third of blacks (36%) support capital punishment for this crime, compared with nearly six-in-ten whites (59%).  Racial divisions extend to other questions related to the use of capital punishment.  In a 2015 survey, 77% of blacks said minorities are more likely than whites to be sentenced to death for committing similar crimes.  Whites were divided on this question: 46% said minorities are disproportionately sentenced to death, while the same percentage saw no racial disparities.

Blacks were also more likely than whites to say capital punishment is not a crime deterrent (75% vs. 60%) and were less likely to say the death penalty is morally justified (46% vs. 69%).  However, about seven-in-ten in both groups said they saw some risk in putting an innocent person to death (74% of blacks vs. 70% of whites)....

Some states now use criminal risk assessments to assist with parole decisions. These assessments involve collecting data about people who are up for parole, comparing that data with data about other people who have been convicted of crimes, and then assigning inmates a score to help decide whether they should be released from prison or not.  A 2018 survey asked Americans whether they felt the use of criminal risk assessments in parole decisions was an acceptable use of algorithmic decision-making. A 61% majority of black adults said using these assessments is unfair to people in parole hearings, compared with 49% of white adults.

Alabama and Tennessee both complete executions in same night

As reported in this extended AP piece, two states carried out executions this evening.  Here are the details:

A man convicted of killing his wife decades ago at a camping center he managed in Memphis was put to death Thursday in Tennessee.  Separately, a man condemned to die for his role in a quadruple killing that followed a dispute over a pickup truck was put to death Thursday evening in Alabama, declining to make any last-minute appeals in the hours preceding his execution.

Sixty-eight-year-old inmate Don Johnson was executed for the 1984 suffocation of his wife, Connie Johnson.  He was pronounced dead at 7:37 p.m. after a lethal injection at a maximum-security prison in Nashville.  He had initially blamed his wife's slaying on a work-release inmate who confessed to helping dispose of the body and who was granted immunity for testifying against Johnson.

Johnson became the fourth person executed in Tennessee since August.  The last two inmates executed in Tennessee chose the electric chair, saying they believed it offered a quicker and less painful death than the state's default method of lethal injection.

Johnson had spent half his life on death row and seen three execution dates come and go as his appeals played out in court, including challenges to Tennessee's lethal injection protocols.  The state's present default method is a three-drug combination that includes the sedative midazolam, which inmates have claimed causes a prolonged and excruciating death. Three more executions are scheduled for later this year in Tennessee.

Gov. Bill Lee announced Tuesday that he would not intervene, following "prayerful and deliberate consideration" of Johnson's clemency request. Religious leaders, including the president of the worldwide Seventh-day Adventist Church, to which Johnson belongs, had asked Lee to spare Johnson's life.  Supporters of clemency said Johnson had undergone a religious conversion and cited his Christian ministry to fellow inmates. Johnson is an ordained elder of the church in Nashville....

Alabama administered a lethal injection Thursday evening to 41-year-old Michael Brandon Samra.  Samra was pronounced dead at 7:33 p.m. following a three-drug injection at the state prison at Atmore, authorities said.

Samra and a friend, Mark Duke, were convicted of capital murder in the deaths of Duke's father, the father's girlfriend and the woman's two elementary-age daughters in 1997.  The two adults were shot and the children had their throats slit.  Evidence showed that Duke planned the killings because he was angry his father wouldn't let him use his pickup.

In a last statement, Samra made a profession of Christian faith.  "I would like to thank Jesus for everything he has done for me," Samra said as he lay strapped on a gurney with his arms extended. He ended with the word "amen."

After drugs began flowing, Samra went still and his chest heaved three times.  He took a few deep breaths and his head moved slightly. Then an officer checked to see if he was still conscious.  A few moments later, Samra's hands curled inward, his chest moved like he was taking some breaths and his mouth fell slightly agape.  The execution procedure began about an hour after the scheduled 6 p.m. start time, and Prison Commissioner Jeff Dunn said there was no particular reason for the delay. "There were no issues that I was aware of," Dunn said in a statement....

Though Duke and Samra were both originally convicted of capital murder and sentenced to death, Duke's sentence was overturned because he was 16 at the time, and the Supreme Court later banned executing inmates younger than 18 at the time of their crimes.

Samra was 19 at the time and asked the U.S. Supreme Court to delay his execution while the Kentucky Supreme Court considers whether anyone younger than 21 at the time of a crime should be put to death, but the justices refused.

New opinion memo from DOJ concludes FDA lacks jurisdiction to regulate execution drugs

As long-time readers know, state execution efforts have sometimes been thwarted in recent years because of an inability to access needed drugs for lethal injections. This new Washington Post article, headlined "Justice Department says FDA ‘lacks jurisdiction’ over death-penalty drugs," reports on the possible start to a new chapter in this long-running saga. Here are the details:

The Justice Department says in a new legal opinion that the Food and Drug Administration does not have authority over drugs used in lethal injections, a stance sure to be challenged by death-penalty opponents. The department’s Office of Legal Counsel said that “articles intended for use in capital punishment by a state or the federal government cannot be regulated as ‘drugs’ or ‘devices.’ ”

The legal opinion, issued this month, comes as states have struggled in recent years to obtain drugs for lethal injections, which remain the country’s primary method of execution even as the number of executions has declined.

In 2015, the FDA blocked Texas from importing shipments of an anesthetic from an overseas distributor, finalizing the decision two years later. The agency argued the importation was illegal because the drug, sodium thiopental, was not approved in the United States and was improperly labeled. It also cited a 2012 federal injunction barring the agency from allowing the drug’s importation.

Texas responded to the FDA’s move by suing the agency in early 2017, claiming the agency was interfering with the state’s responsibility to carry out its law enforcement duties. The lawsuit was filed shortly before President Trump took office. Trump has long been a supporter of capital punishment. while his Senate-confirmed attorneys general — Jeff Sessions, who left the post last year, and William P. Barr, who assumed the job this year — have also backed the practice.

The legal opinion from the Justice Department this month sides against the FDA and with Texas. It says that drugs intended for executions are different from any others, noting that “they exclusively inflict harm” and “are not intended to produce any benefit for the end user.” It expressly highlights “the narrowness of our conclusion,” saying that it does not address whether the FDA “has jurisdiction over drugs intended for use in physician-assisted suicide.”

But it also takes a broad view of the issues at hand, arguing that if the FDA had jurisdiction over drugs meant for executions, it would have similar power over other areas — such as firearms — which the agency has not sought to regulate.

The Justice Department’s opinion is unlikely to have any immediate effect, however, because the FDA is still operating under the 2012 injunction. It is not clear whether the Justice Department will seek to have that injunction lifted, a move that could spark a long legal tussle.

The opinion seems aimed at “giving a green light” to corrections officials to look abroad for drugs needed for executions, said Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham University and a death-penalty expert. “I think this has very broad ramifications, unfortunately,” Denno said in an interview. “This is intended to allow departments of corrections to access drugs outside the country because they’re having so much difficulty doing so.”

While European companies have objected to their products being used in executions, corrections officials could have more luck turning to countries such as China or India, Denno said. “It has the potential to open the floodgates,” she said....

The FDA, in defending its efforts to block states from importing unapproved sodium thiopental has cited the 2012 injunction relating to the drug. That ruling came after death-row inmates filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration, saying the FDA was acting unlawfully by exercising “enforcement discretion” to allow states to import unapproved sodium thiopental from an unregistered foreign facility.

Despite the 2012 order, however, states continued to order sodium thiopental from overseas. BuzzFeed News found that at least three states — Nebraska, Texas and Arizona — had tried to import drugs from a supplier in India despite getting warnings from the FDA in 2015.

The Texas lawsuit, filed in the waning days of the Obama administration, says the state alerted federal officials in June 2015 that its Department of Criminal Justice — which is responsible for the state’s executions — planned to “import thiopental sodium intended for law enforcement purposes.” The lawsuit said the state’s “foreign distributor” shipped 1,000 vials of the drug to Houston in late July 2015, and not long after, the drugs were impounded. According to the FDA, the agency also impounded a shipment intended for Arizona that same year. Texas officials said they had obtained the drugs legally and referred to the government’s actions as an “unjustified seizure.”

The OLC opinion is titled "Whether the Food and Drug Administration Has Jurisdiction over Articles Intended for Use in Lawful Executions."  The opinion runs 26 pages and is available at this link.  Here is its concluding paragraph:

We conclude that articles intended for use in capital punishment by a State or the federal government cannot be regulated as “drugs” or “devices” under the FDCA. FDA accordingly lacks jurisdiction to regulate such articles for that intended use.

Chris Geidner, who did terrific reporting on these issues when at BuzzFeed News, has this lengthy tweet thread criticizing the substance of the OLC memo and concluding with just the right questions:

FINALLY: I'm not sure I get what the point of this OLC memo is.  To quote Madonna as Evita, "Where do we go from here?"  The injunction still exists.  This is OLC's opinion.  Is someone going to seek to have the injunction vacated?  Does DOJ think they can just ignore it?  What now?

"Individualized Executions"

The title of this post is the title of this new paper authored by William Berry now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

States continue to botch lethal injection attempts.  The decision to move forward with such procedures without considering the health of the inmate has resulted in a series of brutal, horrific incidents.  In its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, the Supreme Court has established that courts must give defendants individualized sentencing determinations prior to imposing a death sentence.  Woodson v. North Carolina proscribes the imposition of mandatory death sentences, and Lockett v. Ohio requires that courts examine the individualized characteristics of the offense and the offender, including allowing the defendant to provide mitigating evidence at sentencing.

This Article argues for the extension of the Eighth Amendment Woodson-Lockett principle to execution techniques.  The Court’s execution technique cases proscribe the imposition of punishments that create a substantial risk of inflicting pain.  As such, application of the Woodson-Lockett principle to executions would require that courts assess the imposition of such execution techniques on a case-by-case basis to determine the constitutionality of the technique — as applied to the particular inmate — prior to execution.

In Part I, the Article describes the recent epidemic of failed lethal injection executions and highlights the need for reform in this area.  Part II describes the Woodson-Lockett doctrine, and explores its prior applications.  Part III then explains why this doctrine ought to apply to execution techniques, not just the kind of punishment imposed.  Finally in Part IV, the Article argues for the adoption of this approach, highlighting its advantages both on individual and systemic levels.

Is the latest SCOTUS sparring in capital cases only likely to get worse and worse?

The question in the title of this post is prompted by today's Supreme Court developments in older capital cases, some of which I missed when just blogging here about the morning order list.   Specifically, I missed that Justice Alito penned a lenghty dissent to a stay in a capital case from Texas six week ago(!), which in turn prompted a four-page defense of the stay by Justice Kavanaugh.  (This discussion can be found at this link following the original stay.)   Adam Liptak summarizes all the action in the New York Times article headlined "Tempers Fraying, Justices Continue Debate on Executions."  Here are excerpts:

Several Supreme Court justices on Monday continued a heated debate on how to handle last-minute requests in death penalty cases, issuing a series of unusual opinions about actions the court had taken several weeks ago.

Continuing to fight those battles is an indication that feelings remain raw on a court that is increasingly divided over capital cases.

A guiding principle at the Supreme Court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer has said, is that “tomorrow is another day.” The court very rarely supplements its original rulings with later explanations and responses.

In one opinion, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh, joined by Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., explained why they had voted in March to stay the execution of Patrick H. Murphy, a Buddhist inmate in Texas whose request that his spiritual adviser accompany him to the death chamber had been denied though Christian and Muslim chaplains were allowed....

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, responded on Monday with a statement. The inmate’s delay in asserting his claim, Justice Alito wrote, should have justified letting his execution go forward....

In a footnote, Justice Alito continued a discussion of an even older case, from February, in which the court had allowed a Muslim inmate to be executed outside the presence of his Muslim imam although Christian chaplains were allowed. At the time, Justice Elena Kagan, writing for the court’s four liberal members, said the majority was “profoundly wrong.”...

In a third opinion on Monday, Justice Thomas, joined by Justices Alito and Gorsuch, wrote to “set the record straight” about why they had voted last month to allow the execution of an Alabama inmate, Christopher Lee Price, a move that had prompted an anguished middle-of-the-night dissent from Justice Breyer.

As might be obvious by my question in the title of this post, I think this sparring could get even more heated in part because the reduced number of executions in recent years heighten the stakes (and litigation opportunities) around each execution.

Noting how California's prosecutors keep pursuing death sentences despite execution moratorium, and what more Gov Newsom has in mind

This new lengthy New York Times article discusses the (unsurprisingly) reality that local prosecutors in California keep bringing capital charges even though the state's chief executive has impose a moratorium on execitions. The piece is headlined "California Has a Moratorium on Executions. Prosecutors Want New Death Sentences Anyway."  Here are excertps:

Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, issued a moratorium in March on executions in the state, which has more death row inmates than anywhere else in the Western Hemisphere. But that decision has not stopped local prosecutors from seeking new death sentences, underscoring the divide in the state between conservative prosecutors and liberal reformers like the governor.

And as liberal as California voters are generally, as recently as 2016 they rejected a ballot measure that would have abolished capital punishment, and approved another one to fast-track executions.

These divisions, experts say, are setting the backdrop for what could be a contentious fight as Mr. Newsom takes new steps beyond the moratorium to abolish capital punishment. For now, the moratorium amounts to temporary reprieves for each of the 737 men and women on California’s death row, which will last for the duration of his time as governor.

“It’s got to be really confusing for the average citizen who sees both things going on and doesn’t understand how all of the above can be occurring,” said Michele Hanisee, the president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys in Los Angeles County. She is seeking a death sentence in one of her cases: The man accused of being a serial killer, Alexander Hernandez, who is charged with killing five people in a shooting rampage in the San Fernando Valley in 2014.

“The simple answer is this: The district attorneys of the state of California took an oath to uphold and follow the law,” Ms. Hanisee said. “I think the governor probably did too, but he doesn’t care.” The governor, she added, does “not have the legal authority to tell them not to seek death or not to follow the law.”

New death sentences in California have declined in recent years — 2018 was a record low, with five new sentences. The drop aligns with a national trend, as public support for capital punishment has waned and juries have been reluctant to impose death sentences in the face of evidence of racial disparities and high-profile exonerations. Before Mr. Newsom’s moratorium, 20 other states, including most recently Washington and Delaware, had abolished the practice....

California, while maintaining a large death row, has not executed anyone since 2006. There were longstanding legal challenges to the state’s lethal injection protocol that had halted executions even before Mr. Newsom’s moratorium.

In an interview, Mr. Newsom said his administration was considering several new steps to dismantle the state’s capital punishment system, and that his moratorium was a first step on what he hoped was a path that ended with abolition. He said his advisers were studying how he could commute the sentences of current death row inmates to life without parole. Mr. Newsom has the power to commute sentences in which the inmate has only one felony, but more than half of the death row population has at least two felonies; to commute those sentences would require approval from the State Supreme Court.

Mr. Newsom’s advisers are focusing on the Supreme Court’s decision to block several pardons or commutations — though not for death row inmates — issued by former Gov. Jerry Brown before he left office in January. Those rejections were the first time in decades the court had blocked a governor’s commutations, and Mr. Newsom has asked the court for an explanation. He hopes the explanation will offer some guidance “that will allow us to form better judgment on next steps if we want to look to commutations on the capital punishment side.”...

Mr. Newsom also said he was discussing with the attorney general’s office what role the state could play in blocking prosecutions of new death sentences. But legal experts say this power is limited: The state could decline to defend capital cases on appeal, but it does not have the power to order district attorneys, who are elected at the county level, to not seek death.

One possibility is that the attorney general could take cases away from local prosecutors. But experts say that is unlikely and would be unprecedented. “I have not seen any indication from our attorney general that they want to impose the governor’s view and take cases away from us so that we cannot seek capital punishment,” said Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney, who is part of the prosecution in the Golden State Killer case.

Ms. Schubert added that, “Capital punishment is the law in California, and just because Gavin Newsom has a personal opposition to it doesn’t mean that we as prosecutors abandon our obligation to enforce the law in the appropriate cases. I’m not this zealot about the death penalty, but it is the law.”

Prior related posts:

• New California Gov to order moratorium on executions in his state 
• California Gov Newsom, on heels of execution moratorium order, now talking up halt to any capital prosecutions
• California DAs assail Gov Newsom's execution moratorium 

"Unusual State Capital Punishments"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by William Berry now available via SSRN. Here is its abstract:

This article argues that many of the states that retain the death penalty currently violate their own constitutions because their use of the death penalty is unusual.  Specifically, the death penalty in some states, particularly when assessed in an intra-state manner examining its use across counties, suggests that the rareness of its use might mean that it has become an unusual punishment.  As a result, this article explores the twenty-six capital states that proscribe unusual punishments and categorizes them based on the likelihood that their utilization of the death penalty violates their state constitution.

Part I of the article explains the concept of unusualness under the Eighth Amendment as developed by the United States Supreme Court in its capital cases.  In Part II, the article explores the Eighth Amendment analogues in state constitutions that similarly prohibit unusual punishments and the conjunctive and disjunctive language of the state constitutions, before demonstrating how the Eighth Amendment approach could translate to the analysis of unusualness under state constitutional law.  Part III then examines the states that have unusual proscriptions in their state constitutions, and categorizes the states based on the likelihood that their use of the death penalty violates their state constitution.  Finally, in Part IV, the article argues for an expansive application of state constitutions to bar unusual state capital punishments, exploring the policy reasons supporting this analytical move.

Will New Hampshire legislature this time override veto to finally repeal state's death penalty?

As noted in this post last month, a lopsided vote in favor of a bill to repeal the death penalty in the New Hampshire legislature suggested that the state would be able to abolish capital punishment despite the opposition of the state's Governor.  On Friday, as reported in this local article, the expected veto occurred, setting up the question that is the title of this post.  The local article is headlined "Sununu vetoes repeal of seldom-used death penalty as large delegation of police applaud," and here are excerpts:

Gov. Chris Sununu vetoed legislation to repeal the death penalty Friday surrounded by about 30 state, county and local police officers at the Michael Briggs Community Center, named for the officer whose killer is the state’s lone occupant of death row.

The governor acknowledged the bill he vetoed received bipartisan support in the House and Senate that was “pretty overwhelming.”...

Michael Addison, already a convicted felon when he shot officer Briggs, is the only person on death row in New Hampshire, which hasn’t executed anyone since 1939.  A recurring theme among repeal opponents has been the fear that Addison’s sentence will be converted to life without parole if the death penalty is repealed, even though repeal advocates argue that the law can’t be applied retroactively.

After the veto signing, Sununu said he believes in the death penalty as a matter of sound public policy and that he would have vetoed a repeal whether or not the state had an inmate on death row. “The reason is quite obvious,” he said, “when you talk to law enforcement and ask if this serves as a deterrent, they say ‘absolutely.’ People in this state understand that this is a tool and when you use it justly and with prudence, as New Hampshire does, it’s appropriate.”...

Sununu said he would do everything he could to “engage citizens in this process.”

“When you get to sustaining or overturning a veto, a lot of dynamics come into play,” he said. “So we’ll go back and talk to folks. We’ll keep fighting for it.  The vote was pretty overwhelming, to be honest.  Politics didn’t come into play.  I think it was folks not really understanding what this means to law enforcement and their families.”

Because I do not know the particulars of the New Hampshire legislature and local politics, I am not able to make a confident prediction on a veto override under the circumstances. Notably, the legislature failed to override a similar veto of a similar bill last year, but the 2018 election may have changed the numbers enough to change the outcome. But, as this news article suggests, it would appear the Governor is eager to take steps to preserve his veto and thus the state's death penalty.

Prior related post:

• After veto-proof vote, New Hampshire appears poised to be first state to repeal death penalty legislatively since 2013

Georgia completes execution after courts reject array of final appeals

As reported in this local article, "Scotty Morrow [with a]ppeals exhausted, clemency denied, ... at 9:38 p.m. .. became the first person executed by the state of Georgia this year."  Here is more about his crime and filed appeals: 

The father of two and grandfather of four said in his petition for clemency that he thought every day about what happened on Dec. 29, 1994.  Spurned over the phone by his ex-girlfriend, Barbara Ann Young, Morrow drove to her house and fatally shot her and her friend, Tonya Woods.  He shot a third woman in the face and arm but she survived. The murders were witnessed by Young’s 5-year-old son....

Morrow is the 73rd person executed by the state since the death penalty was reinstated in 1976, and the 50th by lethal injection. “Tonight, justice was carried out for the families of Tonya Woods and Barbara Ann Young and the injured LaToya Horne,” said Hall County District Attorney Lee Darragh, who witnessed the execution.

The U.S. Supreme Court had denied Morrow's final appeal to stay the execution at about 9 p.m. Thursday, two and a half hours after his defense team petitioned the nation's highest court.

Morrow was denied clemency Wednesday by the state Board of Pardons and Paroles. His attorneys argued that unplanned crimes of passion, such as the ones Morrow was convicted of, are rarely punished by death. They also pointed out that jurors in Morrow’s murder trial heard little about his traumatic childhood....

A state court judge overturned Morrow’s sentence in 2011, saying that his lawyers had not afforded him proper representation. A new trial was ordered, but the Georgia Supreme Court later reversed that decision and reinstated the death sentence.

On Tuesday, a Butts County judge dismissed a petition claiming Morrow’s death sentence was unconstitutional because it was improperly imposed. Lawyers for the Gainesville man said the judge in Morrow’s criminal trial decided which of the two murders he committed warranted the death penalty, a decision they said the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled must be made by jurors.  The Butts County judge on Wednesday agreed with attorneys for the state that those claims had already been rejected by higher courts. On Thursday, the state Supreme Court agreed in a unanimous decision. The court described Morrow’s appeal “as lacking in arguable merit” and it also denied a request from his lawyers for a stay of execution....

Prison officials testified Morrow was a model inmate who sought redemption for his crimes. His son and namesake said he was a positive influence on his four grandchildren.  Counselors told the parole board he had been fully rehabilitated. But the parole board was unswayed, denying Morrow’s last, best chance at survival.

Texas completes another execution of another killer involved in notorious hate crime

As reported in this local article, headlined "Texas executes John William King in racist dragging death of James Byrd Jr.," the Lone Star State has completed another notable execution.  Here are the basics:

It’s been more than two decades since an infamous hate crime in East Texas, where three white men were convicted of chaining a black man to the back of a pickup truck, dragging him for miles and then dumping the remains of his body in front of a church.

On Wednesday evening, John William King, 44, became the second and final man to be executed in the 1998 murder case of James Byrd Jr. Lawrence Brewer was put to death in 2011 for the crime, and Shawn Berry is serving a life sentence.

King had previously been involved in a white supremacist prison gang, and he was notoriously covered in racist tattoos, including Ku Klux Klan symbols, a swastika and a visual depiction of a lynching, according to court documents. But King maintained that he was innocent in Byrd’s murder — claiming that Berry dropped him and Brewer off at their shared apartment before Byrd was beaten and dragged to death.

In a last-minute appeal, King’s attorney argued that a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling entitled his client to a new trial because his original lawyers didn’t assert his claim of innocence to the jury despite King’s insistence. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals narrowly rejected this appeal in a 5-4 ruling Monday, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled against stopping the execution about 30 minutes after it was scheduled to begin Wednesday.

After the ruling, King was taken from a holding cell and placed on a gurney in the death chamber and hooked up to an IV. He had no personal witnesses at his execution and spoke no final words, but he did provide a written statement beforehand, stating "Capital Punishment: Them without the capital get the punishment."  He was injected with a lethal dose of pentobarbital at 6:56 p.m., and pronounced dead 12 minutes later, according to the prison department.

Two of Byrd’s sisters and his niece planned to watch King's death. One of the sisters, who also watched Brewer's execution in 2011, told The Texas Tribune Tuesday that she didn’t understand why King’s case was tied up for so long with numerous appeals. He was sentenced to death in February 1999. “He wants to find a way not to die, but he didn’t give James that chance,” said Louvon Harris. “He’s still getting off easy because your body’s not going to be flying behind a pickup truck being pulled apart.”...

Before the execution, Harris said King's death would bring her some closure, but she will still have to be involved in Berry’s case as he becomes eligible for parole in 2038.

Notably, this was only the fourth execution in all of the US so far in 2019.  For telling contrast, consider that 10 years ago, there were 24 executions in 2009 before the end of April; and 20 years ago, there were 40 executions in 1999 before the end of April.  Were the pace of just one execution per month to continue, we would see in 2019 the fewest total number of executions in the United States in more than 30 years.

However, as this upcoming executions page reveals, there are already five executions in five different states scheduled for May 2019.  If all those executions are carried out, the pace for nationwide executions in 2019 would be comparable to the pace in 2017 and 2018.

California DAs assail Gov Newsom's execution moratorium

Four California district attorneys, Anne Marie Schubert, Michael Hestrin, Lisa Smittcamp and Gilbert Otero, have this notable new CNN commentary under the headline "California Gov. Gavin Newsom's death penalty moratorium is a disgrace."  Here is how it gets started:

Gov. Gavin Newsom's blanket moratorium on California's death penalty is a slap in the face to crime victims and their families who have waited years for justice.  With the stroke of his pen last month, Newsom single-handedly undermined our state's democratic values and our criminal justice system.

Democracy embodies a government where the people hold the ruling power either directly or through elected representatives.  In California, the people have exercised their power repeatedly in voting to keep the death penalty for the state's most horrific killers.  In fact, less than three years ago, California voters made this clear when they rejected an initiative, supported by Newsom, to abolish the death penalty and instead passed an initiative to ensure its fair and efficient implementation.

When Newsom campaigned for governor, he explicitly asserted that he would respect the will of the voters regarding the death penalty.  So much for that promise.  Instead, Newsom disregarded the voters in favor of his personal opinion and granted leniency to those facing the death penalty, including serial killers, cop killers, mass shooters, baby killers and sexual sadists.

In doing so, Newsom damaged the very fabric of our criminal justice system -- trial by jury -- where community members, not just one person in a position of power, make decisions affecting life and liberty.  Newsom's unilateral decision to ignore jury verdicts imposing the death penalty is not just an arbitrary exercise of power, it is a gross miscarriage of justice.

In support of his moratorium, Newsom also made broad sweeping statements, often cited by the American Civil Liberties Union and other death penalty opponents, including cautions about racism and claims that some on death row may be innocent.  If Newsom has concerns about specific cases, he should examine those cases individually rather than granting mercy to everyone on death row.  After all, Newsom has the powers of clemency and commutation as a remedy if he sees actual proof that someone was wrongfully convicted.

But looking at the facts of cases isn't something Newsom seems to want to do.  Why?  It could be because the facts are so horrific that one cannot justify leniency to these killers.

Prior related posts:

• New California Gov to order moratorium on executions in his state 
• California Gov Newsom, on heels of execution moratorium order, now talking up halt to any capital prosecutions

Reviewing Ohio's (now-suspended) execution realities

The Cincinnati Enquirer has this lengthy new article headlined "As Ohio struggles to find a painless way to kill death row inmates, is this the end of death penalty?". Here are excerpts:

Jeffrey Wogenstahl was supposed to die Wednesday.... But that didn't happen.  Wogenstahl's case began in 1991 when 10-year-old Amber Garrett went missing and was found dead three days later in Indiana.  A jury found him guilty of beating and stabbing the girl to death. Wogenstahl was 31 at the time.  He's 58 now.

After 27 years of lawsuits and appeals with three cases pending at the county, state and federal level, Wogenstahl was granted an indefinite stay of execution by the Ohio Supreme Court last fall due to open questions about his case.

Since then, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine has suspended all executions in a continuing struggle for the state to find a painless way to kill death row inmates.  With drug suppliers refusing to allow their products to be used to kill people and botched executions making headlines, Ohio's death penalty is on life support.

Wogenstahl managed to live past the day Ohio first scheduled for his death without the help of Mike DeWine, but he and the 137 other people on death row are likely wondering what the governor and legislature might do next.

DeWine recently ordered the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction to find a new method for executing death row inmates.  Until that happens, all executions are on hold.  A federal magistrate called Ohio's three-drug death penalty protocol "cruel and unusual punishment" banned by the U.S. Constitution. That carried weight with the governor. "Having that opinion in front of me, I felt that Ohio shouldn't be carrying out an execution while we know those facts," DeWine told The Enquirer.

The main problem: the first drug administered, midazolam.  Midazolam is a sedative used in some surgeries to relax the patient and block the formation of traumatic memories. It's not a painkiller, even at high doses, experts testified before the federal magistrate.

Midazolam can lead to pulmonary edema, a condition where fluid fills the lungs making it difficult to breathe. One doctor compared it to the torture technique of waterboarding. And the amount of midazolam that Ohio uses to execute prisoners would cause "severe burning sensations in the blood vessels," a doctor testified.  An autopsy showed Hamilton County Killer Robert Van Hook suffered from the condition when he was executed in July 2018.  He was the last person put to death before DeWine's suspension.

After the midazolam, Ohio then injects a paralytic and potassium chloride to stop the inmate's heart. Without an analgesic, the inmate would feel the pain of both those drugs even if he were unconscious, according to doctors' testimony. Ohio executed three death row inmates using this three-drug combo.  But the next person executed in Ohio will likely die by another method....

Ohio used a single drug, pentobarbital, until manufacturers refused to sell it to states for executions. So the state switched to an untested, two-drug combination of midazolam and hydromorphone for Dennis McGuire, who was convicted of raping and fatally stabbing a pregnant woman.  McGuire's execution in January 2014 took almost 26 minutes — the longest since Ohio reinstituted the death penalty in 1999.  He struggled, gasped for air and choked for about 10 minutes before eventually dying, according to a Columbus Dispatch witness. The fallout from McGuire's execution stalled Ohio's death penalty for three and a half years.

During that time, the state created its new three-drug protocol and changed policies to obtain the drugs....

State Public Defender Tim Young and his office are leading a lawsuit against the current lethal injection practices. One problem: Ohio keeps changing its methods. "Whenever the Department of Correction changes the protocol, you essentially reset the litigation," Young said.

Though he agrees with the governor's actions, Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters said the debate over what drugs to use is just a charade to obstruct the death penalty in a state where the public supports it.  "The reality is we are killing someone.  It's not pretty.  It's ugly," he said, rattling off alternatives to lethal injection. "We've got a boatload of fentanyl sitting in (storage) right now. Bring back the firing squad. That has been ruled constitutional."

DeWine's political experiences have given him a unique perspective on capital punishment.  He sponsored legislation to reinstitute the death penalty legislation as a state lawmaker, fought against death row inmates' appeals as the state's attorney and now governs a state where the death penalty is legal....  But should Ohio continue the death penalty?  DeWine didn't take a stance when asked by The Enquirer.  "That is a discussion that certainly can take place, but I’m not going to engage in that today," he said....

Twenty states have abolished the death penalty. Some, such as Michigan, have never executed a prisoner.  Others have outlawed it in the past decade, concerned about its constitutionality, racial bias, cost or potential wrongful convictions. But Ohio is unlikely to join that list anytime soon.  The state's GOP-controlled Legislature has little appetite for limiting, much less banning, capital punishment.

In 2011, Ohio Supreme Court Chief Justice Maureen O'Connor, a Republican, led a task force of judges, prosecutors, defense attorneys and academics, who studied ways to improve the state's death penalty.  One recommendation — to ban the death penalty for individuals with a documented serious mental illness — has been proposed repeatedly by a bipartisan group of lawmakers only to die in committee. The main opponent to these limits on the death penalty: the Ohio Prosecuting Attorneys Association....

Democratic lawmakers have repeatedly introduced bills to abolish the death penalty in Ohio to no avail.  Still, Sen. Nickie Antonio, D-Lakewood, said she sees DeWine's call for a new protocol as an opportunity to move the conversation forward.  "Any time there’s difficulty in figuring out how to execute people, that’s a window to discuss whether the death penalty is even appropriate," Antonio said.

But it's possible DeWine's delay could have the opposite effect.  Lethal injection is currently the only execution method on the books in Ohio, but lawmakers could recommend an alternative, such as electrocution, firing squad, gas chamber or hanging. Senate President Larry Obhof has said he's happy to explore other options.  "We are all concerned that if you're going to have capital punishment, you should have a process in place that courts are willing to accept and meets constitutional muster," he told The Enquirer.

Spotlighting how reduced support for the death penalty is now a bipartisan reality

Alan Greenblatt has this notable lengthy new piece at Governing under the headline "Why the Death Penalty Has Lost Support From Both Parties."  I recommend the piece in full and here are excerpts:

Twenty years ago, most politicians in both parties supported the death penalty.  But today, opposition to it has become increasingly bipartisan.  Democrats have always been more wary, but now more conservatives have also become convinced that capital punishment is another failed government program.  In part, that's because the legal process for such cases is enormously expensive, even though few executions are ever carried out.

“When you look at how much money we’re spending, no one looks at that and thinks the death penalty works fine,” says Hannah Cox, national manager for Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, a pro-abolition group.  “We’re seeing a real escalation as far as the number of Republican legislators who are sponsoring repeal bills.”...

Lately, the spotlight has shifted to New Hampshire, where last week the legislature sent the governor a bill to repeal the death penalty.  Both chambers passed the bill by veto-proof margins, with bipartisan support.  Once the legislature overrides GOP Gov. Chris Sununu’s expected veto, New Hampshire will be the 21st state to outlaw capital punishment.  Colorado and Nevada could be next -- both have repeal bills currently pending.

For the first time since the death penalty was put back into practice during the 1970s, a majority of Americans now live in states that have abolished the practice or imposed a moratorium on it, according to the Death Penalty Information Center, which researches the issue.  Still, support for capital punishment has not vanished.  Polls show that a majority of Americans continue to back it....

“When you talk about death penalty, a lot of people immediately want to have a criminal justice angle on it or a morality angle,” Chad McCoy, the Kentucky House Republican whip and sponsor of an abolition bill, told The Hill. “Mine is purely economics.”...

It’s not only lawmakers who have grown more skeptical about capital punishment.  Prosecutors have, too. In part due to the costs associated with capital cases, the death penalty has essentially disappeared from rural counties, says [Prof Brandon] Garrett, author of End of Its Rope: How Killing the Death Penalty Can Revive Criminal Justice.  Fewer than 2 percent of the counties in the nation are responsible for half the death row convictions, according to the Death Penalty Information Center.

Not long ago, jurisdictions like Philadelphia County, Los Angeles County and Harris County, which includes Houston, were imposing 10 or more death sentences apiece per year.....  But there’s been a changing of the guard in many large counties over the past two or three years, including Harris and Philadelphia.  Voters are electing reform-minded prosecutors who are less likely -- or completely unwilling -- to seek execution as a punishment. 

Last year, no county in the United States imposed more than two death sentences.  During the mid-1990s, there were more than 300 death sentences imposed annually for three years running. Last year, the total was 42.  There hasn’t been more than 100 since 2010....

In 2016, the same year Trump was elected, Nebraska voters overturned a death penalty repeal that had been passed by the legislature, while California voters rejected a ballot measure to end capital punishment.  But if 2016 seemed to signal a shift back in favor of capital punishment, the momentum hasn't been sustained.  Under Trump, just three federal prisoners have been sentenced to die.  In last year’s elections, two governors who imposed moratoriums on the death penalty -- Democrats Kate Brown of Oregon and Tom Wolf of Pennsylvania -- both won reelection.  Conversely, two governors who vetoed abolition bills -- Republicans Pete Ricketts of Nebraska and Chris Sununu of New Hampshire -- also won reelection....

If crime rates increase, support for the death penalty could make a comeback. And many politicians and prosecutors want to keep execution available for punishing the “worst of the worst.”  In Florida, for example, prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for the alleged shooter in last year’s Parkland high school massacre.

Death penalty experts agree that the practice will not be completely abolished anytime in the foreseeable future.  But both the use of the death penalty and political support for it has declined markedly since the 1990s, when it was a wedge issue that moved many voters.  The list of states abolishing the death penalty continues to grow.  “I see the death penalty ending with a whimper, not a bang,” Garrett says. “It may be that the best thing is to allow states and communities to decide what’s best for them.”

This effectively review of the state of the capital mood in the United States will be interesting to revisit as we move into the 2020 election cycle. It seems quite possible that advocates and perhaps the base of the Democratic party will seek a Prez nominee who will actively embrace death penalty abolition. Prez Trump, who clearly likes to talk up his support for the death penalty, might well be eager to turn capital punishment into a wedge issue once again.

"Death by Stereotype: Race, Ethnicity, and California’s Failure to Implement Furman’s Narrowing Requirement"

The title of this post is the title of this new empirical article now available via SSRN and co-authored by an especially impressive list of folks: Catherine M. Grosso, Jeffrey Fagan, Michael Laurence, David C. Baldus, George G. Woodworth and Richard Newell.  Here is its abstract:

The influence of race on the administration of capital punishment in the United States had a major role in the United States Supreme Court’s 1972 decision in Furman v. Georgia to invalidate death penalty statutes across the United States.  To avoid discriminatory and capricious application of capital punishment, the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment requires legislatures to narrow the scope of capital offenses and ensure that only the most severe crimes are subjected to the ultimate punishment.  This Article demonstrates the racial and ethnic dimension of California’s failure to implement this narrowing requirement.

Our analysis uses a sample of 1,900 cases drawn from 27,453 California convictions for first-degree murder, second-degree murder, and voluntary manslaughter with offense dates between January 1978 and June 2002.  Contrary to the teachings of Furman, we found that several of California’s “special circumstances” target capital eligibility disparately based on the race or ethnicity of the defendant.  In so doing, the statute appears to codify rather than ameliorate the harmful racial stereotypes that are endemic to our criminal justice system.  The instantiation of racial and ethnic stereotypes into death-eligibility raises the specter of discriminatory intent in the design of California’s statute, with implications for constitutional regulation of capital punishment.

After veto-proof vote, New Hampshire appears poised to be first state to repeal death penalty legislatively since 2013

For a number of years not too long ago, a number of state legislatures got in the habit of repealing the (usually dormant) death penalty in their states.  Specifically, legislatures in five states over a span of six years led death penalty repeal efforts that become the law in New Jersey (2007), New Mexico (2009), Illinois (2011), Connecticut (2012), and Maryland (2013).  But thanks in part to a voter referendum rejecting a legislative repeal in Nebraska in 2016, it has been a full six years since a state legislature initiated a successful repeal of a state death penalty system.

But today, as reported in this local article, headlined "Death penalty repeal passes NH Senate with veto-proof majority," it looks like New Hampshire might soon be added to the list of states to repeal the death penalty legislatively during the modern era. Here are the details:

A bill to repeal the death penalty in New Hampshire cleared the state Senate with a veto-proof, 17-6, two-thirds margin Thursday, setting the stage for the end of capital punishment in a state that hasn’t executed anyone since 1939.  The House passed the repeal measure, HB 455, on March 3, also by a veto-proof vote of 279-88....

Gov. Chris Sununu has promised to veto the bill, but the votes in the House and Senate signal he most likely will be powerless to stop the repeal from taking effect unless two senators change their minds for the override vote.

The bill revokes the existing capital punishment statute and replaces it with a penalty of life in prison without the possibility of parole for murder of a police officer or other capital offenses.

New Hampshire currently has one person on death row — Michael Addison — who was sentenced to death for the 2006 killing of Manchester police Officer Michael Briggs. Opponents of death penalty repeal argued that Addison will never be executed if capital punishment is repealed, while supporters of the repeal said the law would not be applied retroactively.

Because I am pretty sure no state in the modern era has yet to execute a previously condemned person even after a "prospective only" repeal of the death penalty, I am also pretty sure that it could soon become very unlikely that Michael Addison will be executed for the 2006 killing of Manchester police officer.

Notable new (though incomplete) accounts of the state of death penalty politics

A couple of major news outlets had a couple of recent lengthy stories about modern death penalty politics.  Here are headlines, links, a small snippet and a follow-up comments:

From NBC News, "Death penalty repeal sweeping across states as both parties get on board":

Hannah Cox, the national manager of Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty, said that while the issue of repealing the death penalty was once a partisan one, that's changing.  It "was virtually unheard of in 2012 for a Republican lawmaker to sponsor repeal," Cox said.  This year, ten states have had Republican-sponsored legislation aimed at doing away with capital punishment, according to her grassroots advocacy group.  That includes Georgia, where the bipartisan House Bill 702 was introduced on March 28 backed by the Ways and Means committee chairman and boasting two other GOP co-sponsors.

From the New York Times, "Democrats Rethink the Death Penalty, and Its Politics":

In 2016, for the first time, the Democratic Party platform called for the abolition of the death penalty.  But Hillary Clinton, the party’s nominee for president, supported capital punishment. President Barack Obama never called for its end, either.  Al Gore was a supporter, and so was Bill Clinton.  Some fear it could still be a losing issue in a general election against President Trump, who has talked about expanding those eligible for execution to include convicted drug dealers and could use the issue to rally his base and portray Democrats as weak on crime.  In a Twitter post about Mr. Newsom’s moratorium, Mr. Trump wrote, “friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!”

Because the story of modern capital politics is so interesting and dynamic, I cannot fault these press stories for failing to cover it fully.  These pieces, in my view, especially miss the important stories surrounding the apparent disinterest that even Republican supporters of the death penalty now have for taking steps to enhance the number and pace of executions.  As regular readers know, here in Ohio, former GOP Gov (and once and perhaps future Prez candidate) John Kasich commuted or delayed a large number of executions and his replacement, Gov. Mike DeWine, recently imposed a de facto moratorium on executions because of lethal injection concerns.  Similarly, a number of deep red states with sizable death rows, states like Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma and South Carolina, have not had an execution in a number of years, and I do not recall any GOP leaders complaining (or campaigning) that this is a major problem.

Indeed, though Prez Trump was quick to criticize California Gov. Newsom's announcement of a formal execution moratorium, Prez Trump himself has seemingly done nothing over two+ years in the Oval Office to end the long-running de facto moratorium on federal executions.  Notably, California had its last execution in 2006, whereas the last federal execution took place way back  in 2003.  There are currently more than 60 people on federal death row, and some of have been there for more than 25 years.  Ultimately, it seems that Prez Trump is really like many GOP leaders these days: he is supportive of the death penalty in theory, but he is not really all that interested in doing the work needed to make the death penalty much more functional. And this political reality arguably accounts for the modern state of capital punishment more than any other factor.

Following SCOTUS ruling requiring equal access, Texas bans all religious officials from execution chamber

As reported in this local article, "Texas has banned all prison chaplains from its execution chamber, days after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the state was violating an inmate's rights by not allowing a Buddhist chaplain into the death chamber with him."  Here is more:

The high court last week halted the execution of Patrick Murphy, a member of the infamous "Texas Seven," because the department did not allow him to have a Buddhist chaplain in the room with him at the time of his scheduled death.  The state only allows prison employees in the death chamber, and only Christian and Muslim clerics are employed with the state. During executions, a chaplain will often stand at the feet of the prisoner and rest a hand on his leg mouthing silent prayers.

The court halted Murphy’s execution hours after it was scheduled to begin, and Justice Brett Kavanaugh issued an opinion declaring that the exclusion of a Buddhist adviser was religious discrimination.  The ruling came less than two months after the same court ruled against stopping the execution of a black prisoner in Alabama who requested a Muslim imam at his execution.  In his opinion, Kavanaugh proposed two alternatives for the Texas prison system: Don’t allow any chaplains into the execution chambers, or allow chaplains of all religions.

Texas has chosen the former option. New execution procedures signed Tuesday say that chaplains and ministers may "observe the execution only from the witness rooms." Currently, friends and family of the murder victims and prisoners, as well as media, are allowed to watch executions through a glass window in small rooms adjacent to the death chamber.

A spokesman for the Texas Department of Criminal Justice said the policy change is effective immediately. "TDCJ Chaplain(s) will continue to be available to an offender until they are transferred to the execution chamber.  The chaplain will also be present in the viewing room if requested," said the spokesman, Jeremy Desel.  Under the policy, prisoners will still be able to meet with a TDCJ chaplain or a spiritual adviser “who has the appropriate credentials” on the day of execution.

Prior related post:

• SCOTUS stays Texas execution because condemned was denied Buddhist spiritual advisor in execution chamber 

Splitting 5-4 along traditional ideological lines, SCOTUS rejects Missouri inmate's challenge to lethal injection protocol

The Supreme Court this morning handed down its opinion in an execution protocol case, Bucklew v. Precythe, No. 17-8151 (S. Ct. April 1, 2019) (available here).  The Court split 5-4 in favor of the state of Missouri, and here is how Justice Gorsuch's opinion for the Court gets started:

Russell Bucklew concedes that the State of Missouri lawfully convicted him of murder and a variety of other crimes.  He acknowledges that the U.S. Constitution permits a sentence of execution for his crimes.  He accepts, too, that the State’s lethal injection protocol is constitutional in most applications.  But because of his unusual medical condition, he contends the protocol is unconstitutional as applied to him.  Mr. Bucklew raised this claim for the first time less than two weeks before his scheduled execution.  He received a stay of execution and five years to pursue the argument, but in the end neither the district court nor the Eighth Circuit found it supported by the law or evidence. Now, Mr. Bucklew asks us to overturn those judgments.  We can discern no lawful basis for doing so.

Justice Breyer penned the lead dissent, and it gets started this way:

The Court’s decision in this case raises three questions.  The first is primarily a factual question, namely, whether Bucklew has established genuine issues of material fact concerning whether executing him by lethal injection would cause him excessive suffering.  The second is primarily a legal question, namely, whether a prisoner like Bucklew with a rare medical condition must identify an alternative method by which the State may execute him.  And the third is a more general question, namely, how to minimize delays in executing offenders who have been condemned to death.

I disagree with the majority’s answers to all three questions. Bucklew cites evidence that executing him by lethal injection will cause the tumors that grow in his throat to rupture during his execution, causing him to sputter, choke, and suffocate on his own blood for up to several minutes before he dies.  That evidence establishes at this stage of the proceedings that executing Bucklew by lethal injection risks subjecting him to constitutionally impermissible suffering.  The majority holds that the State may execute him anyway.  In my view, that holding violates the clear command of the Eighth Amendment.

The decision includes short concurring opinions from Justices Thomas and Kavanaugh, and also a added dissenting opinion by Justice Sotomayor. I fear a busy day means I will not be able to analyze all that is being said in this case until late tonight.  But I suspect, as is always true with capital cases, lots of other folks will have lots to say about what various Justices are saying here.

Notable judicial hand-wringing from California Supreme Court justices about "expensive and dysfunctional [capital] system that does not deliver justice or closure"

A helpful colleague made sure I did not miss the notable short concurring opinion at the end of this long decision by the Supreme Court of California affirming a death sentence. The concurring opinion was authored by Justice Goodwin Liu and joined by Justice Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar. Here is how it gets started:

Today’s decision is our first to affirm a death judgment since Governor Newsom signed Executive Order N-09-19 effecting a moratorium on capital punishment in California. Neither defendant nor the Attorney General has suggested that the Executive Order raises any new issues bearing on this appeal. We thus decide this case on the claims and arguments as submitted.

And yet, as the Executive Order underscores, our decision affirming the judgment does not alter a fundamental reality: A death sentence in California has only a remote possibility of ever being carried out.  As leaders of the judiciary have long observed, the death penalty presents serious challenges for the fair and efficient administration of justice. For decades, those challenges have not been meaningfully addressed.  As a result, California’s death penalty is an expensive and dysfunctional system that does not deliver justice or closure in a timely manner, if at all.

The opinion goes on to highlight various reasons why the California death penalty system is such a mess and why the reform initiative in 2016, Proposition 66, "did not enact or put to the voters the key reforms that leading authorities consider fundamental to a workable death penalty system."  The eight-page opinion then concludes with this paragraph:

I express no view here on the morality or constitutionality of the death penalty.  Since joining this court, I have voted to affirm scores of death judgments, and I will continue to do so when the law requires.  It is impossible to review these cases without feeling tremendous compassion for the victims and their families, who have suffered unimaginable heartbreak and loss.  But the promise of justice in our death penalty system is a promise that California has been unable to keep. We are overdue for what our Chief Justice has called “a merit-based discussion on [the death penalty’s] effectiveness and costs.” (Dolan, [California Chief Justice Urges Reevaluating Death Penalty, L.A. Times (Dec. 24, 2011)].)  In the meantime, the judiciary will continue to do its duty under the law, leaving it to the voters and our elected representatives to decide whether California should double down on the current system or chart a new course.

Because Justice Liu was a law professor before he became a Justice, I fully understand his inclination to speak his mind on this issue and his decision to do so through the medium readily available to him (namely, a judicial opinion).  But, candidly, I was hoping for a little bit more of a formal legal payoff from this formal legal opinion, perhaps in the form of a call for briefing on whether Executive Order N-09-19 impacts the legal status of death penalty cases in California or whether state judges might exercise discretion not to continue adjudicating pending capital cases while the moratorium is in place.   

SCOTUS stays Texas execution because condemned was denied Buddhist spiritual advisor in execution chamber

As reported in this local article, "hours after he was to be executed for his role in a notorious 19-year-old crime, Texas death row prisoner Patrick Murphy won a rare stay from the U.S. Supreme Court based on his request to have a Buddhist spiritual adviser next to him in the death chamber."  Here is more:

The condemned man, one of the last surviving members of the so-called 'Texas 7' crew of prison escapees, lobbed a long-shot bid for reprieve earlier this week when his attorneys raised religious discrimination claims, arguing that the converted Buddhist couldn't make it to the Pure Land for rebirth without a spiritual adviser present as he prepared to die.

But the regular prison chaplain is a Christian and, in light of that, the Texas prison system's refusal to accommodate Murphy's request could be a constitutional violation. "As this Court has repeatedly held, governmental discrimination against religion — in particular, discrimination against religious persons, religious organizations, and religious speech— violates the Constitution," Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote.

"The choice of remedy going forward is up to the State. What the State may not do, in my view, is allow Christian or Muslim inmates but not Buddhist inmates to have a religious adviser of their religion in the execution room."

Two justices — Clarence Thomas and Neil Gorsuch — dissented, while Murphy's legal team celebrated the rare win.

"We are pleased the Supreme Court acknowledged both that Mr. Murphy, as a Buddhist, is entitled to be accompanied in the execution chamber during the execution by a minister of his own faith just as a Christian would be," Houston-based attorneys David Dow and Jeff Newberry said in a statement late Thursday.

But the late-breaking decision doesn't mean that Murphy can't be executed — it just means that he gets more time to argue his appeal, unless the Texas prison system instead chooses to resolve the issue by changing their protocols to allow Buddhists the same execution chamber religious rights as Christians.

Prison spokesman Jeremy Desel said the Texas Department of Criminal Justice legal team will "be reviewing the ruling" to figure out "what, if any, impact it will have."

The Supreme Court's ruling is available at this link, and here is the official statement from the Court:

The application for a stay of execution of sentence of death presented to JUSTICE ALITO and by him referred to the Court is granted.  The State may not carry out Murphy’s execution pending the timely filing and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari unless the State permits Murphy’s Buddhist spiritual advisor or another Buddhist reverend of the State’s choosing to accompany Murphy in the execution chamber during the execution.

Justice Kavanaugh decided to write a few paragraphs to explain his vote, and here is are a few sentences therefrom:

In this case, the relevant Texas policy allows a Christian or Muslim inmate to have a state-employed Christian or Muslim religious adviser present either in the execution room or in the adjacent viewing room.  But inmates of other religious denominations — for example, Buddhist inmates such as Murphy — who want their religious adviser to be present can have the religious adviser present only in the viewing room and not in the execution room itself for their executions.  In my view, the Constitution prohibits such denominational discrimination.

UPDATE: A number of commentors below and elsewhere have been discussing the notable difference in outcome between this case, where a dividied SCOTUS imposed a stay after the Fifth Circuit refused a stay, and Dunn v. Ray last month, where a divided SCOTUS lifted a lower court stay to allow an execution to go forward. Ilya Somin at The Volokh Conspiracy speaks to the parallels in this post, which concludes with these observations:

In my view, ... the justices saw the extremely negative reaction against their decision in Ray, and belatedly realized they had made a mistake; and not just any mistake, but one that inflicted real damage on their and the Court's reputations. Presented with a chance to "correct" their error and signal that they will not tolerate religious discrimination in death penalty administration, they were willing to bend over backwards to seize the opportunity, and not let it slip away.

And, whatever can be said about the procedural question, it's a good thing that the justices have taken a major step towards clearing up any confusion over their stance on the substantive one. Whether in death penalty cases or elsewhere, it is indeed impermissible for the government to discriminate on the basis of religion.

After state jury recommended 419 years plus life, feds allow Charlottesville killer to plead guilty to take capital charge off table

As reported in this NBC News piece, headlined "Driver in deadly car attack at Charlottesville white nationalist rally pleads guilty to federal hate crimes," the federal government cut a plea deal to allow a hate crime killer to avoid facing the death penalty.  Here are the basics:

The man convicted of murder in the deadly car attack on counterprotesters at the 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, pleaded guilty to federal hate crime charges Wednesday in order to dodge a possible death penalty.

James Alex Fields Jr., 21, from Maumee, Ohio, pleaded guilty to 29 of 30 charges against him.  The 30th charge, which included a possible death sentence, was dropped. He's been ordered to return to court on July 3 to be sentenced.

The single charge in Count 30 was brought under a provision of the Civil Rights Act of 1968.  It had accused Fields of racially motivated violent interference with a federally protected activity — counterprotesters using the public streets and sidewalks of Charlottesville — and carried a possible death penalty....

"The defendant in this case has pled guilty to 29 hate crimes which he committed by driving his car into a crowd of protesters," Attorney General William Barr said in a statement. "These hate crimes are also acts of domestic terrorism."

Barr cited the recent mosque massacre in New Zealand that left 50 dead in saying the nation must have zero tolerance for racial and religious bias.  “In the aftermath of the mass murder in New Zealand earlier this month, we are reminded that a diverse and pluralistic community such as ours can have zero tolerance for violence on the basis of race, religion, or association with people of other races and religions,” according to Barr....

U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Virginia Thomas Cullen said he hopes this courtroom deal will spare survivors of reliving that day.  “Although the defendant’s guilty plea cannot undo the pain, suffering, and loss that he caused, it is my hope that it will enable these victims and our community to continue the healing process," Cullen said....

Jurors in his state case found him guilty of murder and recommended he be sentenced to life in prison, plus 419 years. Sentencing in that case is scheduled for July 15.

I am always disinclined to question a plea deal without knowing all the details, especially details related to the expressed interests of the victims and the arguments that might be made by the defense.  But, in this context, I still cannot help but note that the Trump administration, though talking up the death penalty in various ways, has not yet shown all that much of a interest in aggressively pursuing capital prosecutions or actual executions.   (This AP article from back in October 2018 indicated that the first couple years of the Trump administration involved roughly the same use of the death penalty as in the early years of the Obama administration and that "both the Trump and Obama administrations pale in comparison to that of President George W. Bush and his attorney general John Ashcroft, who in 2003 alone signed off on capital prosecutions against more than three dozen defendants.")

Prior related posts:

• After Virginia jury convicts James Fields of first-degree murder for killing in Charlottesville, same jury to begin considering sentence
• "Charlottesville Jury Recommends 419 Years Plus Life For Neo-Nazi Who Killed Protester" 

California Gov Newsom, on heels of execution moratorium order, now talking up halt to any capital prosecutions

This Los Angeles Times piece, headlined "Gov. Newsom may prohibit new death sentences, setting up possible conflict with Becerra," it appears that the Governor of California may not be content with just delaying all possible executions during his time in office.  Here are some details:

A week after issuing an executive order imposing a blanket moratorium on the execution of California death row inmates, Gov. Gavin Newsom said he is considering a plan to prohibit any new death sentences in local criminal cases.

Newsom’s pronouncement could create conflict with another top Democratic leader, state Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra, who has supported capital punishment, even though the governor said he wants to work collaboratively with the attorney general.

Newsom reiterated his desire to abolish the death penalty and said he hopes to work with Becerra and others to determine whether, as governor, he can act “on behalf of the people in this state to no longer prosecute death.”

“There is a protocol of death and an administration of death in the state of California, and it consumes the court’s time, it consumes the criminal justice system, it exhausts the soul and the pocketbook,” Newsom said during a conference call with reporters from ethnic news outlets Tuesday. “I would ultimately like to shut down that system of death.”

Though it is not entirely clear how Newsom would carry out such an order, he could either have Becerra direct local district attorneys not to seek the death penalty or order Becerra to not defend appeals. Both approaches would probably face legal challenges....

Asked whether the attorney general will stop defending death sentences on appeal or direct county prosecutors to stop seeking death sentences, a Becerra spokeswoman said he is reviewing what role his office will play.  “The Department of Justice will work with Governor Newsom and his team as he implements his executive order and will continue to hold criminals accountable,” spokeswoman Bethany Lesser said.

After the Times published this story, Becerra requested an opportunity to clarify his position on the death penalty. In a telephone interview Thursday, he declined to answer if he supported or opposed capital punishment. He said only that, as attorney general, it was his duty to enforce the laws in California, the death penalty among them.  “Where I stand personally on it, I have real reservations about the death penalty. I think there is ample proof that it has not worked the way we would want when it comes to undertaking the most severe form of punishment that’s not reversible,” Becerra said....

The U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco on Monday asked the attorney general’s Department of Justice to indicate whether the governor’s moratorium will affect a death penalty case involving Martin Kipp, who was convicted in the 1983 slaying of Antaya Yvette Howard of Huntington Beach, a former basketball star at Marina High School.  “The Office of the Attorney General is in the process of determining the full effect of the Executive Order on death penalty cases,” the state Department of Justice told the court in a letter.

Even if Becerra disagrees with Newsom, he might not have a choice if the governor decides to force the issue. Because the California Constitution gives the governor “supreme executive power” over the executive branch, Newsom could order Becerra to take action that could suspend all death penalty prosecutions across the state. “In California’s executive branch, the governor has the final word,” said David A. Carrillo, executive director of the California Constitution Center at Berkeley Law.

In 1981, the California Supreme Court ruled that the governor’s constitutional powers give him direct authority over the attorney general. “The constitutional pattern is crystal clear: if a conflict between the Governor and the Attorney General develops over the faithful execution of the laws of this state, the Governor retains the ‘supreme executive power’ to determine the public interest,” the court decision stated....

The constitution also states that the attorney general, as the state’s chief law enforcement officer, has direct supervision over every county district attorney “in all matters pertaining to the duties of their respective offices” — opening up the possibility that he could order locally elected prosecutors to cease seeking the death penalty in murder trials.

Any attempt by the attorney general to dictate how a county district attorney can handle murder prosecutions would almost assuredly be unconstitutional and challenged in court, said Assemblyman Jordan Cunningham (R-Templeton), a former deputy district attorney. District attorneys serve independent of the attorney general, he said. “There’s a lot of D.A.s who I have spoken to, who I know, who aren’t happy with the moratorium that we have now,” Cunningham said. “We don’t live in a system where one person gets elected governor and they get to do what they want by executive fiat.”

Prior related post:

• New California Gov to order moratorium on executions in his state 

"Death by Numbers: Why Evolving Standards Compel Extending Roper’s Categorical Ban Against Executing Juveniles From 18 to 21"

The title of this post is the title of this notable new paper authored by John Blume, Hannah Freedman, Lindsey Vann and Amelia Hritz.  Here is its abstract:

Nearly fifteen years ago, the Supreme Court held in Roper v. Simmons that the Eighth Amendment prohibits the execution of people who were under 18 at the time of their offenses. The Court justified the line it drew based on legislative enactments, jury verdicts, and neuroscience.  In the intervening years, however, much has changed in juvenile sentencing jurisprudence, the legal treatment of young people, and neuroscience.  These changes beg the question: Why 18?  Is the bright-line rule that the Court announced in Roper still constitutionally valid or do the changes since 2005 now point to a new cutoff at 21?

To answer those questions, this Article considers post-Roper developments in the relevant domains to make the case that the 18-year-old constitutional line should be extended to age 21.  It does so by applying the Supreme Court’s evolving-standards-of-decency methodology.  Specifically, the Article examines all death sentences and executions imposed in the United States post-Roper and looks at the current state of neuroscientific research that the Court found compelling when it decided Roper.

Two predominant trends emerge.  First, there is a national consensus against executing people under 21.  This consensus comports with what new developments in neuroscience have made clear: people under 21 have brains that look and behave like the brains of younger teenagers, not like adult brains.  Second, young people of color are disproportionately sentenced to die — even more so than adult capital defendants.  The role of race is amplified when the victim is white.  These trends confirm that the logic that compelled the Court to ban executions of people under 18 extends to people under 21.

Rounding-up some news and commentary as SCOTUS hears argument on latest round of capital insanity

Albert Einstein is generally credited with the aphorism that "the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, but expecting different results." That quote came to mind as I was thinking about the Supreme Court's consideration this morning of a Batson claim in Flowers v. Mississippi. Here is a brief accounting of just some of the backstory of this case (with emphasis added) from this SCOTUSblog post when cert was granted:

[T]he justices will once again review the case of Curtis Flowers, who was sentenced to death for an infamous quadruple murder at a furniture store in Winona, Mississippi.  Flowers was tried six times.  During the first four trials, prosecutor Doug Evans was twice found to have violated the constitutional ban on racial discrimination in selecting jurors: He had struck all 10 of the potential African-American jurors, while he used all of his strikes to remove African Americans from the jury pool in the third and fourth trials.  Flowers’ fifth trial deadlocked, but at his sixth trial, Evans allowed the first African-American juror to be seated but then struck the remaining five African-American jurors. 

Reviewing my blog archives, I noticed that it was nine years ago(!) that I blogged here about a local article and asked "Will sixth time be the charm in capital trial(s) of Curtis Flowers?"

Here are a few up-to-date discussions of and commentary on the case as it now comes before the US Supreme Court on the issue of whether the Mississippi Supreme Court properly applied Batson v. Kentucky in this version of the case:

• From ABC News, "After blacks kicked off juries, Mississippi death row inmate brings racial bias claim to Supreme Court"

• From The Atlantic, "A Racial Pattern So Obvious, Even the Supreme Court Might See It: Flowers v. Mississippi reveals a rickety American legal system."

• From CNN, "Mississippi death row inmate, after six trials, claims race discrimination"

• From Jurist, "The Supreme Court Must Stand for Equality in Upcoming Jury-Selection Case"

• From SCOTUSblog, "Argument preview: Justices to weigh allegations of racial discrimination in jury selection"

Rounding up some commentary on Gov Newsom's formal halting of executions in California

Given that there were no executions in California during the second term of Gov Arnold Schwarzenegger or during the two terms of Gov Jerry Brown, I was not expecting to see California's execution chamber suddenly getting a lot of use once Gavin Newsom took over.  But, as reported here, just two months into office, Gov Newsom formalize matters by ordering an "executive moratorium ... in the forms of a reprieve for all people sentenced to death in California."  Here is a smattering of commentary about this move:

• From The Atlantic, "Will the U.S. Finally End the Death Penalty?: In the past, abolition efforts faced a backlash—but Gavin Newsom’s moratorium may be different."

• "From the Mercury News, "Newsom move effectively ends death penalty in US: The closing of California’s death row, America’s largest, has more than just symbolic importance"

• From the Los Angeles Times, "Politicians don’t normally overrule voters. On the death penalty, Gavin Newsom just did"

• From The National Review, "Gavin Newsom's Death-Penalty Overreach"

• From the San Diego Union-Tribune, "How Newsom is ignoring California voters with death penalty reprieve"

• From the San Diego Union-Tribune, "How Newsom is leading California forward on the death penalty"

• From the San Francisco Forum, "Gov. Newsom’s death penalty moratorium undercuts the voters’ will"

New California Gov to order moratorium on executions in his state

As reported in this local piece, headlined "Gov. Gavin Newsom to stop death penalty in California, giving reprieves to 737 death row inmates," there is big death penalty news from the Golden State.  Here are the details:

Gov. Gavin Newsom is putting a moratorium on the death penalty in California, sparing the lives of more than 700 death-row inmates.  Newsom plans to sign an executive order Wednesday morning granting reprieves to all 737 Californians awaiting executions – a quarter of the country’s death row inmates.

His action comes three years after California voters rejected an initiative to end the death penalty, instead passing a measure to speed up executions.

Newsom says the death penalty system has discriminated against mentally ill defendants and people of color. It has not made the state safer and has wasted billions of taxpayer dollars, according to prepared remarks Newsom plans to deliver Wednesday morning when he signs the order.

“Our death penalty system has been – by any measure — a failure,” Newsom plans to say. “The intentional killing of another person is wrong. And as governor, I will not oversee the execution of any individual.”

California has not executed anyone in more than a decade because of legal challenges to the state’s execution protocol. But executions for more than 20 inmates who have exhausted their appeals could have resumed if those challenges were cleared up, and Newsom has said he worried that it could happen soon.

Newsom has been a longtime opponent of the death penalty. While campaigning for a measure to repeal the death penalty in 2016, he told The Modesto Bee editorial board he would “be accountable to the will of the voters,” if he were elected governor. “I would not get my personal opinions in the way of the public’s right to make a determination of where they want to take us” on the death penalty, he said.

The moratorium will be in place for the duration of Newsom’s time in office, the governor’s office said. After that, a future governor could decide to resume executions.

California is one of 31 states with capital punishment.  In recent years, other states have abolished the death penalty and several other governors have placed moratoriums on executions. The California Constitution gives the governor power to grant reprieves to inmates, providing he reports his reasoning to the Legislature.

But Newsom’s action will anger death penalty proponents. “The voters of the State of California support the death penalty.  That is powerfully demonstrated by their approval of Proposition 66 in 2016 to ensure the death penalty is implemented, and their rejection of measures to end the death penalty in 2016 and 2006, said Michele Hanisee, president of the Association of Deputy District Attorneys, in a statement late Tuesday.  “Governor Newsom, who supported the failed initiative to end the death penalty in 2006, is usurping the express will of California voters and substituting his personal preferences via this hasty and ill-considered moratorium on the death penalty.”

Preventing executions through a blanket action is an abuse of the governor’s power, death-penalty supporter Kent Scheidegger told The Bee in an interview earlier this month. The governor’s clemency powers are designed to correct individual cases of injustice, said Scheidegger, legal director for the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.  “It’s not supposed to be a weapon for blocking the enforcement of the law that the people have passed just because the governor disagrees with it,” Scheidegger said.

In addition to the moratorium, Newsom’s order will also withdraw California’s legal injection protocol and close the execution chamber at San Quentin, where all death row inmates are imprisoned.  Those on death row will remain in prison under the order.

I suspect this moratorium order may be challenged in court, but I doubt there is functionally much that can be done to undo this moratorium given that there has been de facto moratorium in place for more than a decade already.

UPDATE: Over at California Correctional Crisis, Hadar Aviram has this lengthy posting about the moratorium and its implications under the title "Moratorium!!! What Does It Mean?"

ANOTHER UPDATE: This press release from Governor Newsom's office provide a link to this official executive order which orders, inter alia, the "executive moratorium ... in the forms of a reprieve for all people sentenced to death in California."  And I have now seen that Prez Trump had this tweet about this development this morning: "Defying voters, the Governor of California will halt all death penalty executions of 737 stone cold killers. Friends and families of the always forgotten VICTIMS are not thrilled, and neither am I!" 

Ohio Governor officially postpones three more scheduled executions

As reported here a few weeks ago, the new Governor of Ohio has imposed something of a de facto moratorium on executions because of concerns over the state's(historically troubled) lethal injection protocol.  This new local article, headlined "DeWine delays three more executions due to lethal drug concerns," reports on the last official manifestation of this unofficial execution moratorium:

After urging from a federal judge, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine delayed three more executions today.

DeWine has said he doesn’t want to carry out another execution until the judge’s concerns with Ohio’s current method are addressed. He has directed the state Department of Rehabilitation and Correction (DRC) to come up with a new protocol after federal Magistrate Judge Michael Mertz said the “current three-drug protocol will certainly or very likely cause (the one being executed) severe pain and needless suffering.”

David Stebbins, assistant federal public defender who is involved in Ohio death penalty cases, called the governor’s move “a commendable first step.” But the defense lawyer noted Ohioans still have “no indication of what the new protocol will be, when it will be made public, or what kind of litigation schedule may ensue. On the current schedule, there is no guarantee that proper vetting can occur before the first execution in September.

In January, DeWine issued a reprieve of execution to Columbus killer Warren Henness, who had been scheduled to die Feb. 13.

So this morning DeWine delayed the death dates for Cleveland Jackson, who was scheduled to be executed May 29, to Nov. 13; Kareem Jackson, set for July 10, moved to Jan. 16, 2020; and Gregory Lott, slated for Aug. 14, now scheduled for March 12. This was not the first delay for Lott, a Cuyahoga County killer; he originally was scheduled for execution on Nov. 19, 2014.

DeWine’s office said the reprieves were granted “because it is highly unlikely that the state’s new execution protocol, which is still in the process of being developed by DRC, would have time to be litigated by scheduled execution dates. Governor DeWine is also mindful of the emotional trauma experienced by victims’ families, prosecutors, law enforcement, and DRC employees when an execution is prepared for and then rescheduled.”

A few (of many) prior recent related posts:

• New Ohio Gov puts halt to all executions until Ohio develops new execution method 
• Ohio's new governor delays first scheduled execution under his watch based on concerns about lethal-injection drugs
• Highlighting, though Ohio's remarkable recent experience, a possible tipping point on midazolam as a lethal injection drug 
• "Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States"

Federal judge denies request by Philly DA to vacate state death sentence

As reported in this local article, headlined "Judge denies Krasner office’s request to vacate death penalty in 1984 double murder," an effort by the current Philadelphia District Attorney to undo some work by prior DAs hit a federal snag. Here are the interesting details:

A federal judge on Monday denied a request by the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office to vacate the death penalty for a Philadelphia man convicted of the 1984 strangulation and drowning deaths of a prominent pastor’s son and daughter-in-law in their East Mount Airy home.

U.S. District Judge Mitchell Goldberg wrote that for three decades, the DA’s Office had “consistently and zealously opposed” inmate Robert Wharton’s efforts to overturn his conviction and death sentence. Early last month, the office informed the judge it would no longer fight the appeal. Max Cooper Kaufman, supervisor of the federal litigation unit under District Attorney Larry Krasner, wrote that the decision came after the office reexamined the case and communicated with the victims’ family.

In his written opinion, Goldberg described the deaths of Bradley Hart, 26, and his wife, Ferne, 31, as “particularly horrific” and noted the DA’s Office didn’t explain the reason behind what he called "this complete reversal of course.” He ordered both parties to submit briefs explaining their positions.

Krasner, a former criminal defense lawyer who took office last year, campaigned on a platform of never seeking the death penalty. His spokesperson, Ben Waxman, said by email Monday that the office had no comment on Goldberg’s ruling “except to say that we are reviewing the opinion and considering next steps in the case." The Federal Community Defender Office, which is representing Wharton, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Wharton’s co-defendant, Eric Mason, was sentenced to life in prison. Both men, construction workers from Germantown, were 20 at the time of the murders. Now 56, Wharton is on death row at the State Correctional Institution-Phoenix in Montgomery County.

According to evidence in the case, on the night of Jan. 30, 1984, Wharton and Mason went to the Harts’ home, tied up the couple, and separated them. Wharton choked Ferne Hart with a necktie and drowned her in a bathtub. Mason denied killing anyone, but was accused by Wharton of killing Bradley Hart by forcing his face in water and strangling him with an electrical cord....

In April 1992, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court partially granted Wharton’s appeal, ordering a new sentencing hearing. That December, a second Philadelphia jury reimposed the double-death sentence for Wharton. In December 2002, then-Gov. Mark Schweiker signed his death warrant, but the execution was stayed after Wharton appealed to federal court.

Goldberg in 2012 denied his petition, but an appellate court sent it back to the district judge on just one claim — whether his lawyer was ineffective for failing to tell the jury about Wharton’s adjustment to prison. That was the claim the District Attorney’s Office last month said it would not fight. The DA’s Office also asked the judge to grant summary relief by taking the death penalty off the table and said that if the judge did so, prosecutors wouldn’t seek a new death sentence in state court.

Krasner has received pushback by the judiciary in at least one other case in which his office tried to throw out a death sentence. In October, Pennsylvania Supreme Court Justice Christine Donohue wrote in a majority opinion that a jury had approved the death penalty for Lavar Brown, and the DA’s Office couldn’t change that result “based upon the differing views of the current office holder.”

Pennsylvania’s death penalty has been used just three times since it was reinstated by the state in 1978. Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium on its use in 2015. Wolf’s spokesperson said Monday that the governor believes the moratorium should continue in light of a June 2018 report by a bipartisan legislative task force and advisory committee, which found various problems concerning the death penalty.

Because I have not yet had time to find Judge Goldberg's opinion, I am disinclined to comment on the specifics yet. But the case presents a fascinating set of issues concerning finality, prosecutorial discretion and the interplay of federal and state authority over capital prosecutions. And, as it always the case when I learn about long-running capital cases, I cannot help but wonder what litigation over the death penalty has cost (and will continue to cost) state and federal taxpayers here.

Spotlighting the role of prosecutors as the death penalty fades away in Pennsylvania

This lengthy local article, headlined "Death penalty has fallen out of favor with Pennsylvania prosecutors," reports on the steady decline in capital prosecutions and death sentences in the Keystone state in recent decades. Here are excerpts:

Pennsylvania’s death penalty is, by all accounts, embattled.  There hasn’t been an execution in two decades, even before Gov. Tom Wolf imposed a moratorium on them in 2015. The courts have long scrutinized death sentences, throwing out scores of them at appeal.  And juries have become more hesitant to impose the state’s ultimate punishment.  A long-awaited legislative study recently called for a host of reforms.

But a surprising factor is quietly contributing to the death penalty’s decline in Pennsylvania: Prosecutors are increasingly reluctant to pursue capital murder charges, given the high financial cost and lengthy legal battles they guarantee, and the improbability the sentences will ultimately be carried out.

In 2004, 40 percent of murder convictions in Pennsylvania started as death-penalty cases, according to a review of state data by The Morning Call.  By 2017, that number had dropped more than threefold, to 12 percent of murder convictions, the lowest rate in 14 years....

The Morning Call’s figures offer a first accounting of the waning frequency with which the state’s 67 elected district attorneys pursue capital punishment, data that state government does not track.  For its analysis, the newspaper reviewed 4,184 murder convictions in Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2017, using docket sheets, appellate court records and local media accounts to determine whether they were ever listed as capital cases....

The findings showed that in 2004, there were 309 murder convictions statewide, of which 123 started as death-penalty prosecutions.  In 2017, there were 271 murder convictions, of which 33 saw the filing of capital charges.

The downward trend held generally year to year, though there were occasional bumps.  It was driven by Philadelphia, which has long dominated Pennsylvania’s death-penalty cases, but was also seen in the rest of the state, though some individual counties such as Bucks, Chester and Lancaster saw little or no change.  And the numbers should only fall further in the coming years, amid the tenure of Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner, a self-described progressive who took office in 2018 vowing to never pursue the death penalty....

Death sentences are falling across the nation, said Robert Dunham, a former federal public defender in Pennsylvania who now heads the Death Penalty Information Center, a Washington, D.C., nonprofit.  “Pennsylvania reflects that pattern,” Dunham said. “What we’re seeing is that prosecutors have realized these cases are likely to not result in a death sentence.”...

Amid that, the governor’s moratorium remains in effect, with little movement in the Legislature to take up capital punishment.  Wolf tied his decision to a Senate-commissioned report on the death penalty, a long-delayed study that was released in June after seven years of preparation.  The report offered a raft of potential reforms, including calls for a state-funded capital defender’s office, and more protections to prevent the execution of the mentally ill and intellectually disabled.

Wolf will continue blocking executions until the death penalty’s problems are corrected, said J.J. Abbott, a spokesman for the governor.  “He looks forward to working with the General Assembly on their plans to address the report and its recommendations for legislative changes, all of which he believes should be debated and considered,” Abbott said in a prepared statement.

Whether there is momentum to take up the death penalty — either to repeal it or to fix it with an eye to resuming executions — remains unclear.

State Rep. Rob Kauffman, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said he is open to re-examining capital punishment, considering its cost to taxpayers and the lack of executions.  But he said it just isn’t a big topic in Harrisburg.  “There’s a lot that has been talked about regarding criminal justice reform, but this is not one of those front-burner issues,” said Kauffman, R-Franklin.

In the meantime, the number of inmates on death row continues to fall, as do the number of new death sentences.  In 2018, juries added only one killer to death row in Pennsylvania.

Texas completes execution of triple killer ... and his family gets arrested

This local article, headlined "Texas death row inmate's son arrested for outburst during father's execution," reports on an execution and its remarkable aftermath. Here are details:

Billie Wayne Coble's son pounded on the execution chamber windows, cursing and shouting "no" as he watched his father die. It was just after 6:20 p.m., and the 70-year-old triple killer was about to become the oldest Texan executed in the modern era of capital punishment.

The aging Vietnam veteran who murdered his in-laws in an apparent rash of vengeance offered a only a short final statement before he was pronounced dead, according to the Texas Department of Criminal Justice. "That will be five dollars," he said. "I love you, I love you, and I love you."...

But as soon as he finished speaking, the witness room erupted into chaos.  Gordon Coble started banging on the glass, and his son Dalton joined in the furor.  Both men — along with another relative — were removed from the room before the execution ended, and the two ended the night in the Walker County Jail, facing resisting arrest charges....

It was a dramatic and unexpected end to a decades-long saga. Back in the summer of 1989, Coble was distraught over the disintegration of his third marriage when he kidnapped his estranged wife and killed her parents and brother before attempting to kill himself.

But the Waco man, now 70, had no priors and, as he racked up years of good behavior in prison, his attorneys argued that a pair of experts for the state got it wrong at trial when they offered testimony claiming he'd be a future danger even behind bars....

This year, Coble's lawyer filed a plea for clemency.  "He is now 70 years old, in poor health, and has an almost blemish-free prison record for the past 30 years," attorney Richard Ellis wrote.  "His execution would serve no valid purpose."

The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles turned his request down on Tuesday, leaving him with a final appeal in front of the U.S. Supreme Court.  In that claim, Coble's attorney argued that the Waco man's trial attorneys shouldn't have admitted his guilt because Coble asked them not to.  Last year, the same concern came up in a Louisiana case — and the high court sided with the condemned prisoner.  In Coble's case they did not....

Coble was the second man executed in Texas in 2019. There are five more executions on the calendar, including a June death date for Harris County killer Dexter Johnson.

SCOTUS, ruling 5-3, clarifies execution competency standards and remands in Madison v. Alabama

The Supreme Court this morning handed down an opinion in Madison v. Alabama, 17-7505 (S. Ct. Feb. 27, 2019) (available here), a case concerning the distinctive Eighth Amendment jurisprudence addressing whether a defendant is competent to be executed.  The ruling in the case is 5-3, as Justice Kavanaugh had not yet joined the Court at the time the case was argued.  Justice Kagan delivered the opinion of the Court, which was joined by the Chief Justice as well as Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor.  Here is how the opinion gets started:

The Eighth Amendment, this Court has held, prohibits the execution of a prisoner whose mental illness prevents him from “rational[ly] understanding” why the State seeks to impose that punishment. Panetti v. Quarterman, 551 U.S. 930, 959 (2007). In this case, Vernon Madison argued that his memory loss and dementia entitled him to a stay of execution, but an Alabama court denied the relief.  We now address two questions relating to the Eighth Amendment’s bar, disputed below but not in this Court.  First, does the Eighth Amendment forbid execution whenever a prisoner shows that a mental disorder has left him without any memory of committing his crime?  We (and, now, the parties) think not, because a person lacking such a memory may still be able to form a rational understanding of the reasons for his death sentence. Second, does the Eighth Amendment apply similarly to a prisoner suffering from dementia as to one experiencing psychotic delusions?  We (and, now, the parties) think so, because either condition may — or, then again, may not — impede the requisite comprehension of his punishment.  The only issue left, on which the parties still disagree, is what those rulings mean for Madison’s own execution.  We direct that issue to the state court for further consideration in light of this opinion.

Justice Alito filed a dissenting opinion, which Justices Thomas and Gorsuch joined, and starts with these pointed passages:

What the Court has done in this case makes a mockery of our Rules.

Petitioner’s counsel convinced the Court to stay his client’s execution and to grant his petition for a writ of certiorari for the purpose of deciding a clear-cut constitutional question: Does the Eighth Amendment prohibit the execution of a murderer who cannot recall committing the murder for which the death sentence was imposed? The petition strenuously argued that executing such a person is unconstitutional.

After persuading the Court to grant review of this question, counsel abruptly changed course. Perhaps because he concluded (correctly) that petitioner was unlikely to prevail on the question raised in the petition, he conceded that the argument advanced in his petition was wrong, and he switched to an entirely different argument, namely, that the state court had rejected petitioner’s claim that he is incompetent to be executed because the court erroneously thought that dementia, as opposed to other mental conditions, cannot provide a basis for such a claim.  See Brief for Petitioner 16.

This was not a question that the Court agreed to hear; indeed, there is no mention whatsoever of this argument in the petition — not even a hint. Nor is this question fairly included within those on which the Court granted review.  On the contrary, it is an entirely discrete and independent question.

Counsel’s tactics flagrantly flouted our Rules.  Our Rules make it clear that we grant certiorari to decide the specific question or questions of law set out in a petition for certiorari. See this Court’s Rule 14.1(a) (“Only the questions set out in the petition, or fairly included therein, will be considered by the Court”).  Our whole certiorari system would be thrown into turmoil if we allowed counsel to obtain review of one question and then switch to an entirely different question after review is granted. In the past when counsel have done this, we have dismissed the writ as improvidently granted.  See, e.g., Visa, Inc. v. Osborn, 580 U.S. ___ (2016); City and County of San Francisco v. Sheehan, 575 U.S. ___ (2015). We should do that here.

Instead, the majority rewards counsel’s trick.  It vacates the judgment below because it is unsure whether the state court committed the error claimed in petitioner’s merits brief.  But not only was there no trace of this argument in the petition, there is nothing in the record showing that the state court ever adopted the erroneous view that petitioner claims it took.

As all Court watchers know, "death is different" not only for Eighth Amendment jurisprudence but also for how the Justices approach these cases procedurally. I suspect Justice Alito is not surprised that some fellow Justices are approaching a capital case in a unique way, but I wonder if he is surprised that the Chief Justice provides the key swing vote for the defendant here.

New Ohio Gov puts halt to all executions until Ohio develops new execution method

As reported in this local article, headlined "Gov. Mike DeWine freezes all Ohio executions while new method developed," the Buckeye state is yet again in a capital holding pattern because it governor is troubled by the state's current execution method. Here are the details:

Gov. Mike DeWine said Tuesday that there will be no more executions in Ohio until a new method of carrying them out can be developed and deemed constitutional by the courts.

“As long as the status quo remains, where we don’t have a protocol that has been found to be OK, we certainly cannot have any executions in Ohio,” DeWine told reporters at an Associated Press forum in Columbus. “That would not be right, at least in my opinion.”

Pressed on whether he personally supports the death penalty, DeWine paused. Seeming to choose his words carefully, he then said he was a sponsor of Ohio’s current capital punishment law, which took effect in 1981. “It is the law of the state of Ohio. And I’ll let it go [not comment further] at this point. We are seeing clearly some challenges that you have all reported on in regard to carrying out the death penalty. But I’m not going to go further down that path any more today,” he said.

DeWine, a Republican, ordered a review of Ohio’s death penalty protocols last month after a federal magistrate judge wrote that Ohio’s method of carrying out executions would subject a condemned Ohio prisoner to “severe pain and needless suffering.” Judge Michael Merz wrote Ohio could proceed with the execution, since the inmate, Warren Henness, did not produce an alternative that is ”available,” “feasible,” and can be “readily implemented,” required under a 2015 United States Supreme Court ruling that upheld lethal injection.

DeWine delayed Henness’ execution from Feb. 13 to Sept. 12 while the review was underway. But on Tuesday, he declined to place a timetable on how long it might take for a new execution method to be developed, for it to be legally challenged and then found constitutional by the courts. “I’ve dealt with the court system a long time, and I think it’s whenever you think you can figure out how fast or slow something’s going to take, you’re wrong,” he said....

Ohio’s method of execution is to inject the condemned with a combination of three drugs: midazolam (as a sedative), a paralytic drug, and potassium chloride to stop their heart. Death penalty opponents have challenged similar methods in other states, saying they are unconstitutional because they cause cruel and unusual punishment.

In his January opinion, Mertz, the federal magistrate judge, agreed with arguments made by Henness’s lawyers, writing that “it is certain or very likely” that the state’s prescribed dose of midazolam “cannot reduce consciousness to the level at which a condemned inmate will not experience the severe pain associated with injection of the paralytic drug or potassium chloride” or the “severe pain and needless suffering that is certain or very likely to be caused by the pulmonary edema which is very likely to be caused directly by the midazolam.”

DeWine’s review marks the second time in five years Ohio has searched for a new method of execution. The state changed the drugs it uses for lethal injection after the January 2014 execution of Dennis B. McGuire took more than 25 minutes.

Ohio had some two dozen execution dates scheduled over the next four years, but I think they are all now functionally on hold pending development of a new execution method. And, reading between the lines, I get the sense that Governor DeWine would be just fine if the state official did not try all that hard to devise a new execution method anytime soon.

A few (of many) prior recent related posts:

• Ohio's new governor delays first scheduled execution under his watch based on concerns about lethal-injection drugs
• Highlighting, though Ohio's remarkable recent experience, a possible tipping point on midazolam as a lethal injection drug 
• "Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States"
• Ohio completes its first execution since botched execution of another inmate late last year
• Ohio unable to complete execution for elderly murderer once called death penalty “poster child”
• Reviewing Ohio's unique execution difficulties ... which perhaps explains seemingly ho-hum reaction to latest botched Ohio execution 

SCOTUS via 6-3 vote rules Texas yet again misapplied its Eighth Amendment jurisprudence prohibiting the execution of those with intellectual disability

In the middle of this lengthy new SCOTUS order list, which has lots of cert denials and individual opinions about cert denials, is one notable Supreme Court opinion on the merits in Moore v. Texas, No. 18–443 (S. Ct. Feb. 19, 2019). The start and last substantive paragraph of the 10-page per curiam opinion for the Court provides the basics:

In 2015, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals held that petitioner, Bobby James Moore, did not have intellectual disability and consequently was eligible for the death penalty.  Ex parte Moore, 470 S.W.3d 481, 527–528 (Ex parte Moore I).  We previously considered the lawfulness of that determination, vacated the appeals court’s decision, and remanded the case for further consideration of the issue.  Moore v. Texas, 581 U. S. ___, ___ (2017) (slip op., at 18).  The appeals court subsequently reconsidered the matter but reached the same conclusion.  Ex parte Moore, 548 S.W.3d 552, 573 (Tex. Crim. App. 2018) (Ex parte Moore II).  We again review its decision, and we reverse its determination....

We conclude that the appeals court’s opinion, when taken as a whole and when read in the light both of our prior opinion and the trial court record, rests upon analysis too much of which too closely resembles what we previously found improper.  And extricating that analysis from the opinion leaves too little that might warrant reaching a different conclusion than did the trial court.  We consequently agree with Moore and the prosecutor that, on the basis of the trial court record, Moore has shown he is a person with intellectual disability.

Chief Justice Roberts has this one-paragraph concurrence in the case:

When this case was before us two years ago, I wrote in dissent that the majority’s articulation of how courts should enforce the requirements of Atkins v. Virginia, 536 U.S. 304 (2002), lacked clarity.  Moore v. Texas, 581 U.S. ___, ___–___ (2017) (slip op., at 10–11).  It still does.  But putting aside the difficulties of applying Moore in other cases, it is easy to see that the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals misapplied it here.  On remand, the court repeated the same errors that this Court previously condemned — if not quite in haec verba, certainly in substance.  The court repeated its improper reliance on the factors articulated in Ex parte Briseno, 135 S.W.3d 1, 8 (Tex. Crim. App. 2004), and again emphasized Moore’s adaptive strengths rather than his deficits.  That did not pass muster under this Court’s analysis last time.  It still doesn’t.  For those reasons, I join the Court’s opinion reversing the judgment below.

Justice Alito, joined by Justices Thomas and Gorsuch, pens a three-page dissent with concludes this way:

The Court’s foray into factfinding is an unsound departure from our usual practice.  The error in this litigation was not the state court’s decision on remand but our own failure to provide a coherent rule of decision in Moore.  I would deny the petition for a writ of certiorari.  I certainly would not summarily reverse and make our own finding of fact without even giving the State the opportunity to brief and argue the question.  I therefore respectfully dissent.

There is a whole lot here to notice, but I think especially important and notable is the fact that the newest Justice, Justice Kavanaugh, is with the majority of the Court and not the dissenters here. Because of the Chief Justice's vote, Justice Kavanaugh is not technically a swing vote in this capital case.  But his vote still reveals that, unlike Justices Alito and Thomas (and even seemingly Justice Gorsuch), Justice Kavanaugh may be more inclined to scrutinize state capital practices than certain of his conservative colleagues.

"A World of Steel-Eyed Death': An Empirical Evaluation of the Failure of the Strickland Standard to Ensure Adequate Counsel to Defendants with Mental Disabilities Facing the Death Penalty"

The title of this post is the title of this new article now available via SSRN authored by Michael Perlin, Talia Roitberg Harmon and Sarah Chatt. Here is its abstract:

Anyone who has been involved with death penalty litigation in the past four decades knows that one of the most scandalous aspects of that process — in many ways, the most scandalous — is the inadequacy of counsel so often provided to defendants facing execution.  By now, virtually anyone with even a passing interest is well versed in the cases and stories about sleeping lawyers, missed deadlines, alcoholic and disoriented lawyers, and, more globally, lawyers who simply failed to vigorously defend their clients.  This is not news.

And, in the same vein, anyone who has been so involved with this area of law and policy for the past 35 years knows that it is impossible to make sense of any of these developments without a deep understanding of the Supreme Court’s decision in Strickland v. Washington, 466 U.S. 668 (1984), the case that established a pallid, virtually-impossible-to fail test for adequacy of counsel in such litigation.  Again, this is not news.

We also know that some of the most troubling results in Strickland interpretations have come in cases in which the defendant was mentally disabled — either by serious mental illness or by intellectual disability.  Some of the decisions in these cases — rejecting Strickland-based appeals — have been shocking, making a mockery out of a constitutionally based standard.

To the best of our knowledge, no one has — prior to this article — undertaken an extensive empirical analysis of how one discrete US federal circuit court of appeals has dealt with a wide array of Strickland-claim cases in cases involving defendants with mental disabilities.  We do this here.  In this article, we reexamine these issues from the perspective of the 198 state cases decided in the Fifth Circuit from 1984 to 2017 involving death penalty verdicts in which, at some stage of the appellate process, a Strickland claim was made (in which there were only 13 cases in which any relief was even preliminarily granted under Strickland).  As we demonstrate subsequently, Strickland is indeed a pallid standard, fostering “tolerance of abysmal lawyering,” and is one that makes a mockery of the most vital of constitutional law protections: the right to adequate counsel.

This article will proceed in this way.  First, we discuss the background of the development of counsel adequacy in death penalty cases.  Next, we look carefully at Strickland, and the subsequent Supreme Court cases that appear — on the surface — to bolster it in this context.  We then consider multiple jurisprudential filters that we believe must be taken seriously if this area of the law is to be given any authentic meaning.  Next, we will examine and interpret the data that we have developed, looking carefully at what happened after the Strickland-ordered remand in the 13 Strickland “victories.”  Finally, we will look at this entire area of law through the filter of therapeutic jurisprudence, and then explain why and how the charade of adequacy of counsel law fails miserably to meet the standards of this important school of thought.

WWJD?: Interesting comments as Wyoming senate rejects effort to repeal the state's dormant death penalty

I mentioned in this post a few weeks ago that the Wyoming House of Representatives had voted to repeal the state's death penalty.  This past week the legislative repeal effort died, as reported in this local article headlined "Wyoming Senate defeats death penalty repeal bill."  And a notable quote from a particular senator concerning her reasons for voting against repeal has garnered some extra attention.  Here are some particulars:

The Wyoming Senate defeated a bill Thursday that would have repealed the state’s death penalty, ending the most successful legislative attempt to do away with capital punishment in recent memory. Having passed the House by a safe margin, the bill was swiftly voted down by the Wyoming Senate on its first reading. The final vote was 12-18.

“The vote was different than I expected to see from talking with people beforehand,” said the bill’s sponsor in the Senate, Brian Boner, R-Converse. “There’s a lot of different factors and, at the end of the day, everyone has to make their best determination based on the information they have.”

The death penalty repeal had passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday by a unanimous vote. Proponents of the bill argued that it would save the state money and create a more humane justice system, an argument that had gained substantial traffic in the House of Representatives....

In the Senate — which has trended more conservative than the House this session — the bill had garnered several unlikely allies. Sen. Bill Landen, a reluctant sponsor of the bill, said that after years of budget cuts and eliminating line item after line item, he could no longer go home and feel good explaining the myriad cuts he’s made to the state budget while defending annual expenses like the death penalty, which costs the state roughly $1 million a year. “Regardless of my personal thoughts — my religion doesn’t believe in the right to kill people — that’s not enough for me,” he said.

Opponents of the bill, meanwhile, argued retaining the death penalty would allow the justice system to offer closure to victims of the most heinous crimes, and could be used as a tool to coerce confessions from the state’s worst perpetrators....

Several senators had other reasons for voting against the bill.  Sen. Anthony Bouchard, R-Cheyenne, said that while the death penalty could be used as an effective tool, it was also a means to keep the state’s justice system from turning into the type seen in other states. He then noted that states like California — in some cases — have allowed inmates to undergo gender reassignment surgery. “I think we’re becoming a lot like other states, and we have something to defend,” he said.  California, however, has not repealed the death penalty.

Sen. Lynn Hutchings, R-Cheyenne, argued that without the death penalty, Jesus Christ would not have been able to die to absolve the sins of mankind, and therefore capital punishment should be maintained. “The greatest man who ever lived died via the death penalty for you and me,” she said. “I’m grateful to him for our future hope because of this. Governments were instituted to execute justice. If it wasn’t for Jesus dying via the death penalty, we would all have no hope.”

Wyoming has not executed a prisoner since 1992. According to Wyoming Department of Corrections Director Bob Lampert, the average death row inmate costs the agency 30 percent more to incarcerate than a general population prisoner, with an average stay of 17 years.

I find it more than a bit amusing that Senator Bouchard seemed to think that voting to keep an effectively dormant costly capital punishment system on the books in Wyoming would help keep the state from becoming more like California, where voters have repeatedly voted to keep an effectively dormant costly capital punishment system on the books.  But, perhaps unsurprisingly, the comment generating the most attention has been Senator Hutchings' suggestion that we can thank (and should preserve) the death penalty for giving us all hope through Jesus Christ.

I am disinclined to make too many jokes about these comments at the risk of being sacrilegious, but I cannot help imagining a new ad campaign for capital punishment: "The death penalty: hope for you and me."  I also cannot help but note that Senator Hutchings has recently garnered negative attention from some other statements on a distinct issue.

Federal judge rejects Sayfullo Saipov's efforts to block capital prosecution based on Prez Trump's tweets

As reported in this New York Times piece, headlined "Trump’s Tweets Do Not Bar Prosecutors From Seeking Death in Terror Case, Judge Rules," a federal judge yesterday issued a notable ruling in a high-profile capital case. Here are the details:

When President Trump said on Twitter that an Uzbek man charged with using a pickup truck to kill eight people “SHOULD GET DEATH PENALTY,” the man’s lawyers asked a judge to bar prosecutors from seeking execution, saying the decision had become too politicized.  But a federal judge in Manhattan ruled on Thursday that prosecutors could seek capital punishment despite the president’s comments.

Defense lawyers had argued the president’s tweet and other statements he made on Twitter had put political pressure on the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, to seek a death sentence.  The lawyers pointed to public reports that Mr. Trump was considering firing the attorney general for not following his wishes, and said Mr. Sessions would not be able to make an impartial decision.

In his ruling, Judge Vernon S. Broderick wrote that Mr. Trump’s statements advocating for the death penalty “were perhaps ill-advised given the pendency of this case.”  Still, the judge said the argument that Mr. Sessions was improperly motivated to seek execution was “pure speculation made without a scintilla of direct factual support.”  The judge said that without more evidence he could not interfere with “the attorney general’s presumptive authority to make charging decisions.”

In September, Mr. Sessions went ahead and directed prosecutors to seek the death penalty for the defendant, Sayfullo Saipov, 31, if he is convicted at trial, even though Judge Broderick had not yet ruled on the motion concerning the president’s tweets.  Six weeks later, Mr. Trump fired Mr. Sessions. 

Mr. Saipov is accused of driving the truck down a crowded bike path along the Hudson River on Oct. 31, 2017, and, after smashing into a school bus, jumping out and running down the highway, shouting “God is great” in Arabic.  He was taken into custody after being shot by a police officer.  He has pleaded not guilty to eight capital counts of murder and other charges, and is scheduled for trial in October.

Judge Broderick wrote that Mr. Saipov had “offered no evidence that the president’s remarks impacted the attorney general’s decision-making process in any way.”  To the contrary, the judge said, Mr. Sessions had “categorically renounced other provocative remarks made by the president” and had vowed that the Justice Department would “not be improperly influenced by political considerations.”

Prior related posts:

• Will NYC terror attack become the first big federal capital case for Trump's Department of Justice?
• "Trump labels US justice system 'laughing stock' "

A year after tragedy, taking stock of the agony (and wondering about the costs) already surrounding the capital prosecution of Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz

CNN has this notable new article headlined "This is where Parkland shooter Nikolas Cruz's death penalty case stands a year later," and here are excerpts:

A year after Nikolas Cruz massacred 17 people and injured 17 others at his former high school in Florida, the question is not whether he's guilty -- he's confessed on video.  It's does he live or die?  His defense team has offered a guilty plea in exchange for life in prison without the possibility of parole -- but only if prosecutors take the death penalty off the table. Prosecutors have rejected the plea, meaning a lengthy trial is all but inevitable.

If the case goes to trial, Cruz will join a short list of mass shooters who've faced their victims in court.  Of the 10 deadliest shootings in recent US history, Cruz is the only one who was captured alive.

The case is on what's described as the "pretrial discovery" stage, says Broward Public Defender Howard Finkelstein, whose office is representing Cruz.  He says the case is a long way from trial. In this stage, Cruz's attorneys have been deposing dozens of witnesses to give oral statements under oath.

Such sessions happen behind closed doors and are only attended by attorneys, the court reporter and the victims' advocate, says Richard Hornsby, a criminal defense lawyer in Florida who is not involved in the case.  Depositions are conducted in person by prosecutors and defense attorneys, and the defendant is not allowed to be present, he adds.

"It is common for victims/accusers to be deposed. However, from a strategic standpoint, I could not imagine the defense attorneys deposing the survivors in this case without a good reason," Hornsby says.  The Broward County Clerk of Court's website lists deposition notices for mostly law enforcement witnesses.

It's the beginning of a long, arduous process.  A death penalty case can take years to go to trial.... The process involves painstakingly combing through graphic details of the shooting in court. No detail is too small, including the gunshots, autopsies and the killer's words.  "However, with the judge pushing the case hard and the passage of Marsy's Law last fall, I would not be surprised if this case makes it to trial early next fall," Hornsby says.  Marsy's Law expanded the rights of victims of crimes, including giving them the right to have a voice in prosecution issues.

Broward state prosecutors have not revealed much in recent months.  But in the past, they've rejected the defense's offer of a guilty plea in exchange for a life sentence, paving the way for a lengthy trial. While the prosecution did not respond to CNN's request for comments for this article, Michael Satz, Broward County's prosecutor, has previously said this is "certainly the type of case the death penalty was designed for."  Assistant State Attorney Shari Tate has said Florida will not allow Cruz to "choose his own punishment for the murder of 17 people."

Cruz's defense team has made it clear it's not looking forward to a death penalty trial. That's why Finkelstein is offering his client's guilty plea in exchange for 34 life sentences without parole.  That would take the death penalty trial off the table and spare the victims from reliving the nightmare during testimony, he says.

That would end the extensive legal process he says could last decades if there's an appeal. In some cases, death penalty trials are followed by lengthy appeals in which survivors return to court to face the killer all over again.  "A plea to 34 consecutive life sentences ends not only the above immediately but means no appeals," Finkelstein says. "We still stand ready to plead guilty to 34 consecutive life sentences."

Some Marjory Stoneman Douglas students are conflicted on the possibility of a death penalty trial.  Student leader Emma Gonzalez describes Cruz's potential death penalty trial as a "good" thing.  Another student, Cameron Kasky, has said he wants him to "rot forever" in prison instead.

Andrew Pollack, whose daughter, Meadow, was one of the people killed, has said he does not plan to attend any death trial hearings. "I don't want to go through some lengthy trial that's going to be brutal. I want him to sit in a cell and rot for the rest of his life," Pollack says.

In high-profile cases such as the Parkland shooting, there are no shortages of challenges for everyone involved.  Even finding a jury will be an ordeal, Hornsby says.... "You will have to find people who say they could be fair and impartial to the defendant given what they know about the Parkland murders," he says. "Good luck."

Florida's death penalty law requires the jury's decision to be unanimous. If one of the 12 jurors dissents, the defendant must be sentenced to life without parole.

There are so many interesting and sad elements to this story. For starters, the possibility of the death penalty has, in one sense, already done a lot of work in this case, as it is surely driving the defense to offer to plead guilty to 34 consecutive life sentences.  But because prosecutors, likely influenced in part by the wishes of some victims, are eager to secure a death sentence, there will be lots and lots of process (and expense) in the months and years ahead.  I hope that the victims of the shooting and victims' families can find some comfort in the long capital trial process, but even if they do they also have to be prepared for years (likely decades) of an appeals process.  (Recall, as noted in this recent post, that we are approaching the six-year anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombing and the capital case still is not close to being fully briefed in the First Circuit.)  

With a focus on the victims, I find it especially interesting that activist Emma Gonzalez is apparently supportive of the decision to pursue capital charges against Cruz.  My general perception is that many progressives and many young people tend to be strong opponents of the death penalty, and so I would be inclined to guess that most of the Parkland students will be disinclined to support efforts to send Cruz to death row.  But, as is often the case, victims are a diverse and sometimes unpredictable bunch.  And with Marsy's Law newly on the books in Florida, their roles will be one to watch closely in the months and years ahead as well.

Finally, at the risk of seeming crass, I hope someone is keeping track of what this prosecution is costing the taxpayers of the state of Florida.  As regular readers know, I think the extraordinary expense of many capital cases can often serves as one of the strongest arguments against the death penalty as it rarely seems the penalty's (debatable) benefits measure up to its (reasonably clear) economic costs.   

Prior related posts:

• Contemplating the capital prosecution of Parkland school shooter Nikolas Cruz
• Will Florida school shooting mass murderer thwart efforts to raise age for limit on application of the death penalty? 
• In shadow of Parkland, a notable discussion with victim families about capital prosecutions in Florida
• "Nikolas Cruz’s birth mom had a violent, criminal past. Could it help keep him off Death Row?" 

Highlighting, though Ohio's remarkable recent experience, a possible tipping point on midazolam as a lethal injection drug

Because there have been so many fewer executions nationwide in recent years, it seems there have been fewer struggles over access and use of execution drugs in recent years.  But Ohio, which always struggles in so many ways with carrying out death sentences, has already had significant 2019 developments in this arena.  This lengthy new article at The Intercept, headlined "Ohio’s Governor Stopped An Execution Over Fears It Would Feel Like Waterboarding," provides a great review of these developments.  I recommend the piece in full, and here are some excerpts:

At the coroner's office in Dayton, Ohio, Dr. Mark Edgar stood over the body of Robert Van Hook. The deceased 58-year-old weighed 228 pounds; he wore blue pants, a white shirt, and identification tags around his ankles.  Edgar, a professor of pathology at Emory University School of Medicine, had done countless autopsies over the years. But this would be the first time he examined the body of someone executed by the state.

Van Hook had died one day earlier, on July 18, 2018, inside the death chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville. After a tearful apology to his victim’s family, he was injected with 500 milligrams of midazolam — the first of a three-drug formula adopted in 2017. Media witnesses described labored breathing from Van Hook shortly afterward, including “gasping and wheezing” loud enough to be heard from the witness room. Nevertheless, compared to recent executions in Ohio, things seemed to go smoothly.

Still, Edgar had cause for concern. For the past few years he had been examining the autopsy reports of men executed using midazolam across the country. He found a disturbing pattern. A majority showed signs of pulmonary edema, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs. Several showed bloody froth that oozed from the lungs during the autopsy — evidence that the buildup had been sudden, severe, and harrowing. In a medical context, where a life is to be saved, pulmonary edema is considered an emergency — it feels like drowning. Even if someone is to be deliberately killed by the state, the Constitution is supposed to prohibit cruel and unusual punishment. To Edgar, the autopsies showed the executed men felt the panic and terror of asphyxiation before they died....

Ohio does not conduct autopsies following executions. But Ohio Federal Public Defender Allen Bohnert secured permission on Edgar’s behalf.  “The autopsy was conducted in the usual manner,” Edgar wrote in a subsequent report.  He made a Y-shaped incision into the chest and abdomen.  A technician removed and weighed Van Hook’s organs and Edgar examined them, looking for anything unusual.  When he got to the lungs, he found “significant abnormalities.”  They were unusually heavy — one telltale sign of congestion.  When he cut into them, he found a mix of blood and frothy fluid.

Of the 27 previously available autopsy reports for people executed using midazolam, Edgar had found evidence of pulmonary edema in 23.  Van Hook was the 24th. A few weeks later, Tennessee used midazolam to execute Irick, who moved and made choking sounds — another grim sign. In a motion seeking a stay of execution and preliminary injunction for Warren Keith Henness, who was scheduled to die in Ohio in February 2019, Bohnert urged a federal magistrate judge to consider these recent developments. “At some point the courts cannot explain away the ever-growing mountain of evidence” against midazolam, he wrote.

Magistrate Judge Michael Merz granted an evidentiary hearing.  After four days of testimony, he issued a damning 148-page order on January 14. The evidence surrounding midazolam had become far more persuasive since Merz last presided over such a proceeding. Not only was he now convinced that midazolam had no analgesic properties, but the drug was “sure or very likely” to cause pulmonary edema, which was akin to “waterboarding.” Yet Merz said he could not stop Henness’s execution. Under Glossip, people challenging lethal injection protocols had to prove that there was an alternative method readily available for the state to use to kill them. Henness had not met this burden.

“This is not a result with which the court is comfortable,” Merz wrote. “If Ohio executes Warren Henness under its present protocol, it will almost certainly subject him to severe pain and needless suffering. Reading the plain language of the Eighth Amendment, that should be enough to constitute cruel and unusual punishment.”

Ohio seemed poised to carry out Henness’s execution. But then, on January 22, the governor’s office issued an order of its own. Newly inaugurated Gov. Mike DeWine granted a warrant of reprieve, delaying Henness’s execution until September. In the meantime, he ordered a review of the state’s options and an examination of “possible alternative drugs.”...

Bohnert points to an irony about Glossip and its legacy. “The fact that the states have been allowed to continue to execute using midazolam is in large part what allowed the evidence to accumulate,” he says. Although it is not clear what will happen next in Ohio, “I think we had a tipping point here.”

A few (of many) prior recent related posts:

• Ohio's new governor delays first scheduled execution under his watch based on concerns about lethal-injection drugs
• "Behind the Curtain: Secrecy and the Death Penalty in the United States"
• Ohio completes its first execution since botched execution of another inmate late last year
• Ohio unable to complete execution for elderly murderer once called death penalty “poster child”
• Reviewing Ohio's unique execution difficulties ... which perhaps explains seemingly ho-hum reaction to latest botched Ohio execution 

US Supreme Court, voting 5-4, vacates Eleventh Circuit stay of execution in Alabama for Muslim death row prisoner

The Supreme Court this evening, voting 5-4 along usual ideological lines, vacated the stay of execution entered yesterday by the Eleventh Circuit to allow the court to hear an Alabama death row defendant's religious liberty claims concerning who could be present at his execution.  The opinion of the majority of the court runs these two paragraphs:

The application to vacate the stay of execution of sentence of death entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit on February 6, 2019, presented to JUSTICE THOMAS and by him referred to the Court, is granted.

On November 6, 2018, the State scheduled Domineque Ray’s execution date for February 7, 2019.  Because Ray waited until January 28, 2019 to seek relief, we grant the State’s application to vacate the stay entered by the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit.  See Gomez v. United States Dist. Court for Northern Dist. of Cal., 503 U.S. 653, 654 (1992) (per curiam) (“A court may consider the last-minute nature of an application to stay execution in deciding whether to grant equitable relief.”).

A two-page dissent, authored by Justice Kagan, and Joined by Justices Ginsburg, Breyer and Sotomayor, gets started and ends this way:

Holman Correctional Facility, the Alabama prison where Domineque Ray will be executed tonight, regularly allows a Christian chaplain to be present in the execution chamber. But Ray is Muslim. And the prison refused his request to have an imam attend him in the last moments of his life.  Yesterday, the Eleventh Circuit concluded that there was a substantial likelihood that the prison’s policy violates the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, and stayed Ray’s execution so it could consider his claim on its merits.  Today, this Court reverses that decision as an abuse of discretion and permits Mr. Ray’s execution to go forward. Given the gravity of the issue presented here, I think that decision profoundly wrong....

This Court is ordinarily reluctant to interfere with the substantial discretion Courts of Appeals have to issue stays when needed.  See, e.g., Dugger v. Johnson, 485 U.S. 945, 947 (1988) (O’Connor, J., joined by Rehnquist, C. J., dissenting). Here, Ray has put forward a powerful claim that his religious rights will be violated at the moment the State puts him to death.  The Eleventh Circuit wanted to hear that claim in full.  Instead, this Court short-circuits that ordinary process — and itself rejects the claim with little briefing and no argument — just so the State can meet its preferred execution date. I respectfully dissent.

Prior related posts:

• Condemned Alabama inmate seeks stay of execution based on notable religious claims
• Litigation update on Alabama death row prisoner denied Muslim spiritual adviser for upcoming execution 
• Eleventh Circuit panel grants stay of execution in Alabama for Muslim death row prisoner