San Quentin News

Written By Incarcerated - Advancing Social Justice

WALL CITY, VOLUME 2, ISSUE 2: My birth plan is to deliver in a jail cell

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A true story of women on their own in an Oklahoma lockup

By Laci Berg as told to Mary Fish Story courtesy of Victoria Law

My name is Laci. I am a locked-up pregnant lady at Oklahoma’s Mabel Bassett Correctional Center. Previously, I was in Caddo County Jail on a controlled of a dangerous substance charge with a former conviction of a felony. One of my cellmates (there were about 40 of us in this jail) was pregnant. Her name was Cheree and she was Native and Caucasian. One afternoon, she went into labor. They brought the trays and we told the male guard she was in labor. He said, “I’ll see what I can do,” and he left.

Cheree started crowning—this baby was coming and she wasn’t waiting on anybody. My other cellies were banging o on the door, hollering for the guard and saying, “We’re having a baby!” They were pushing the button to central control and telling them, “The baby is coming!”

They answered back, “Quit yelling and quit banging and quit pushing the button!” So we did and commenced to having a baby!

I grabbed my sheet to hold as a curtain so she could have some semblance of privacy, as the bottom bunk was layered with our towels to catch the fluids. We draped a towel over her knees as they were positioned for the baby to come out. The baby’s head was crowning when the EMTs came in and misdiagnosed Cheree, saying, “No, she is not crowning!” And they left.

My cellies were banging on the door, hollering for the guard and saying, “We’re having a baby!”

I saw Cheree’s face getting red and I thought she needed air, so I let the sheet down and everybody in the pod started scream- ing as the baby’s head was coming. I don’t know if it was from shock or what, but I put the sheet back up. Cheree was too tired to push anymore. The umbilical cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck twice. We tried to urge her to push, but she said she couldn’t. So Kathryn, who was studying to be a nurse, came over, wrapped a towel around the baby’s head and unwrapped the umbilical cord around her neck. Within five minutes, we, the locked-up women delivered Patience Rose, a 21-inch, beautiful baby girl out into the world at Caddo County Jail. She had long legs, and lots of hair.

The EMTs came back about 10 minutes later and took her to the hospital.

Oklahoma initiates new parole reforms

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Oklahoma recently began a new way to parole inmates in its prison system.

In 2018, the Legislature approved House Bill 2286 among a host of criminal justice reform measures, reported the Oklahoma Watch.

They established it as what they called administrative parole, rather than the traditional way of paroling, according to the article.

“If you meet the five statutory requirements, we skip that part,” said Justin Wolfe, general counsel for the Pardon and Parole Board. Wolfe is referring to the process where inmates have had to appear in front of the board and then undergo a pre-review investigation before the board members approve them. The new “truncated” parole process cuts out those two parts, said the article.

Eligible inmates must have served one-quarter to one- third of their sentences, and they must be “substantially compliant” with Department of Corrections case plans, the Oklahoma Watch said.

Oklahoma has standard requirements that are similar to those implemented by California’s Proposition 57 in 2017. Proposition 57, which was passed by California voters in 2016, allows California inmates to earn good time credits that will shorten their prison or jail time by significant margins. Both nonviolent and violent offenders capitalize on the bills.

Oklahoma’s bill took effect on Nov. 1, 2018, and a list of eligible inmates was recommended to the board the following month. The initial list of 138 was eventually reduced to 74.

The board approved one- third of nonviolent offenders in Oklahoma in 2018, an increase from the 27% approved two years prior.

The new approach is draw- ing skepticism from criminal justice policy analysts on whether it will work or not. Damion Shade, an analyst with the Oklahoma Policy Institute, is taking a “wait- and-see” approach, said the article.

“I think the biggest issue with the administrative pa- role part of the process is that it began in November of last year…Those individuals who came into the system before November 1 don’t have ac- cess to the remedy of administrative parole,” Shade said.

Wolfe disagrees. Unlike California’s Prop. 57, the administrative parole of Oklahoma is retroactive. This means that the time inmates served before the law went into effect would count toward eligibility, he said.

Inert gas asphyxiation the new method of execution

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Alabama lawmakers in March voted to authorize a method of execution that has never been used before—inert gas asphyxiation.
Lawmakers say this alternative method is a more humane way to carry out capital punishment. It works by directing the inmate to breathe inert gas as opposed to oxygen. Examples of such gases include helium, methane and nitrogen.
The Associated Press reported that inhaling nitrogen gas is “like dying on a plane that depressurizes in flight, swiftly killing all aboard.”
Perhaps that’s why 51 of Alabama’s 180 death row inmates have signed statements indicating their preference for that gas as opposed to a lethal injection or the electric chair.
Some may say this represents a leap into the unknown, but according to John Palombi, an attorney with the Federal Defenders Program, “the uncertain- ties of nitrogen gas” trump what he thinks is the “known torture” of other execution methods.
An example of such torture took place in 2016, when Ronald Smith Jr.’s attorney witnessed him coughing and heaving for more than 10 minutes in the gas chamber. Smith’s movement showed he was not anesthetized at any point during the agonizingly long procedure.
Others, however, believe the uncertainty behind such a new procedure may cause more harm.
“This is entirely experimental,” said Randall Marshall, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama. “It is the epitome of cruel (and unusual punishment) because it is experimenting on human beings.”
State Senator Cam Ward said he believes some inmates agreed to nitrogen gas because of the foreseeable, lengthy legal challenges. He added that it could possibly be a way for prisoners to avoid the death penalty.
Ward also attributes the fact that inmates are opting for this alternative method of execution to fear. According to the Dorland’s Illustrated Medical Dictionary, lethal injections involve drugs that, if given incorrectly, can result in suffering “I think they’ve seen stories of where the three-drug cocktail lethal injection has failed and there’s that fear of it being a botched process as opposed to nitrogen,” Ward said.

The executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, Robert Dunham, said that he expects there will be considerable litigation regarding nitrogen asphyxiation. In Oklahoma, which announced in March that nitrogen gas would be the primary method of execution, officials have begun constructing a set of protocols to use the gas because there has been an issue of obtaining legal injection drugs.

In Mississippi the method has been approved, but only in the event that lethal injections have been ruled unconstitutional or are unavailable.
In Alabama, the most recent state to consider this alternative method, litigation over the state’s lethal injection method ended because inmates
chose the nitrogen gas process.
The lawsuit that challenged lethal injections was dismissed.

States struggle to carry out executions

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Lethal injections, legal battles and difficulty obtaining drugs have forced a number of states to find alternative ways to carry out the death penalty, reports the New York Times.
Alabama, Oklahoma and Mississippi have authorized the use of inhaling the inert gas nitrogen for executions.
“An oxygen-deficient atmosphere” can knock a person unconscious after just one or two breaths and “the exposed person has no warning and cannot sense that the oxygen level is too low,” according to a report from the United States Chemical Safety and Hazard Investigation Board.
“The safest, the best and the most effective method available,” Mike Hunter, Oklahoma’s attorney general, said about using nitrogen.
The problem is that no one actually knows how safe it is. “If and when states begin carrying out executions with nitrogen, it will amount to the same type of experimentation we see in the different variations of lethal injections,” Jen Moreno of the Berkeley Law Death Penalty Clinic told the New York Times.
Lethal injections were started some 40 years ago and were expected to be more efficient and humane than the electric chair or gas chamber but have failed to consistently deliver on this promise.
“It burns, man,” were the last words of a Georgia inmate executed in May for a 1996 shotgun slaying as he twitched briefly when the lethal injection flowed into his body reported the Associated Press in a May 5 article. He was the second Georgia inmate executed this year.
There are approximately 2,750 inmates on death row in the 31 states and in federal and military prisons according to The New York Times.
Across the nation there were 41 sentences calling for the death penalty in 2017 — 23 executions were carried out during that same period, according to Amnesty International, and 41 additional death penalties sentenced. These figures were the second lowest totals for executions and death sentences recorded in any year since 1991 and 1973, respectively.
Blocked by legal challenges, California has not executed anyone since Clarence Ray Allen in January 2006.
However, that could change in the next governor’s term, after voters approved speeding up the appeals process in 2016 by passing Proposition 66.
While one judge recently lifted an injunction blocking executions, four federal and state lawsuits are pending over the state’s protocol for execution by lethal injection.
Unlike the constitutions in most states, California’s limits a governor’s executive clemency power — governors cannot commute the sentence of an inmate who has two felony convictions unless four of the seven State Supreme Court justices concur. About half of California death row inmates have two or more felonies on their record, experts estimate.
Even if the governor cannot commute a death penalty, California has no current legal avenue to purchase the execution drugs specified in its new procedure: pentobarbital or thiopental. State officials have said they plan to use compounding pharmacies to produce the drugs, although that could invite further litigation, according to experts.
The only gubernatorial candidate who personally supports the death penalty is Assemblyman Travis Allen, an Orange County Republican who vowed in an interview to “clean out this death row in California.”
“I don’t think we’re ever going to see an execution carried out in California because there are too many legal and practical obstacles,” said Natasha Minsker, the director of the ACLU of California Center for Advocacy and Policy in the Mercury News.
For more information, go to the Death Penalty Information Center.

PPI’s “Correctional Control: Incarceration and Supervision by State” is the first report to aggregate data on all types of correctional control nationwide.

Technology makes your smart phone a snitch


http://sanquentinnews.com/us-supreme-court-hear-death-row-case-hidalgo-v-arizona-challenges-new-arizona-death-penalty-law/

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