USA | Attorney General Merrick Garland suspends federal executions and orders review of Trump-era rules

(CNN) -- Attorney General Merrick Garland has ordered a temporarily halt to federal executions as Justice Department senior officials review the policies and procedures for the controversial punishment.

"Serious concerns have been raised about the continued use of the death penalty across the country, including arbitrariness in its application, disparate impact on people of color, and the troubling number of exonerations in capital and other serious cases. Those weighty concerns deserve careful study and evaluation by lawmakers," Garland said in a memo issued on Thursday.

There has not been a scheduled federal execution since President Joe Biden was sworn in to office.

"As the President has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions," White House spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement.

There are 46 men currently on federal death row, and while there are more than 2,500 men and women on state death row, this directive from Garland does not halt those proceedings.

Blood bath

"The Department must take care to scrupulously maintain our commitment to fairness and humane treatment in the administration of existing federal laws governing capital sentences," Garland wrote in the memo, citing changes the Justice Department had made under former Attorney General William Barr to policies and procedures around the federal death penalty in 2019.

Barr revived the federal death penalty after a 17-year hiatus. Despite calls from civil rights leaders, celebrities, lawmakers and anti-death-penalty advocates to halt the executions, 12 men and one woman were executed during the last seven months of former President Donald Trump's term.

"If the DOJ review is as narrow as the memorandum suggests—i.e., it addresses only the things the Trump administration did to expedite executions and expand the methods available to kill federal prisoners—it barely even scratches the surface of death penalty reform. Simply put, if the administration doesn't repeal or commute, it isn't taking steps to end the federal deathpenalty. It may be making reforms, but it isn't fulfilling the Biden campaign pledge." — Robert Dunham, Executive Director, Death Penalty Information Center.

"To put that in historical context, the Federal Government will have executed more than three times as many people in the last six months than it had in the previous six decades," Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissenting opinion on January 15 before the last scheduled execution of Dustin John Higgs.

Garland's directive will include a review of changes to regulations made in 2020 under Barr that expanded the permissible methods of execution beyond lethal injection, to include the use of firing squads.

During Garland's confirmation hearing in February, he said the use of the death penalty gave him "pause" because of the number of wrongful conviction cases that have occurred across the country.

"Not enough"

"A moratorium on federal executions is one step in the right direction, but it is not enough. We know the federal death penalty system is marred by racial bias, arbitrariness, over-reaching, and grievous mistakes by defense lawyers and prosecutors that make it broken beyond repair," Ruth Friedman, director of the Federal Capital Habeas Project, said in a statement reacting to Garland's move to pause federal executions.

"President Biden, with the support of the Department of Justice, can and should commute all federal death sentences to address these problems. Otherwise, this moratorium will just leave these intractable issues unremedied and pave the way for another unconscionable bloodbath like we saw last year."

Source: CNN, Christina Carrega, July 2, 2021

Merrick Garland pauses federal executions a year after his predecessor resumed them.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland on Thursday imposed a moratorium on federal executions pending a review of the Justice Department’s policies and procedures, reversing the Trump administration’s decision to resume executions of federal death row inmates last year after a nearly two-decade hiatus.

“The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely,” Mr. Garland said in a memo to Justice Department leaders. “That obligation has special force in capital cases.”

Mr. Garland said in his memo that the deputy attorney general, Lisa O. Monaco, would supervise a review of Justice Department policies related to federal executions that were implemented by former Attorney General William P. Barr. He asked that several of the department’s divisions, including the Bureau of Prisons, the criminal division and the civil rights division, participate, along with other federal agencies and outside advocacy groups.

After 17 years without executions, the Justice Department under Mr. Barr began to execute federal death row inmates last summer. He argued that the Justice Department under both parties had sought the death penalty and that the government owed “the victims and their families to carry forward the sentence imposed by our justice system.”

The Trump administration ultimately executed 13 people, more than three times the number of people put to death by the federal government in the previous six decades.

"While a moratorium on federal executions has symbolic value, we’ve seen the danger of half-measures that do not fully address the fundamental brokenness of our death penalty system. More is required." — Sister Helen Prejean, anti-death penalty activist, spiritual adviser to men and women on death row. Author of Dead Man Walking, The Death of Innocents, and River of Fire.

Andrew Bates, a White House spokesman, said President Biden approved of Mr. Garland’s decision.

“As the president has made clear, he has significant concerns about the death penalty and how it is implemented, and he believes the Department of Justice should return to its prior practice of not carrying out executions,” Mr. Bates said.

As a candidate, Mr. Biden said that he would work to abolish federal executions and incentivize states to follow suit.

The Supreme Court also said in March that it would review an appeals court’s decision to overturn the death sentence of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was sentenced to death for his role in the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings.

Should the Biden administration withdraw its support for the death penalty against Mr. Tsarnaev, the Supreme Court case would become moot.

Mr. Garland has asked the department to review policies implemented in the last two years that paved the way to restart federal executions.

Source: nytimes.com, Katie Benner, July 1, 2021

🚩 | Report an error, an omission, a typo; suggest a story or a new angle to an existing story; submit a piece, a comment; recommend a resource; contact the webmaster, contact us: deathpenaltynews@gmail.com.

Opposed to Capital Punishment? Help us keep this blog up and running! DONATE!

"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde

USA | What happens in the final weeks before an execution? These reporters were inside the room.

The journalists behind ‘The Last 12 Weeks’ earned extraordinary access to a death penalty defense team—and faced difficult ethical choices Many defense lawyers are naturally cagey. They work in a pressure cooker, protecting their clients’ rights while fighting for the best possible outcome. And arguably, the stakes can’t get any higher than trying to save a client’s life. So no, defense lawyers don’t usually invite journalists into strategy meetings. But that’s what happened when Marshall Project reporter Maurice Chammah and Serial Productions senior producer Alvin Melathe spent the final few months before a Texas execution embedded with a capital defense team.

North Korea | 'I was only 9': North Korean defector recalls childhood memory of public execution

Kim Eun-joo was 9 years old when her teacher stopped their lesson and told the class to follow her outside. The children were marched to a public execution ground in North Korea. “I would cry even when our family dog died,” Kim said in a recent interview with The Korea Times. “But the first time I watched humans killing a human, I had no words for what I was feeling. It was the most brutal scene I have ever seen, in any movie or in real life.” The memory has stayed with her ever since. Now a human rights advocate after defecting from North Korea, Kim recently brought that childhood scene to the 9th World Congress Against the Death Penalty in Paris, where North Korea’s use of public executions and capital punishment was officially placed on the agenda for the first time.

19 July 1943 | Auschwitz's Largest Public Hanging: 12 Polish Prisoners Executed in Escape Reprisal

OSWIECIM, Poland — The SS carried out the largest public hanging in Auschwitz history on July 19, 1943, executing 12 Polish prisoners before other inmates as collective punishment for escapes and civilian contacts. The victims, all from the camp’s surveyors’ labor unit, were hanged on gallows built in front of the camp kitchen during an Auschwitz I roll call. The SS orchestrated this reprisal following prisoner escapes from the surveyors’ detail and unauthorized communication between inmates and civilians. Camp authorities used the recent escapes as a pretext to impose collective punishment.

Japan: Capital punishment for a minor

Death chamber at Tokyo Detention Center The Supreme Court's recent decision to uphold the death sentence given in a lay judge trial to a 24-year-old man for murders he committed when he was a minor raises questions about the lay judge trial system and capital punishment. These include whether the lay judges correctly understood the spirit of the Juvenile Law in sentencing the defendant to death. It was the 1st death sentence handed down on a minor in a lay judge trial. The murders took place in Ishinomaki, Miyagi Prefecture, in 2010 when Yutaro Chiba was 18 - meaning he fell under the purview of the Juvenile Law. Chiba was convicted of entering his ex-girlfriend's house and stabbing to death the girl's sister and a female friend of the girl with a butcher knife, seriously injuring a male friend of the sister and abducting the girl. Prosecutors said Chiba killed the victims because they were trying to separate him and his former girlfriend. Since Chiba pleaded n...

Texas: The inmates who refused to die quietly and had to be gassed out of their cells before execution

Former crime reporter Michelle Lyons, who witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, reveals the desperate acts of death row prisoners who refused to accept their fate After spending years or often decades locked up in a tiny cell for 23 hours a day, most Death Row inmates go willingly to their executions. However, some refuse to die quietly - with officers forced to gas them out of cells, strap up their heads and even give chase across prison grounds. Michelle Lyons, who has witnessed nearly 300 executions in Texas, US, exclusively tells Sun Online how certain inmates "fight like hell" in their last moments. On most occasions, Michelle watched from the witness area, with the killers already on the gurney - the stretcher where they'd be given a lethal injection. Seven prisoners once tried to escape from the Row in Huntsville - with one shoving magazines and newspapers under his clothes to help him roll over razor-wire fences. Others have had to b...

Former Florida cop to be executed on same day as 80-year-old Pasco man

In an unprecedented move in the modern history of capital punishment, Gov. Ron DeSantis on Tuesday cleared the way for 2 executions to occur on the same day. DeSantis reset the execution of James Duckett, whose execution earlier this year was stayed amid efforts to secure DNA testing and analysis of evidence in his case. Duckett’s execution was reset for July 28. That is the same day previously set for the execution of Dominick Occhicone. Court records indicate that Duckett’s execution is scheduled for noon. Occhicone’s is set to follow at 6 p.m.

Idaho | Death row prisoners sue over state's new firing squad

BOISE (Idaho Statesman) – Days after Idaho made the switch to a firing squad for executions, two Idaho death row prisoners next in line to be put to death sued the state prison system, saying its director withheld information about how she settled on the specifics for carrying out the method. Attorneys for prisoners Thomas Creech and Gerald Pizzuto filed suit this week in state district court against Idaho Department of Correction Director Bree Derrick. In the filing, they called her approval of an updated standard operating procedure for the firing squad and lethal injection as a backup method “arbitrary, capricious, or an abuse of discretion and in excess of the statutory authority of the agency.”

Florida executes Dennis Sochor

Man, 74, becomes oldest inmate executed in Florida in state’s 10th lethal injection this year Florida put to death one of its oldest prisoners in its history on Tuesday, a 74-year-old convicted murderer who was 1 of 3 older inmates scheduled for execution within the span of a month in the nation’s busiest death penalty state. Dennis Sochor was pronounced dead at 6:16 p.m. following a 3-drug injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, the office of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis said. He was convicted of killing a woman on Jan. 1, 1982, just hours after meeting her at a New Year’s Eve party.

Oldest inmate set to be executed in Florida will face strict spending limit for final meal

An entire category of food is also off-limits for final meal requests in Florida Florida is currently preparing to execute its oldest inmate later today (July 14), a 74-year-old convicted murderer who has been on death row since the 1980s—but his final meal will be limited by a strict budget. Dennis Sochor is scheduled to be put to death later today, making history as the oldest inmate to ever be executed in the state. The criminal, who has been on death row for nearly 40 years, will be administered the lethal three-drug injection, with the process due to begin at around 6pm.

Florida | Former warden recalls botched electrocution that left him battling PTSD for 13 years and turned him into an abolitionist

Ron McAndrew anticipated it would be just another standard execution. He had been assigned to carry out the death of Cuban refugee Pedro Medina via electric chair within the confines of Florida State Prison. Fifteen years had passed since Medina's conviction for the murder of 52-year-old Dorothy James, and McAndrew's responsibility was to oversee the administration of lethal electrical currents to his brain. Having already supervised two previous executions using the identical procedure and raised in a community that strongly supported capital punishment, he expected a swift conclusion with justice delivered.

Death Penalty News

Search This Blog