Death Penalty News

After Tennessee death row inmate Christa Pike survived an execution attempt, it's unclear whether the state will try again. After Christa Pike survived Tennessee’s failed attempt to execute her, the unsettled question of whether the state will try again could push Tennessee into uncharted legal territory, experts say. Pike, 50, suffered burns and blisters to her arms, and her prognosis remains uncertain after executioners tried to give her two lethal doses of pentobarbital, her legal team said Wednesday. She was sentenced to death for the 1995 beating and stabbing death of classmate Colleen Slemmer.

The famous appellate judge Richard Posner once wrote, “A civilized society locks up [criminals] until age makes them harmless, but it does not keep them in prison until they die.” The state of Ohio apparently hasn’t heard of Judge Posner, as they went one step further and tried to execute an elderly Alva Campbell and failed. Ohio’s lethal injection team spent more than 30 minutes poking Alva Campbell’s decrepit body in search of any decent vein into which they could inject their lethal cocktail to no avail. They finally relented — but only temporarily. Hours later, Gov. John Kasich announced not a commutation — or a plan to investigate what went wrong — but that Campbell’s execution would be rescheduled for 2019. It’s a travesty of justice that Ohio’s bungled attempt at executing Alva Campbell was both predictable and avoidable. Campbell’s attorneys had in fact informed the governor and courts that their client’s abysmal health made him a uniquely poor candidate for leth...

Ohio tried and failed to execute Alva Campbell. The state shouldn't get a second chance. The pathos and problems of America's death penalty were vividly on display yesterday when Ohio tried and failed to execute Alva Campbell . Immediately after its failure Gov. John Kasich set June 5, 2019, as a new execution date.

Hilton Butler experienced the history of US executions like few others, assisting with Louisiana’s portable electric chair and then overseeing executions as the Warden of Angola, the state’s largest penitentiary.  In 2002 I interviewed him at the Angola Prison museum for my documentary series The Executioners and this is an edited transcript. Q. How did you first become involved in execution work? “Well, in 1955 I was assigned as a young officer to go around to where the crime was committed. The chair was transported to wherever the crime was committed, at that time and there was a Captain [Ephie] Foster that was in charge of the chair and I was assigned to go with him and transport the chair to wherever the crime was committed.” [Note: Prison guard Foster was responsible for the drunken botched execution of Willie Francis in 1946. Whilst Foster may have sometimes been involved in transporting the chair to executions in the 50’s, the executioner was usually Gra...

Romell Broom, shortly after the execution attempt he survived on Sept. 15, 2009 Ohio can try a second time to execute convicted killer Romell Broom, the Ohio Supreme Court ruled today. In a 4-3 ruling written by Justice Judith Lanzinger, the court said that the state would not violate the U.S. Constitution Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment by executing Broom, a Cleveland man who was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering 14-year-old Tyrna Middleton in 1984 . The court sided with the Cuyahoga County prosecutor who argued that the botched attempt to execute Broom on Sept. 15, 2009 , didn't count as a failed execution because deadly chemicals never entered Broom's body. "To be clear, the state must comply with the protocol as amended," Lanzinger wrote. "Strict compliance with the protocol will ensure that executions are carried out in a constitutional manner and can also prevent or reveal an inmate’s attempt to interfere ...

Ohio’s unusual pending death-penalty case, involving an inmate the state already tried but failed to execute , will be argued on Tuesday before the Ohio Supreme Court. Attorneys for Romell Broom contend that the state would be guilty of unconstitutional double jeopardy if it tries to execute him a second time. They said in a court filing that the state’s contention that their client didn’t suffer physically during a botched execution on Sept. 15, 2009, “ignores the unnecessary psychological suffering Broom endured during two hours of lawless chaos." Representatives for Attorney General Mike DeWine counter that what happened on Sept. 15, 2009, wasn’t a failed execution but a breakdown in the lethal-injection process, and a new execution should proceed. They argue that the U.S. Constitution doesn’t promise that executions will be pain-free and that what happened to Broom wasn’t unconstitutional “cruel and usual punishment.”  The attempted execution of Broom, 59, on S...

The botched execution of Romell Broom causes Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland to put executions on hold, the latest in a string of challenges to capital punishment. An Execution Mired in Controversy Rekindles Long-Smoldering Capital Punishment Debate On Sept. 15, Romell Broom, who was convicted of abducting, raping and murdering a 14-year-old girl in Cleveland in 1984, survived his execution when executioners failed for two hours to find a usable vein to administer a lethal injection. Observers described a scene during which Romell attempted to aid the executioners in locating a vein, and then broke into tears before Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland intervened to issue a one-week reprieve. Broom’s lawyers have since claimed a second execution attempt to execute Broom would constitute cruel and unusual punishment and violate the Eighth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. A hearing in the case has been scheduled for Nov. 30. On Monday, 43-year-old Lawrence Reynolds of Cleveland, a convi...

THE Supreme Court concluded last week, in a 7-2 ruling, that Kentucky’s three-drug method of execution by lethal injection does not violate the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. In his majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts cited a Supreme Court principle from a ruling in 1890 that defines cruelty as limited to punishments that “involve torture or a lingering death.” But the court was wrong in the 19th century, an error that has infected its jurisprudence for more than 100 years. In this nation’s landmark capital punishment cases, the resultant executions were anything but free from torture and prolonged deaths. The first of those landmark cases, the 1879 case of Wilkerson v. Utah, was cited by Justice Clarence Thomas, in his concurring opinion in the Kentucky case. The court “had no difficulty concluding that death by firing squad” did not amount to cruel and unusual punishment, Justice Thomas wrote. Wallace Wilkerson might have begged to di...

Author Gilbert King, in his forthcoming book The Execution of Willie Francis , details the story of a young African-American man who endured the electric chair twice before being executed for the murder of a white man in Louisiana. In 1946, an all-white jury convicted Francis (pictured), who was 17, and sentenced him to death. The first attempt to execute him by electrocution did not work, and Francis was returned to his death row cell where he remained for almost another year while the U.S. Supreme Court considered whether a second electrocution would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. Noted death penalty author and activist Sister Helen Prejean describes The Execution of Willie Francis as “profound.” She writes, Gilbert King transforms abstract arguments over Louisiana's right to re-execute a condemned youth into a profound story of flesh and blood. His impassioned portrait of the unlikely bond between two young Catholics, Willie Francis and his undaunted lawye...