capital punishment

Ethics Quiz: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

At Riverbend Maximum Security Institution in Nashville, 49-year-old condemned inmate Christa Pike got two full doses of pentobarbital when one was supposed be sufficient to kill her. The second was administered into her bloodstream after the first didn’t work, following state protocols. But she still maintained a distinct heartbeat, and began snoring.

There were no rules in Tennessee for what should happen when a prisoner survives both lethal injections, because it’s not supposed to happen and had never happened before.

The microphones were shut off and viewing curtains were drawn. Attending medical staff then entered the execution chamber to evaluate vital signals, confirm the presence of a heartbeat, and determine whether there as acute respiratory distress. Defense attorneys recorded the information to file an emergency motion with a federal court citing evidence that their client survived and suffered unconstitutional pain, citing the 8th Amendment against “cruel and unusual” punishment. Pike was disconnected from the IV lines, her condition stabilized, and she was transferred by secure transport to an off-site civilian medical facility.

I must confess, because I have watched way too much TV, a Western I must have seen when I was about 10 had me believing that when a condemned prisoner survives an execution, such as a hanging, the prisoner is deemed to have completed his sentence and goes free. My father had confirmed this, saying that the real punishment in capital cases was the waiting and anticipation. The dying part was a breeze, or was supposed to be. (Last words of British acting legend, 19th-century actor Edmund Kean: “Dying is easy; comedy is hard.”)

Well, that legend is not true; that has never been the case in the U.S., and it has rarely been the practice anywhere. Wikipedia has a just-updated list of botched executions going back to 1540. It’s a long (and probably incomplete) list, but there are only two examples where the condemned was set free, and only three where the death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, none since 1885.

That last lucky guy was John Henry George “Babbacombe” Lee (1864 –1945), an Englishman famous for surviving three attempts to hang him in 1885. He had been convicted of murder. Lee was eventually released and supported himself by touring and speaking about his strange life. There have been several books about Lee including “The Man They Could Not Hang” (Holgate and Waugh, 2005) and a silent film. He’s buried at Forest Home Cemetery, Milwaukee.

So that’s what happens when you survive an execution. You end up in Milwaukee….

But I digress. The issue at hand is what is the ethical, fair and responsible way to handle such situations.

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ProPublica Really Thinks Revealing That Florida Actually Executes Convicted Murderers Will Turn Americans Against DeSantis, Trump and Republicans

/ Jack Marshall / 2 Comments

(That’s a famous photo of the execution of the John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators)

Ah, the ethical delusions of the woke and biased!

ProPublica is another one of those supposedly “non-partisan” watchdogs that somehow only finds the conduct of Republicans and conservatives worth criticizing, with enough rare exceptions to let them say, “But what about…?” to rebut that verdict sufficiently for those who aren’t paying attention.

Being reflexively progressive, ProPublica has long been an opponent of capital punishment, though the position is misplaced absolutism. Now it announces, “Early last year, Gov. Ron DeSantis began signing death warrants at a faster rate than ever before. What followed was the most intense period of executions the state has carried out in more than eight decades.”

This supposedly horrific “period of executions” meant that a grand total of 19 murderers who had forfeited their rights to live in a civilized society were dispatched instead of being kept alive at taxpayer expense. Let’s look at the killer ProPublica picked to have us weep for in the first half of the long article: Frank Walls, whom Florida executed last year.

Walls committed his first murder on March 26, 1985, at the age of 17. He noticed 19-year-old junior college student Tommie Lou Whiddon sunbathing at the beach, went over to her and slashed her throat. Walls then stole her car. Whiddon’s body was discoveredthe next day lying in a pool of blood on the beach. On September 16, 1986, he killed 24-year-old Cynthia Sue Condra by stabbing her 21 times. He left her body on the side of a road.[4] On May 20, 1987, Walls broke into the mobile home of 47-year-old Audrey Gygi. Walls raped her, left, but later decided to come back and murder her.He stabbed her to death, stole a fan and a radio, and left her nude body to be found after she failed to show up for work. On July 22 that same year, Walls committed a double murder. He broke into another mobile home inhabited by 22-year-old airman Edward Alger and his girlfriend, 20-year-old Anne Louise Peterson. Walls forced Peterson to tie up her boyfriend, then tied her up as well. Alger managed to get partially free and attacked Walls. In the fight, Walls cut his throat with a knife, but Alger bit Walls on the hand, causing him to drop the knife. Walls then shot Alger three times in the head. After sexually assaulting Peterson, he shot her in the head too, and when the first shot didn’t kill her, Walls put a pillow over her face and shot her again, killing her. The couple’s bodies were found the next day.

The story, as is de rigueur in such sobfests, is told from the perspective of death penalty activist Father Dustin Feddon, who has nothing better to do than “administer” to condemned prisoners like Walls. ProPublica never informs its readers of the details of why Walls was on Death Row. It just arrays the usual anti-death penalty rationalizations:

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On Capital Punishment Porn From The New York Times

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

“For 90 Minutes, I Watched an Execution Go Horribly Awry” [Gift link!]is an unethical opinion piece. It is manipulative and an appeal to emotion, while pretending to make a persuasive argument against capital punishment using deflection and misdirection, tying three separate ethics issues together as one. The author’s methodology is to argue that killing someone can be icky. So?

The author is a criminal defense lawyer, so you might think I should cut her some slack. I won’t. It is acceptable for a lawyer to use trickery, logical fallacies and rhetorical cheats to convince a jury, because that is what defense lawyers have to do to zealously represent their clients. A newspaper’s readers, however, are not jurors. A publisher and paper’s editors should maintain journalistic standards, which demand truthful communication that is not calculated to deceive or confuse. The New York Times, however, is not an ethical newspaper, and is interested in advancing agendas, not fair and responsible punditry. Even the headline is deceitful. Her client’s execution by lethal injection was botched, but he survived. His execution was delayed for a year by the governor. She doesn’t reveal that little detail until the next to last paragraph. Surprise! The execution attempt went ‘horrible awry,” but there was no execution.

Author Maria DeLiberato is a mission lawyer, meaning that she takes cases to accomplish a personal objective, in her case, opposing the death penalty. She begins by telling us that she believes Tony Carruthers, her condemned client, was wrongly convicted. That issue is 100% irrelevant to the focus of her article, which is that executions in Tennessee (and presumably elsewhere) are often botched and excruciatingly painful as a result, making them “cruel and unusual punishment,” an 8th Amendment violation. She argues that Carruthers was innocent, which is a different ethical issue entirely. A botched execution is exactly as painful and torturous whether the condemned is guilty or not. Like a good lawyer (but an unethical writer) DeLiberato pre-sets the dial to sympathy and indignation by framing Carruthers’ ordeal as an unjust one. But even a perfect, quick and painless execution of an innocent individual is wrong beyond redemption: it doesn’t become more wrong because the killing takes longer.

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Once Again, Unethical Tears For A Well-Earned Execution: Boyd v. Hamm

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

Supreme Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson are in a tight competition for most flagrantly incompetent liberal member of the Supreme Court. Jackson appears to be well ahead, but Sonia let her inner sensitive Latina run wild in her recent emotional dissent in Boyd v. Hamm, in which the Supreme Court turned down the plea of a condemned prisoner to force Alabama to execute him by firing squad rather than by the relatively new method of nitrogen gas asphyxiation. (Sotomayor’s lame dissent was joined by her two Democratic, reflex-Left wing colleagues because they are nice.)

Some salient facts: Anthony Boyd was convicted of murder in the first degree because he and two drug-dealing comrades killed another drug dealer by binding him and setting him on fire. I’d say Boyd was ethically estopped from complaining that his own execution method was “cruel and unusual,” but he did, even though he had earlier been given a choice between death by firing squad and death by nitrogen, and picked the latter. This is more consideration than his victim was given; at least nothing in the trial transcript indicates that the victim was offered a choice between being roasted alive or having his head bashed in with a rock.

Sonia, however, want us all to feel horror that Boyd, who was executed after his last-ditch appeal to SCOTUS failed, suffered pain in the process of dying. “Take out your phone, go to the clock app, and find the stopwatch,” Sotomayor opens her October 23 dissent. “Click start. Now watch the seconds as they climb. Three seconds come and go in a blink. At the thirty second mark, your mind starts to wander. One minute passes, and you begin to think that this is taking a long time. Two . . . three . . . . The clock ticks on. Then, finally, you make it to four minutes. Hit stop.”

Wow. That’s some impressive legal argument.

My dissent from the dissent: I don’t care, and nobody should. The endless obstacles bleeding heart judges and ethically-confused death penalty activists have thrown in the way of our society’s obligation to set and enforce standards of conduct are destructive and costly. Boyd had a choice, and may have chosen the nitrogen method specifically so his lawyers could use it to stall the arrival of his day of reckoning. The murder he was convicted of committing was particularly heinous and cruel: I might be persuaded to endorse a system in which convicted murderers are executed in the same manner as their victims. But for such an individual to beg for a less “cruel” form of punishment is Death Row chutzpah. Yet Sotomayor fell for it.

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Regarding Biden’s Mass Mercy For Convicted Murderers

/ Jack Marshall / 24 Comments

As was anticipated after reports that were issued over the weekend, “President Joe Biden announced” today that he has commuted the sentences of 37 convicted murderers, thus taking them off federal death row. They will now serve out life sentences in prison, being housed, fed, given medical attention and more at taxpayer expense. This was done deliberately to foil the announced intention of President-elect Donald Trump to carry out the verdicts of juries and the courts.

“Biden’s statement”—this is in quotation marks because he didn’t write it, probably doesn’t understand it and quite possibly never read it or approved it—reads,

“Today, I am commuting the sentences of 37 of the 40 individuals on federal death row to life sentences without the possibility of parole. These commutations are consistent with the moratorium my Administration has imposed on federal executions, in cases other than terrorism and hate-motivated mass murder.Make no mistake: I condemn these murderers, grieve for the victims of their despicable acts, and ache for all the families who have suffered unimaginable and irreparable loss. But guided by my conscience and my experience as a public defender, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vice President, and now President, I am more convinced than ever that we must stop the use of the death penalty at the federal level. In good conscience, I cannot stand back and let a new administration resume executions that I halted.”

Ethics observations:

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“Clayton Lockett Is Dead, Right? Then 1) Good! and 2) His Execution Wasn’t ‘Botched'”: The Sequel

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Demonstrators in Washington rally against the death penalty outside the Supreme Court building Oct. 13, 2021. (CNS photo/Jonathan Ernst, Reuters)

Following this introduction is an EA post from ten years ago about a “botched” execution. The issue has come around again: The always woke online tabloid The Guardian is caterwauling over another messy execution, this time in Alabama. “The only lesson from this grim sequence of events is that when states use human beings as guinea pigs for lethal experiments, they are bound to suffer, whether at the point of a needle or behind a mask,” Matt Wells, deputy director of the human rights group Reprieve US, is quoted as saying. OK, they suffer. I have no sympathy for them. Killing human beings is hard, and murderers like Clayton Lockett and Carey Dale Grayson are at fault for making society kill them. There are ways of killing the condemned that involve no suffering at all, and I don’t know what we don’t make use of them except that they are a bit spectacular. In India, they used to execute people by training an elephant to step on their heads and smash them like a grape. I don’t understand why states have to be fooling around with methods as baroque as nitrogen poisoning.

The Guardian also includes the obligatory anti-capital punishment statement from the daughter of the victim. “Murdering inmates under the guise of justice needs to stop,” Jodi Haley, who was 12 when her mother was killed, told reporters. “No one should have the right to take a person’s possibilities, days, and life.” Well, Jodi, you have been indoctrinated to your disadvantage and society’s best interests. Nobody has the right to make me pay to keep them alive when they have violated the conditions of the social compact, and when allowing them to live devalues the lives of others while requiring lesser punishments for other terrible crimes.

I was going to reprint the post below substituting Grayson for Lockett, but that isn’t necessary. Everything below applies to the Alabama execution as well.

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Capital punishment foes have no shame, and (I know I am a broken record on this, and it cheers me no more than it pleases you), the knee-jerk journalists who have been squarely in their camp for decades refuse to illuminate their constant hypocrisy. In Connecticut, for example, holding that putting to death the monstrous perpetrators of the Petit home invasion was “immoral,” anti-death penalty advocates argued that the extended time it took to handle appeals made the death penalty more expensive than life imprisonment—an added expense for which the advocates themselves are accountable.

A similar dynamic is at work in the aftermath of the execution of convicted murderer and rapist Clayton Lockett in Oklahoma.Witnesses to his execution by lethal injection said Lockett convulsed and writhed on the gurney, sat up and started to speak before officials blocked the witnesses’ view by pulling a curtain. Apparently his vein “blew,” and instead of killing him efficiently,  the new, three-drug “cocktail” arrived at as the means of execution in Oklahoma after extensive study and litigation failed to work as advertised.  Why was there an excessively complex system involving multiple drugs used in this execution? It was the result of cumulative efforts by anti-death penalty zealots to make sure the process was above all, “humane.” Of course, the more complicated a process is, the more moving parts it has, the more likely it is to fail.

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Small Ethical Silver Lining To An Ugly Cloud: At Least This Awful Woman’s Lawyer Talked Her Into Pleading Guilty

/ Jack Marshall / 6 Comments

Tiffanie Lucas, 33, had been preparing to try an insanity defense in her upcoming December murder trial stemming from her Novenber 8, 2023, shooting of her sons Maurice “Peanut” Baker Jr. and Jayden Howard, 6 and 9. Now she says she will plead guilty and rely on the judge to decide her fate.

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The Explanation For Everything That Afflicts Americans of Color Is Systemic Racism, Part II: Botched Executions

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

A report released last week by Reprieve, a human rights group that opposes the death penalty apparently shows that the lethal injections of convicted murderers are botched more than twice as often as the executions of white convicts. Spinning, the New York Times says, “That finding builds on a wealth of research into racial disparities in how the U.S. judicial system administers the death penalty. The proportion of Black people on death rows is far higher than their share of the population as a whole.”

“We know that there’s racism in the criminal justice system,” said Maya Foa, an executive director of Reprieve. “We know it’s there in the capital punishment system, from who gets arrested, who gets sentenced, all of it. This is, though, the first time that it’s been looked at in the context of the execution itself.”

To start with, they don’t “know” that at all. It is a self-perpetuating theory built on other debatable assumptions, such as believing that the disproportionate number of blacks on Death Row, and in the U.S. prison system generally, is because a disproportionate number of blacks commit crimes that legitimately put them there. Second, how exactly does doing a bad job killing a condemned prisoner show racial bias?

More from the Times:

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Another Example of Why the Death Penalty Is Necessary

/ Jack Marshall / 27 Comments

My go-to case for defending the death penalty is the Cheshire home invasion, though the surviving Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is an equally strong, indeed I would say irrefutable case. I now have another one.

Read with care.

Kristel Candelario left on a summer vacation in Puerto Rico with a male friend, leaving her 16 month daughter Jailyn alone in a playpen with a few bottles of milk. The neighbor’s doorbell camera recorded the baby’s anguished screams as she suffered from abandonment and separation, hunger and dehydration. After a few days at the beach and another stopover in Detroit, Jailyn’s mother returned tp her Cleveland home to find her daughter dead, though she had the gall to call 911 in a panic. She’d been gone for about 10 days. I wonder what she expected to find.

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Oregon’s Governor Spares 17 Murderers Who Deserve To Die

/ Jack Marshall / 28 Comments

It is clear the the 2022 Ethics Alarms Award for the Most Incompetent Elected Official of the Year is going to come down to the wire. Oregon Governor Kate Brown, already a strong contender (as she was in 2021 and 2020), just delivered a pure grandstanding exhibition that insulted multiple juries, undermined the rule of law, and in effect lowered the penalty for vicious murder to that of far less heinous crimes.

Her decision to commute the death sentences of 17 convicted killers who have forfeited the right to live in civilized society is legal, and the power she has to make it is necessary. There has to be some safety valve for the justice system, which is bound to fail as all systems do, and making the executive the final arbiter of extreme and unusual cases is the best of several flawed options. However, many governors abuse this power, and, like Brown, use it to pander to a political base. Here, from Oregon Live, is the list of the seventeen men on Death Row that Brown feels deserve to continue to live at taxpayers’ expense: Continue reading →