Death Penalty News

On Thursday, David Earl Miller became the 2nd person in the last 5 weeks to choose death in Tennessee’s electric chair over lethal injection. Miller was executed for the 1981 murder of 23-year-old Lee Standifier. After losing a lawsuit claiming he had a right to be executed by a firing squad, Miller took advantage of a state law allowing death row inmates convicted prior to 1999 to opt for the electric chair rather than lethal injection. He did so because he feared that the state’s lethal injection protocol, which includes midazolam, a drug that has been involved in several botched executions, would result in a more prolonged and painful death than would electrocution. The real significance of the return of the electric chair, though, would be missed if we saw it only as a loss of faith in lethal injection by death row inmates. It signals a larger crisis for the death penalty system in the United States. Hailed as a humane alternative to hanging, which had long been Amer...

IMPORTANT NOTICE: It seems that Google made a few changes to the way images are shown on Google-powered blogs. Pictures and links to social media (Twitter, Facebook, etc.) will no longer be loaded if you are using an ad blocker. Please be advised that no commercial activity whatsoever (ads, links, etc.) is conducted by DPN on their website. Ads, if any shown, are selected and inserted on this page by Google, not by DPN. Disable your ad blocker if pictures and/or videos are no longer shown on DPN pages. Please note that this may not apply to all browsers. When it comes to the death penalty, guilt or innocence shouldn’t really matter to Christians.   NASHVILLE — Until August, Tennessee had not put a prisoner to death in nearly a decade. Last Thursday, it performed its third execution in four months. This was not a surprising turn of events. In each case, recourse to the courts had been exhausted. In each case Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, declined to intervene, tho...

NASHVILLE – David Earl Miller didn't care that I came to see him die. He didn't care if anyone heard his last words. He didn't mention Lee Standifer, the woman he beat and stabbed to death a generation ago, didn't bother to apologize — even when he got a second chance to speak as all of us in the witness chamber at Riverbend Maximum Security Institution leaned toward the glass in the dark. Those might have been the only words he could say that her family would have wanted to hear. I heard the disappointment in her mother's voice. No more delays I won't write what was said on that phone call. I called the mother — with her permission — to give her the chance to speak for her daughter, since she chose not to make the trip to Tennessee from Arizona for Thursday's execution. But everything she wanted to say publicly, she's said. She's in her 80s now. She wants to remember her daughter, not Miller. But she wanted to hear the case was finally ov...

"Media: Please skip the "last meal" articles and instead write about the fact that David Miller was subjected to horrific abuse throughout his childhood that resulted in severe mental illness. This execution is plain wrong and the public deserves to know about David's background." -- Sister Helen Prejean, author of " Dead Man Walking "

The U.S. Supreme Court will not stop the execution of death row inmate David Earl Miller.  The Supreme Court denied Miller's request for a stay of execution, shorty before it is scheduled to take place at 7 p.m. U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sonya Sotomayor disagreed with her colleagues' decision. "Tennessee is scheduled to electrocute David Miller tonight.  Miller is the second inmate in just over a month who has chosen to die by the electric chair in order to avoid the State’s current lethal injection protocol." Sotomayor wrote in her dissent. "Both so chose even though electrocution can be a dreadful way to die. They did so against the backdrop of credible scientific evidence that lethal injection as currently practiced in Tennessee may well be even worse."  Earlier Thursday, Gov. Bill Haslam announced that he will not stop Miller's execution, either.  Miller had asked the governor to commute his sentence to life in prison ...

Nashville, Tenn., Dec 6, 2018 / 01:43 pm (CNA).- Hours before David Miller is scheduled to be executed in Tennessee’s electric chair, the state’s governor has rejected Miller’s request that his sentence be commuted to life in prison. Gov. Bill Haslam released a one-sentence statement Dec. 6, saying that “after careful consideration of David Earl Miller’s clemency request, I am declining to intervene in this case.” Miller, 61, was convicted of the 1981 murder of Lee Standifer, whom he bludgeoned to death and stabbed. He was sentenced to death, and chose to be executed by the electric chair rather than by the state’s controversial lethal injection protocol. Attorneys for Miller filed a clemency petition with the governor last week. The petition said that Miller “accepts responsibility for the death of his friend.” The petition also argued that Miller suffers from “severe mental illness” that renders him “far outside that group of offenders who are the worst and for who...

Miller's attorneys detail his childhood — a hellish upbringing rife with sexual abuse, beatings and addiction In an interview with a clinical psychologist in 2002, David Earl Miller — the man set to be executed in Tennessee's electric chair on Dec. 6 — described a recurring nightmare he'd had during his years on death row.  "I'm at my execution, strapped to the gurney so I can't move at all, and my step-father is present," Miller told Dr. David Lisak, a clinical psychologist, according to documents included in Miller's application for clemency. "I see him sitting in the viewing gallery. I don't see any expression on his face, but I hear him say this to me: 'I hope you have nightmares about this you sorry bastard!'" Lisak notes: "It is as though Mr. Miller fully expects to be tormented by his step-father right through to the final seconds of his life." Miller will not die strapped to a gurney, of course...

A Tennessee inmate is scheduled to become the second person to die in the state's electric chair in as many months, nearly two decades after Tennessee adopted lethal injection as its preferred method of execution. Both David Earl Miller, 61, and Edmund Zagorski before him chose the electric chair over lethal injection, a process that proponents said would be painless and humane. But the inmates argued in court that Tennessee's current midazolam-based injection method causes a prolonged and torturous death. They pointed to the August execution of Billy Ray Irick, which took about 20 minutes during which he was observed coughing and huffing before turning a dark purple. Their case was thrown out, largely because a judge said they failed to prove that a more humane alternative was available. Zagorski was executed on November 1. Miller was convicted of killing 23-year-old Lee Standifer in 1981 in Knoxville. Ms Standifer was a woman with a mental impairmen...

Tennessee death row inmate David Earl Miller has been moved into a cell next to the electric chair days before his scheduled execution. The Tennessee Department announced the move Tuesday, as preparations for Miller's execution continued.  The new cell is part of Miller's "death watch," a period of time within 72 hours of an execution, when an inmate is under 24-7 surveillance and other heightened security measures. Unless a court or Gov. Bill Haslam intervenes, Miller will stay in the new cell until he is put to death Thursday night.  Miller, 61, has told prison officials he wants to die by the electric chair. RELATED : 'A simmering rage' led David Earl Miller to Tennessee's electric chair David Earl Miller is scheduled to die by electrocution Thursday Inmates can choose the chair over lethal injection if they were convicted of a crime that took place before 1999.  The chair was used last for the execution of Edmund Zago...

He started drinking in the womb, abused from his first moments by a mother who wished he'd never been born. He grew up in a household of "unspeakable horror" and made his 1st suicide attempt at age 6. When his mother died this year, her obituary didn't even list his name. David Earl Miller came to Knoxville in 1979 a 22-year-old drifter - homeless, jobless and friendless. He might never have stayed had he not been picked up on Interstate 75 by a preacher looking for sex - and Lee Standifer might be alive today. Miller's set to die Thursday in the electric chair in Nashville, more than 37 years after he beat and stabbed Standifer to death the night of May 20, 1981. "It was just a series of random events that led him here and to her and to her innocent life," said Jim Winston, a retired Knoxville Police Department lieutenant who worked the case from the first night. "She was just starting a life on her own, and he took all that ...