Death Penalty News

Almost a year ago to the day, James Nathan Jones endured the longest execution in US history, causing Alabama to halt the practice Alabama is set to resume its executions with a death row inmate who battered a 75-year-old woman to death with a claw hammer - a year after it halted the punishment as critics say the flawed process is tantamount to torture. Convicted killer James Barber is scheduled to receive a lethal cocktail in an IV by 6am Friday for the 2001 murder of Dorothy Epps. A handyman by trade, he murdered her in cold blood with both fists and a hammer before stealing her purse. 

On July 20, America will add two more names to the list of people on the roster of those it has put to death as a punishment for crime. One, the execution of James Barber in Alabama , has already received a lot of publicity. The other, Oklahoma’s execution of Jemaine Cannon , has attracted less public attention. But together they illustrate the continuing injustice and cruelty of America’s death penalty system. The Cannon case highlights the kinds of people who end up on death row and are put to death. It reminds us that we are not executing the “worst of the worst.”

SCOTT DETROW, HOST: Elizabeth Breunig says she has never done an interview like the one she did last year. ELIZABETH BREUNIG: He called me the night of his attempted execution. And, you know, I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone in the course of my reporting who was so shaken. DETROW: It was last November. Alabama officials had just tried to execute Kenneth Smith, who 34 years earlier had been convicted in the murder for hire of Elizabeth Sennett. They had tried to execute him, but they had failed. BREUNIG: They sat him down in the prison office and allowed him to make a phone call to his wife. And he asked her to three-way me in. He just wanted to make sure that he got down on the record what happened immediately while it was on his mind.

Editor’s Note: This column is the product of a research collaboration with five Amherst College students, Mattea Denney, Nicolas Graber-Mitchell, Greene Ko, Rose Mroczka, and Lauren Pelosi. In a column last month, I argued that over the last decade the lethal injection paradigm decomposed as new drugs and drug cocktails were adopted in death penalty states. As this happened, the number of problems encountered during executions multiplied. Of all the techniques used to put people to death in the United States since the start of the twentieth century, by 2010 lethal injection already had shown itself to be the most problematic . Since then, things have only gotten worse As lethal injection mishaps multiplied, death penalty states did not sit idly by . Over the last decade, they responded in two ways . My research collaborators and I found that while some states modified their execution procedures to make mishaps less likely, others introduced greater ambiguity and discretion into their ...