David Leonard Wood. Jessie Hoffman. Aaron Gunches. Wendell Grissom. Edward Thomas James. Moises Sandoval Mendoza.
So many names. So many dead men walking. Ten days, five states, six death row prisoners scheduled for execution.
For a decade now, capital punishment in the US has been on the wane. Last year, for the 10th year running, there were fewer than 30 executions in America, and the number of new death sentences is also tracking at historic lows.
And yet. Among the rump of death penalty states – “killing states”, as detractors call them – the desire to keep on going seems to burn stronger every year.
Some state corrections departments are firing up their death chambers after decades of leaving them mothballed. Others are turning to new experimental execution methods such as nitrogen gas, or reviving long discarded techniques – on Friday, South Carolina carried out the first firing squad execution in the US for 15 years.
The result is a landscape of capital punishment that is as riven as is the country as a whole. Across vast swathes, the practice is officially, or in effect, moribund. In pockets of the country, there is a frenzied scramble to get back into the death business.
The syndrome was on dramatic display last September, when over six days of horror five different states ended a life in the name of justice.
On Thursday, the desolate spectacle begins again with another flurry of scheduled executions packed into 10 short days. Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Oklahoma, Florida, then Texas again.
“These states will go to any length – pass secrecy laws, introduce new execution methods, bypass public scrutiny,” said Samantha Kennedy of the Promise of Justice Initiative, a New Orleans-based group that fights the inequities of the criminal justice system. Louisiana is preparing to carry out its first execution in 15 years.
“By hook or by crook,” she said, “they are determined to kill people.”
The latest killing spree begins, as it ends, in Texas. The Lone Star State has traditionally been the death penalty capital of America, its fondness for judicial killings reaching a peak in 2000 when it put to death 40 people that year alone.
By last year that number had fallen to five. But as Kristin Houlé Cuellar, executive director of the Texas Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, TCADP, explained, the will is still there.
“Texas stubbornly remains among the handful of states that is still regularly executing, and doing so in cases where grave concerns persist,” she said.
Barring last-minute legal challenges, David Leonard Wood will be killed by lethal injection in the Huntsville Unit after 5pm local time on Thursday. The crimes he has been found guilty of are numerous and profoundly shocking.
Six teenaged girls and young women were murdered and buried in shallow graves in the desert around El Paso by a serial killer who came to be known as the “desert killer”. Wood has always insisted he is innocent, claiming the state got the wrong man.
Wood’s lawyers have pressed for DNA evidence to be tested on more than 100 items of crime-scene evidence, but the Texas attorney general has for over a decade consistently rebuffed the request. As a result, the prisoner will be executed on the basis of circumstantial evidence alone.
The Texas Observer has reported evidence that one of the key witnesses at his trial was encouraged to testify against Wood with promises of a $25,000 reward. The witness was, according to a cellmate, fed incriminating details about Wood from detectives’ own files.
For Cuellar, the questions surrounding Wood’s prosecution point to a wider on-going crisis in capital punishment in Texas. Like most of the 178 people on Texas’s death row, Wood was put there for crimes committed decades ago at the height of the moral panic around drugs and violent crime.
The issues raised in Wood’s case, including convictions rammed through despite the lack of forensic evidence, massaging of witnesses, and other dubious prosecutorial actions, were commonplace in the 1980s and 1990s. Elected officials competed with each other to convince voters that they were the toughest on crime.
An Innocence Project study of Texas in the early 2000s found 91 cases of prosecutorial misconduct, ranging from hiding evidence to misleading the jury. Not one of the prosecutors involved had been disciplined.
“In that rush to judgment, that rush to fill death row, corners were cut. Fast forward decades later, when people are set for execution, the flaws and failures in their cases are on stark display,” she said.
In Wood’s case, the murders for which he was convicted occurred in 1987, almost 40 years ago. Should he die on Thursday, it will be more than 32 years after he landed on death row.
The other five men facing execution tell a similar story. Their crimes were committed, in order of their execution dates, 29, 23, 20, 30, and 19 years ago.
Such an agonisingly prolonged process takes its toll on many people: the death row inmates themselves living under the shadow of execution, the guards who secure and care for them, the American taxpayers who pay for what is by far the most expensive part of the US criminal justice system. And then there are the families of the victims.
Prejean, a Catholic nun, is the most celebrated face of the death penalty abolitionist movement. Her memoir about being spiritual adviser to two death row inmates, Dead Man Walking, was made into the 1995 movie of the same name.
Prejean told the Guardian that in her analysis the upcoming spate of six executions in 10 days could be explained by three pillars of the death penalty. The first was slavery.
Of the five states about to carry out executions, all were part of the confederacy (in Arizona’s case as a then territory). “Under the black codes in the deep south states, a Black man could steal an apple and be hanged, and that attitude is still very much present in the death penalty.”
Prejean’s two other pillars propping up the system are the variety of evangelical religion prevalent in death penalty states – “deep south Christianity is a John Wayne Jesus who believes in solving things with violence” – and endemic poverty. She believes those three factors – slavery, religion, poverty – have recently all combined to generate a fourth pillar that is coming to capital punishment’s rescue.
“They set up a culture in which a strong man, a politician, can come along and say, ‘We’re going to execute people to show we’re really tough on crime’.”
Is she saying there is a connection between the rump revival of the death penalty and Donald Trump?
“Absolutely. There’s a mood. Look at the mood in the country. Violence solves social problems – that’s Trump all the way. And other politicians look at him and realize, hey, he got elected, and they start to ape him. And so far, they’re getting away with it.”
Kennedy also sees Trump as a player behind the partial resurgence of executions. She points to the 13 federal death-row prisoners killed under Trump at the end of his first administration – the most intense burst of judicial killings under any president in 120 years.
“That killing spree in Trump’s first term set a tone for the acceptability of gratuitous violence,” she said.
Kennedy and Prejean are both from Louisiana, the state which is scheduled to carry out the second execution in the upcoming 10-day spate. If it goes ahead, it will be Louisiana’s first use of the death chamber since 2010.
Jessie Hoffman, who is Black, is set to die on 18 March for the rape and murder of Mary Elliott in 1996. The chronology behind the scheduled execution is interesting.
On 20 January, on Trump’s first day back in the Oval Office, he issued an executive order titled “Restoring the death penalty”. Three weeks later, Trump attended the Super Bowl in New Orleans where he sat beside Jeff Landry, the Republican governor of Louisiana.
The next day, 10 February, Landry announced his decision to restart executions after a hiatus of 15 years.
There are several other striking aspects to Hoffman’s pending execution. He was 18 and two months old when he committed his gruesome crime.
He was found guilty of first-degree murder at trial and sent to death row. Had he been 60 days younger he would have been shielded from a death sentence as a juvenile.
“He harmed people in ways that are probably everlasting,” Kennedy said. “And what he did with his time since then is that he grew up. He has spent decades reflecting, has been a devout Buddhist for many years, has expressed deep remorse. He’s transformed.”
Should the execution go ahead, Hoffman, 47, will be forcibly gassed with nitrogen, an experimental process that has only previously been used four times, all in the state of Alabama. Witnesses to those nitrogen deaths reported distressing scenes of prisoners shaking and convulsing on the gurney.
“These gassing executions are suffocations. The person suffocates, so they struggle, they panic. It is arduous and cruel,” Kennedy said.
The Trump-infused wave of renewed activity is not confined to deep red states like Louisiana. The third execution in the upcoming 10-day spree is in the purple state of Arizona, under the auspices of the Democratic governor Katie Hobbs.
Aaron Gunches is a “volunteer”, meaning that he is not resisting execution and effectively wants the state to kill him. He was sentenced to death for the 2003 murder of his girlfriend’s former husband, Ted Price.
In 2023 Hobbs halted all executions and ordered a review of the entire death process following a spate of three horribly botched killings the year before. She commissioned a retired federal magistrate judge, David Duncan, to carry out the probe in a rare instance of a death penalty state allowing an independent outside inspection of its methods.
Duncan said that in the course of his investigation he came across some alarming findings. “I saw things such as, on the eve of an execution, a superior telling a member of the execution team to use Wikipedia to check the dosage of the lethal drugs.”
He also looked into the refrigerator where eight vials of pentobarbital were being stored. “The jars were completely unmarked, not a single letter on any of them. It could have been my mother’s minestrone soup. I said to the official, ‘Do you think your high-school chemistry teacher would have allowed you back in the chem lab ever again if you left things unlabelled like that?’”
Duncan pored over thousands of documents and confirmed the fact, first reported by the Guardian, that in 2021 the state spent $1.5m obtaining supplies of lethal injection drugs. He also discovered that the physician and assistant who had been present at the three botched executions in 2022 were each paid $60,000 in cash for the privilege.
With all that under his belt, it might have been assumed that Duncan would have been encouraged to complete his report, so that Arizona’s troubled system could be cleaned up. In November, however, Hobbs abruptly dismissed the judge and ended his review before completion, accusing Duncan of having overstepped his remit.
“I could no longer finish my report as I no longer had access to any documents,” the judge said.
With the outside investigation terminated, Arizona has slipped back into its old ways of doing the death business – based on internal recommendations from within the department of corrections. Duncan fears it runs the risk of repeating past mistakes.
“Haven’t we learned that lesson? It’s not good to have people grade their own papers,” he said.
Gunches, 53, is set to be killed by lethal injection on 19 March. The next day, Wendell Grissom, 57, and Edward Thomas James, 63, are scheduled to die in Oklahoma and Florida respectively, before the killing spree returns to Texas for the execution of Moises Sandoval Mendoza, 40, on 23 April.
Prejean believes that if you boil down the 10-day glut of state violence to its essential, in the end you arrive at the people in whose name six lives are about to be taken. “It’s all about us,” she said.
“Granted, people do these terrible crimes – unspeakable crimes – and we can be outraged over that. But finally, now, how are we going to respond?”
Source: The Guardian, Ed Pilkington, March 11, 2025
"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted."
— Oscar Wilde
Comments
Post a Comment
Pro-DP comments will not be published.