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Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

USSC denies stay of execution because of constitutional issues

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Over the last three months, six executions in the United States have been stayed or rescheduled because of constitutional issues regarding the method of execution or who can be present in the death chamber, according to Reuters.

At the helm of this controversy is the state of Alabama, according to recent articles featured in Reuters and Mother Jones.

Christopher Price was scheduled to be executed at the beginning of April. Price filed an appeal when he found out that he was to be lethally injected. He wants to die by lethal gas. The lower courts granted him a 60-day stay of execution. The state of Alabama appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

After some last minute arguing, the court decided 5-4 along ideological lines, with a conservative majority voting to proceed with the execution. The decision, which was issued at 3 a.m., was too late. The death warrant had expired. Alabama will have to set a new execution date.

The Alabama ruling comes at a time when the justices have been clashing over capital punishment. Conservative justice Neil Gorsuch wrote that an eleventh-hour stay of execution should be an “extreme exception.” It appears that the case of Christopher Price did not rise to that standard. The issue for the state of Alabama was the timing.

The state contends that Price and his lawyers had ample time to alert the state and let them know how Price wanted to be executed.

The liberal side of the high court maintained that the hasty decision made in the middle of the night undermined the criminal justice system. Justice Stephen Breyer, one of the liberal justices, called the litigation an example of arbitrary administration of the death penalty. He wrote that Price’s claim failed because of a minor oversight by his lawyer when filing evidence to support his argument.

“To proceed in this way calls into question the basic principles of fairness that should underlie our criminal justice system,” Breyer wrote.

Price, who was convicted of killing a minister, has no objection to dying. He con- tends that the three-drug protocol would cause him severe pain, and that nitrogen hypoxia would reduce that risk.

In a similar case, Russell Bucklew, a convicted murderer, sought to die by lethal gas. He has a rare medical condition that he claims could make his execution by lethal injection “gruesome.” He requested that the execution be delayed 60 days so he could proceed with his request to be executed by lethal gas. The Supreme Court, however, was not persuaded. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that the Constitution does not guarantee a condemned prisoner “a painless death.”

Amnesty International urges death penalty repeal

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“Two wrongs don’t make a right. The death penalty is no way to impart justice,” says Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas Director at Amnesty International.
In 2016, the US Supreme Court in Hurst v. Florida ruled that Florida’s capital sentencing law was unconstitutional. Yet, despite the ruling, Florida still has the second-largest death row in the nation and is fourth in the number of executions since 1976.
Amnesty International wants Florida to abolish their death penalty but it’s an uphill battle.
A new report released by Amnesty International, which focuses on three groups of death row inmates, shows that youth offenders and those with serious mental and intellectual disabilities are being taken advantage of by Florida’s capital sentencing laws.
The report calls into question the validity of executing those with serious mental illness, who are unfairly being labeled the “worst of the worst.” The report shows that prisoners with an intellectual disability, young adults with a mental maturity lower than that of an 18 year old, and those with a background of extreme deprivation and abuse, are at risk.

Amnesty’s goal is to convince Florida’s governor and his cabinet to commute the death sentences of all prisoners on death row.
Another problem the report reveals is how race influences who gets executed. Since 1976, not a single White person has been executed for killing a Black person. Whereas almost one fifth of the executions in this same time period involved Black defendants convicted of killing White victims.
Amnesty’s opposition to Florida’s death penalty is unconditional and absolute. Amnesty also wants Florida’s judges and juries to be made aware of a defendant’s mental health status and age before imposing the sentence of death.
Despite Amnesty’s urging, Florida remains a staunch believer in the death penalty. In response to the U.S. Supreme Court ruling, Florida’s legislation has revised its death penalty statute so executions could resume. In fact, Florida’s Supreme Court has even made the retroactive effect of Hurst only available to a limited group of cases,
cutting off almost half of the 400 people on Florida’s death row from a new sentencing hearing.
Mathew Marshall is one such person. He was 24 when he was convicted of murder in 1988. Although the jury unanimously voted to sentence him to life in prison, the judge overruled the decision and sentenced him to death. “The USA must stop resorting to the ultimate cru- el, inhuman and degrading punishment, and join the 142 countries that are abolitionist in law or practice today,” says Erika Guevara Rosas for Amnesty International.

Texas court updates death penalty protocols

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A Texas court implemented updated protocols for Death Row prisoners with intellectual disabilities. The revised standards came after the U.S. Supreme Court had set aside Texas prisoner Bobby Moore’s execution, Reuters reports.
The new protocols allowed the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals to reinstate Moore’s death sentence.

U.S. Supreme Court


Moore, 58, was convicted of murder in 1980. He was sentenced to execution, but the execution was set aside by the U.S. Supreme Court because of its 2002 ruling that the execution of inmates with intellectual disabilities is “cruel and unusual punishment.”
A 2017 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg concerning the Moore case, ruled against Texas’ system for measuring the intellect of defendants, because it was found to be “deficient.”
This 2017 Supreme Court decision came a month after a psychologist had testified that another Texas inmate facing execution was more likely to reoffend because he was Black. Chief Justice John Roberts said that the comment was a “noxious strain of racial prejudice.”
However, the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, the state’s highest criminal court, announced in June that it had revised its standards to better reflect modern medical thinking and abide by U.S. Supreme Court directives. “Under its new protocols, inmate Bobby Moore, 58, can be executed,” the Texas court said.
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.

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Lawyer urges defendant to plead guilty in capital case

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Oklahoma-Execution-Lawsuit

execution apparatus

In the summer of 2011, defendant Robert McCoy met with his lawyer Larry English to discuss how to plead in a capital case, The New York Times reported.

English told McCoy that he wanted him to concede to killing the mother, stepfather and brother-in-law of his estranged wife.

Others committed the crimes, McCoy told English, and he wanted to clear his name.

However, English said in a sworn statement that “Robert was furious, and it was a very intense meeting. He told me not to make that concession, but I told him that I was going to do so.

There was substantial evidence that he had done so, the Times reported

There was no ambiguity in McCoy’s position that he was innocent of the murders, according to English. But,  his “belief in his innocence was both earnest and delusional,” according to the Times.

“I believed that this was the only way to save his life,” English said.

The dispute was settled in court.

“Admitting guilt in an attempt to avoid the imposition of the death penalty appears to constitute a reasonable trial strategy,” the trial court determined after finding that there was overwhelming evidence incriminating McCoy.

English believed McCoy’s credibility was at stake and “feared the jurors would not listen him to when he begged them to spare Mr. McCoy’s life in the second phase.” 

According to a unanimous 2004 ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court in Florida v. Nixon, “Lawyers need not obtain the clients’ express consent before conceding guilt in a capital case.”

“Conceding guilt in a capital case is sometimes the right play,” according to the Times. In September, the Supreme Court agreed to decide whether it is permissible “even if the man whose life is at stake objects.”

However, the Nixon ruling did not address whether it was permissible for a lawyer to disregard a client’s explicit instruction to the contrary.

“Mr. English is simply selling me out. … This is unconstitutional for you to keep an attorney on my case when this attorney is completely selling me out,” McCoy told the trial judge, who denied his request to represent himself after he tried to fire English.

A Yale law school clinic accused English of not being an effective defense attorney.

In a legal brief filed in the U.S. Supreme Court on behalf of McCoy, the law school claimed that English did not go far enough to test the prosecution’s case, which backfired when McCoy was found guilty of capital murder.

The Sixth Amendment to the United States guarantees a right to the assistance of counsel. However, a capital defendant has no right to a lawyer who insists on his innocence, the Supreme Court ruled. The Supreme Court also ruled in 1975 in Faretta v. California that “the client is boss.”

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Prosecutors accepting guilty pleas: no executions

2017’s low executions only 23

New technology aids police oversight

Initiatives Solicit Voters’ View About Death Penalty

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Signatures are being solicited for two November ballot initiatives that would ask California voters to speed up executions or repeal the death penalty.
One of the initiatives would require the state Supreme Court to rule on capital cases within five years. It would also limit death penalty appeals, set strict deadlines for filing appeals and seek to expand the pool of death penalty lawyers.
Any attorney who now accepts court appointments to represent impoverished defendants in criminal cases would also have to take on capital cases, regardless of experience, reported Bob Egelko of the San Francisco Chronicle.
Included in this proposal is a scheme that would disregard the commentary period required by the state to approve a new single-drug execution method that would eliminate the current three-drug executions.
Egelko also reported that a rival initiative would repeal and replace the death penalty with life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
Sponsors for the abolition initiative have raised more than $1 million and both initiatives will need 365,880 valid signatures of registered voters in 180 days in order to be placed on the November ballot, said criminal trial lawyer Charles Bell.
Proponents supporting the elimination of capital punishment in the state of California saw death penalty sentences decline sharply in 2015. According o the Death Penalty Information Center, “there were 28 executions in six states, the fewest since 1991. There were 49 death sentences in 2015,” a 33 percent decline from what was already a 40-year low.
Three states, California, Florida and Alabama, accounted for more than half of all new death sentences in the country. The center reported “13 of the California death verdicts were concentrated in four Southern California counties.”
Riverside County by itself imposed eight death sentences, 16 percent of all the new death sentences in the nation and more than those that were imposed by any state except Florida. The center’s report shows “two-thirds of the 28 people executed in 2015 exhibited symptoms of severe mental illness, intellectual disability, the debilitating effects of extreme trauma and abuse or some combination of the three.”
More than 20 percent of death sentence imposed since 2010 were handed down by non-unanimous juries. This is a practice barred in all states except Florida, Alabama and Delaware. Those states collectively have” imposed 16 percent of death penalty cases in the nation. However, more than a quarter of all death sentences in 2015 were cases in which juries did not unanimously recommend death, the center reported.
 

“I believe it highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eight Amendment”

 
“At least 70 Death Row prisoners with execution dates in 2015 received stays, reprieves or commutations, 2.5 times the numbers who were executed.” The number of executions dropped by 20 percent compared to 2014 from 35 to 28, “marking the first time in 24 years that fewer than 30 executions were carried out in the United States,” the center reported.
“Most states in the union have abandoned the death penalty in law or in practice,” according to a report by the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School. The report shows 33 jurisdictions, including 30 states and the District of Columbia, the federal government and the U.S. military, have either formally eliminated the death penalty or have not carried out an execution in the last nine years.
In 2015, a Religion Research Institute’s survey revealed that when asked the policy question which sentence they preferred as punishment for people of murder, “a majority of Americans favored life without parole over the death penalty.”
In the opinion of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, “I believe it highly likely that the death penalty violates the Eighth Amendment.”
PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.
–Charles David Henry

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