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Biden Fails a Death Penalty Abolitionist’s Most Important Test

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The mystery of Joe Biden’s views about capital punishment has finally been solved. His decision to grant clemency to 37 of the 40 people on federal death row shows the depth of his opposition to the death penalty. And his decision to leave three of America’s most notorious killers to be executed by a future administration shows the limits of his abolitionist commitment. The three men excluded from Biden’s mass clemency—Dylann Roof, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, and Robert Bowers—would no doubt pose a severe test of anyone’s resolve to end the death penalty. Biden failed that test.
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No Drugs, No Executions: The End of the Death Penalty

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Death Penalty Barbie doll
Death Penalty Barbie doll
Florida's new drug of choice replaced pentobarbital, a barbiturate the state used for years as part of its three-drug lethal cocktail until de facto boycotts by foreign drug manufacturers exhausted its supply. Midazolam hydrochloride, marketed as Versed, was chosen not because of its effectiveness but because of its availability, a decision legal experts say calls into question Florida's commitment to the Eighth Amendment's promise of no infliction of cruel or unusual punishment.

Florida is just one of several states scrambling to update or refine its capital-punishment protocol amid a sudden shortfall of its lethal injection drugs, resulting in an unprecedented inconsistency in the way inmates are executed in the United States. Even as a steady majority continues supporting the death penalty, the difficulty in obtaining new lethal drugs, associated legal hurdles, and a gaping void of better execution alternatives has left capital punishment in America with an uncertain future.

Distilling the amount of pain Happ endured is nearly impossible because the second drug in Florida's three-drug cocktail, vecuronium bromide, acts as a paralytic agent. Its purpose is largely cosmetic, effectively masking how much pain the subject may be enduring.

"We don't even know if the new drug (midazolam) is working or not," said Richard Dieter, the executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center. "Everything is a bit of an experiment with a human subject. If this were ordinary medicine, that would not be allowed, but this is the death penalty and that's how it goes."

In a letter to Florida Gov. Rick Scott last month describing the changes to its lethal-injection protocol, Florida Department of Corrections Secretary Mike Crews wrote that "the procedure has been reviewed and is compatible with evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society, the concepts of the dignity of man, and advances in science, research, pharmacology, and technology. He added: "The process will not involve unnecessary lingering or the unnecessary or wanton infliction of pain and suffering. The foremost objective of the lethal injection process is a human and dignified death."


Source: National Journal, Dustin Volz, October 28, 2013
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