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Biden Commuted Their Death Sentences. Now What?

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As three men challenge their commutations, others brace for imminent prison transfers and the finality of a life sentence with no chance of release. In the days after President Joe Biden commuted his death sentence, 40-year-old Rejon Taylor felt like he’d been reborn. After facing execution for virtually his entire adult life for a crime he committed at 18, he was fueled by a new sense of purpose. He was “a man on a mission,” he told me in an email on Christmas Day. “I will not squander this opportunity of mercy, of life.”

Video of a Lethal Injection Reopens Questions on the Privacy of Executions

As Andrew Grant DeYoung died by lethal injection in a prison in Jackson, Ga., on Thursday night, a video camera watched silently.

For decades in the United States, what goes on inside the execution chamber has been largely shrouded from public view, glimpsed only through the accounts of journalists and other witnesses.

But the video recording of Mr. DeYoung’s death, the first since 1992, has once again raised the possibility that executions might be made available for all to see. In the process, it has reignited a widespread debate about how bright a light to shine on one of the most secretive corners of the criminal justice system.

Legal experts say the decision by Judge Bensonetta Tipton Lane of Fulton County Superior Court to allow the taping in Mr. DeYoung’s case opens the way for defense lawyers across the country to push for the video documentation of other executions. And it is inevitable, many experts believe, that some of those recordings will make their way onto television or even YouTube, with or without the blessings of a court.

Brian Kammer, a defense lawyer who argued for allowing Mr. DeYoung’s execution to be recorded, said that documenting the death was essential because of the controversy over the drugs used in lethal injections.

“We’ve had three botched lethal injections in Georgia prior to Mr. DeYoung, and we thought it was time to get some hard evidence,” Mr. Kammer said.

After Mr. DeYoung’s execution, the video was sealed and sent to a judge’s chambers for safekeeping, and Mr. Kammer, for one, said he hoped it stayed hidden. “It’s a horrible thing that Andrew DeYoung had to go through, and it’s not for the public to see that,” he said.

But Douglas Berman, a professor of law at Ohio State University who commented on the issue on his blog, Sentencing and Law Policy, said, “I think it would be foolish for anybody who is authorizing or supervising the videotaping of executions to assume that it will always remain sealed and unseen.” Mr. Berman added, “Somewhere, somehow, at some point, this will become publicly accessible.”


Source: The New York Times, July 23, 2011

Related articles:

Jul 22, 2011
Andrew DeYoung was put to death by lethal injection Thursday night at the state prison in Jackson after courts turned down his appeals. The 37-year-old was pronounced dead at 8:04 p.m. ...
Jul 21, 2011
DeYoung had been due to die by injection at 7 p.m. Wednesday at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison in Jackson. But amid last-minute court activity at the state and federal level, Department of Corrections ...
Jul 21, 2011
If the lethal injection of Andrew Grant DeYoung is carried out as scheduled at 7 p.m. Thursday, it would be the nation's first known video recording of an execution in nearly two decades. Superior Court Judge Bensonetta ...
Jul 21, 2011
The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals is reviewing a ruling issued earlier Wednesday by U.S. District Judge Steve Jones, who concluded that DeYoung failed to show the state's use of pentobarbital as part of a lethal ...

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