Days after President Obama said a bungled execution in Oklahoma was 'deeply disturbing' and called for a review of how fairly the death penalty was used, a bipartisan panel of legal experts has urged sweeping changes in what it calls the 'deeply flawed' administration of capital punishment.
'I support the death penalty for guilty people but not for innocent people,' said a leader of the panel, Mark White, a Democrat who oversaw 19 executions as the governor of Texas from 1983 to 1987. 'We run the real risk today of executing innocent people.'
The committee, which finished its report before the Oklahoma execution on April 29 and was scheduled to release it on Wednesday, is calling on states to stop using the troubled three-drug sequence commonly used for lethal injections. It said that approach carried an unacceptable risk of causing pain and suffering, as it apparently did in Oklahoma last week when an insufficiently sedated prisoner writhed and mumbled for several minutes before dying of heart failure.
Instead, the report says, executions should be carried out with large doses of a single anesthetic or barbiturate, the same method used in doctor-assisted suicides in states like Oregon.
Many medical experts agree, but an acute shortage of traditional barbiturates, mainly because manufacturers refuse to provide them for executions, has led states to scramble for secret suppliers and try out new drug combinations. Mr. White said in an interview that it was up to the states to find a humane method.
The report, 'Irreversible Error,' was written by experts assembled by The Constitution Project, a research and advocacy group in Washington. The panel included supporters and foes of capital punishment and was led by Mr. White, Gerald Kogan, a former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court, and Beth A. Wilkinson, a former federal prosecutor. It included former state attorneys general, judges and corrections officials.
Capital punishment remains available in 32 states, although the annual number of executions is in decline.
In another sign of fallout from Oklahoma's botched execution last week, lawyers for Robert James Campbell, who is scheduled to be executed on May 13 in Texas, filed a request on Tuesday for a delay, based on what they called the 'unimaginably torturous conduct' in the Oklahoma execution last week of Clayton D. Lockett.
Though Texas will use one drug, in line with the Constitution Project panel's recommendation, it has kept the source secret, leading to what Mr. Campbell's lawyers called 'a substantial risk that Mr. Campbell's execution could be as horrific as Mr. Lockett's.'
Most of the new report focused on what the group called ongoing procedural deficiencies in the imposition of death sentences.
It called for relaxing constraints on the review of exculpatory evidence after a person has already been convicted, for federal standards for forensic laboratories and for universal videotaping of interrogations to help weed out false confessions.
It devoted considerable attention to what it called the inconsistent application of a 2002 Supreme Court ruling that the death penalty should not be applied to intellectually disabled defendants.
The group called for a presumption, subject to challenge, that a person with an IQ below 75 should receive the exemption. It noted that Florida, one of the leading states for executions, adopted a strict IQ cutoff of 70, 'even if all examining experts conclude, using the clinical definition, that the person is in fact intellectually disabled.'
The committee also cited the case in Georgia of Warren Hill, who was sentenced to death for killing his cellmate. A court held that he had been shown to be disabled by a 'preponderance of evidence' but not 'beyond a reasonable doubt,' as required by state rules that the panel called too stringent.
The state plan to proceed with Mr. Hill's execution has been delayed by a challenge to the state law that calls the source of execution drugs a 'state secret.'
The report said: 'Lack of adequate counsel to represent capital defendants is likely the gravest of the problems that render the death penalty, as currently administered, arbitrary, unfair and fraught with serious error.'
States including Alabama, Pennsylvania and Texas, it said, often compensate capital defense lawyers so poorly that a proper defense is 'nearly impossible.'
States should analyze data for signs of racial disparities in capital punishment, one of the concerns raised by President Obama, the report said.
The group recognized a dilemma in its call for the involvement of better-trained doctors and other medical technicians in the administering of lethal drugs. Most doctors and nurses abide by the American Medical Association's policy forbidding participation in executions.
But the risks of mistakes without well-trained personnel are so great, the panel said, that states should delay executions unless trained professionals are available.
A death penalty advocacy group, the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, issued a statement criticizing the Constitution Project as one-sided and its report as failing to note that the main problem with capital punishment was that the appeals process delays it for far too long.
Posted by Unknown on Tuesday, May 6, 2014 - Rating: 4.5
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