Death Penalty News

JACKSON, Miss. (WLBT) - Mississippi’s longest-serving death row inmate is seeking clemency from Gov. Tate Reeves. On Monday, attorneys for Richard Gerald Jordan filed the petition, asking the governor to commute his sentence to life in prison without parole. Jordan’s attorneys are also requesting a 15-minute in-person or virtual interview with the state’s top elected leader. “It is the long-standing practice of the Office of the Governor in Mississippi to allow a 15 to 20-minute meeting with a death-sentenced inmate’s representatives,” Frank Rosenblatt, a representative for Jordan wrote.

I witnessed the death of Jemaine Cannon. I was horrified. On the morning of the execution, I woke up in a crappy motel room in McAlester, Okla., and although the day before I’d thought frequently about what I would be doing if I knew this would be my final day, I now found myself wordless, affectless, calm. I did some pushups and crunches. I took a shower. And then I checked out and found some coffee before heading to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary. Except for that last part, the morning was unremarkable. I had wanted to attend an execution for some time, because I believe that the growing normalization of a punishment that is inherently cruel and unusual—and wildly disproportionate in its application against people of color—is directly related to a growing reluctance to look at the evidence of barbarities inflicted on our society, and by it. And I believe the first step to changing any horror is to bear full witness to it.

Florida administers executions by lethal injection or electric chair. In 2000, then-Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed legislation making lethal injection the state’s default method of execution amid controversy over the electric chair.  The last inmate Florida executed by electrocution was Allen Davis in July 1999. Witnesses described blood streaming from Davis’ nose and onto his shirt, which drew widespread attention two years after an inmate’s mask burst into flames during a different Florida electrocution. Since then, 57 people have been executed by lethal injection and none by electric chair. Prior to 2000, there were 44 electrocution executions.

Alabama’s corrections department has bungled the procedure on three recent occasions, with IV teams failing on hours at end, adding immense distress to a difficult situation On three occasions in the past four months, Alabama’s department of corrections has bungled its lethal injections procedure. At 7.57pm on 17 November, prison guards entered the “death cell” at Holman correctional facility in Atmore, south Alabama, where Kenneth Smith was awaiting execution by lethal injection for the 1988 murder-for-hire of a preacher’s wife.

Alabama’s execution of Joe Nathan James Jr. last month offered the latest evidence that lethal injection is a notoriously bad way to put people to death. His execution took more than three hours to complete. It was a gruesome affair from start to finish. Once touted as America’s most humane method of execution, lethal injection has proven itself to be unreliable and very difficult to get right. From 1900-2010, 7 percent of all lethal injection executions carried out in the United States were botched, far more than for hanging, the firing squad, the electric chair, or the gas chamber. Over the last decade, as death penalty states have turned to new and untested drugs and drug combinations, the situation has only gotten worse. More than ever, there is a very real risk that anyone put to death by lethal injection will suffer some version of James’ fate. But rather than openly address lethal injection’s fatal flaws, Alabama, like other death penalty states, has tried to hide them and to m...

Oklahoma has used the wrong drug labels during at least 3 recent executions, prison officials said Friday during testimony in a federal trial on whether the state's 3-drug lethal injection method is unconstitutional. Despite the improper labels, Department of Corrections Director Scott Crow and his chief of operations, Justin Farris, both testified that they were confident the proper drugs were used during each of the executions. "I am 100% confident that all executions have used the proper drugs," Crow told U.S. District Judge Stephen Friot. Farris said the labels read "rocuronium bromide" instead of "vecuronium bromide," which is a paralytic and the second of 3 drugs used in Oklahoma's method. Farris said he believes the "rocuronium bromide" labels were used in training exercises and were never replaced. Both drugs are similar paralytics, and Oklahoma's execution protocols authorize the use of rocuronium bromide, although the protoc...

An expert of anesthesiology has testified in trial challenging Oklahoma's lethal injection protocol that a prisoner the state executed last month was likely in "extreme pain." Gail Van Norman, a professor at the University of Washington who has trained anesthesiology students for 36 years, told the court Wednesday that Gilbert Postelle attempted to make a fist after prison officials declared him unconscious during the lethal injection process. The state executed him Feb. 17 for killing 4 people in 2008. "It was a purposeful movement," Van Norman said, according to The Oklahoman. She said she believed with "virtual medical certainty" that Postelle, along with the state's three other most recent executed prisoners "experienced extreme pain and suffering." Van Norman's testimony comes as part of a federal lawsuit filed by a group of Oklahoma death row prisoners challenging the state's lethal injection protocol. Attorneys for the pris...

Editor’s Note: This column is the product of a research collaboration with five Amherst College students, Mattea Denny, Nicolas Graber-Mitchell, Greene Ko, Rose Mroczka, and Lauren Pelosi. America’s death penalty continues to fall out of favor, a well-known fact. When the year started, eight executions were scheduled for February and March in five different states. But all of them are now on hold, and two of the three executions that were set for April already have been halted. While advocacy for the end of the death penalty has played some role, it is the decomposition of the lethal injection paradigm that has truly driven down execution numbers. We have now seen a decade of chaos and experimentation as death penalty jurisdictions tried to find reliable sources of drugs to carry out executions. States rolled out new drugs, but things did not go smoothly. The number of mishaps associated with lethal injection increased substantially. From 2010-2020, an already problematic method of ex...

A new bill passed by the Virginia General Assembly this year aimed to add transparency to the state’s execution process by declassifying the sources of its lethal injection drugs. But the Virginia Department of Corrections recently denied a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Mercury for the names of its suppliers over the last decade, noting that the new law doesn’t apply to contracts that were already signed by the state. “Specifically, the 2020 amendment provides that the identity of an outsourcing facility ‘that enters into a contract’ is no longer confidential or exempt from the Freedom of Information Act,” wrote Ryan McCord, the department’s legal compliance manager, in a response letter last week. “The General Assembly expressly chose the word ‘enters,’ rather than ‘entered into,’ or ‘has entered into,’ indicating that the law does not apply to contracts executed prior to the statutory amendment.” Sen. John Bell, D-Loudoun, who introduced the bill duri...

As the COVID-19 pandemic has spread around the world, hospitals across this country and in many other nations have reported serious shortages of sedatives, painkillers, and paralytics needed to treat coronavirus patients. Many states have supplies of these drugs that could be used to alleviate those shortages and treat seriously ill and dying patients. These states, though, have decided shortsightedly and dangerously to maintain these stockpiles for their intended purpose: executions. Lethal injection drugs—like fentanyl, midazolam, vecuronium bromide, and rocuronium bromide—are urgently needed to help save people seriously ill with COVID-19. And death penalty states with stockpiles of those drugs now have a choice to make: Is it more important to guard those supplies so that in the future they can be used to execute convicted murderers, or should they release them to help save innocent lives? So far, they are choosing to let innocent people fighting the illness today suffer. ...

"Florida has 20,000 milligrams of rocuronium bromide, which experts estimate could treat 100 COVID-19 patients."  Death penalty states are stockpiling medicines for lethal injections that could save the lives of hundreds of coronavirus patients were they released for medical use, The Guardian reports . Prominent medical practitioners have appealed to capital punishment states to release their stocks of essential sedatives and paralytics that they save for executions. The drugs are among the most sought after in hospital intensive care units where shortages of the key medicines are putting lives of COVID-19 patients at risk. A letter, co-signed by seven leading anesthesiologists, pharmacists and medical academics, is being sent to corrections departments of all death penalty states. RELATED |  Doctors Ask Oklahoma, Other Death Penalty States, to Give up Execution Drugs for COVID-19 Patients It points out hospitals are facing desperate shortages of sedatives and...

There’s a national shortage of the drugs used to treat COVID-19 patients in ICU beds, and a group of out-of-state doctors penned a letter asking Oklahoma to share its supply with local hospitals. It’s unclear how many people could be treated with Oklahoma’s supply, but the state plans to use two of the drugs listed in the doctors’ letter to put prisoners to death. The drugs were originally designed for medical use.  The doctors say they can be used to subdue Covid-19 patients who need to be hooked up to ventilators. Dr. Joel Zivot, an anesthesiologist and ICU doctor in Atlanta, helped write the letter.  The doctor was already an outspoken critic of using medicine in lethal injections. Now, he says states’ drugs are badly needed. "My question is, if states have execution drugs — or rather drugs, that in my hand are for the purposes of healing and in their hand are for the purposes of killing — if you’ve got them, I respectfully ask that you hand them ...