Death Penalty News

He’s called for tougher prison sentences and the death penalty for high-level drug dealers, but that’s discredited by a body of research finding that tougher criminal penalties don’t slow the flow of drugs into the US. Several months after his inauguration, President Donald Trump said the opioid epidemic would end under his watch. “Watch what happens, if we do our jobs, how the number of drug users and the addicted will start to tumble downward over a period of years,” he said in 2017. “It will be a beautiful thing to see.” It’s similar to the kind of empty promise Trump made on Covid-19 — when he said it would disappear “like a miracle.” And just like the coronavirus, the opposite has happened: Under Trump, drug overdose deaths actually increased, even before the Covid-19 pandemic took off. According to preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , drug overdose deaths in 2019, before Covid-19, hit a record high of nearly 72,000, up almost 5 percent from 6...

Undeterred by a shortage of drugs used for lethal injections and capital punishment’s waning popularity, states that still practice the death penalty are seeking alternative ways to kill death row inmates. The latest suggestion? Death by nitrogen gas, a method that has never been used before. After several international drug companies decided to stop sending drugs to prisons  if they were to be used in executions, state officials began scrambling to find alternatives. Several states have mulled bringing back older methods such as the electric chair or firing squads. Recently, Nebraska and Nevada suggested fentanyl , a powerful opioid responsible for thousands of deaths in the United States. And in the last several months, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Alabama have authorized nitrogen gas for executions.  But there may be a problem. “Nitrogen hypoxia, whatever that might be, is not a medical act,” Dr. Joel Zivot, a professor of anesthesiology at Emory University, told M...

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Wednesday issued new guidance to federal prosecutors on how to apply the death penalty to numerous drug-related crimes. Sessions advised federal prosecutors to utilize laws permitting capital punishment as a viable sentence, both in violent and non-violent cases. In the memo sent to U.S. attorneys Wednesday morning, Sessions said that some of the "appropriate cases" to seek the death penalty include murder related to racketeering crimes, gun deaths occurring during drug trafficking crimes and murder related to criminal enterprise. The memo also encouraged prosecutors to pursue capital punishment in cases involving "dealing in extremely large quantities of drugs." According to the U.S. statutes, an "extremely large" quantity of drugs means distributing at least 600 times the amount of a given substance that would bring penalties of five to 40 years in prison. The Trump administration has frequently ad...

US President Donald Trump has called for drug traffickers to face the death penalty as part of his plan to combat the US painkiller-addiction epidemic. He outlined the proposal during a speech in New Hampshire, a state badly affected by the opioid crisis. Mr Trump said his administration was attempting to change the law to execute drug dealers, but it will face stiff political and judicial headwinds. Opioids are a class of drugs including prescription painkillers and heroin. What are opioids and what are the risks? Some 2.4 million Americans are estimated to be addicted to the drugs. The crisis claimed an estimated 63,600 lives nationwide in 2016, say health officials. Mr Trump was cheered on Monday as he told a crowd in Manchester, New Hampshire: "If we don't get tough on the drug dealers we're wasting our time. "And that toughness includes the death penalty." Mr Trump previously suggested the "ultimate" punishment fo...