Torture in Tennessee

Today the state of Tennessee is set to murder inmate Billy Ray Irick using a lethal injection cocktail using midazolam, vecuronium bromide and potassium chloride.

Midazolam is a sedative that will supposedly  render Mr. Irick unconscious. Vecuronium bromide is a paralytic that would prevent Mr. Irick from making any movements. Potassium chloride is the drug that will stop Mr. Irick's heart - and leave him dead on the gurney.

The question, however, is whether or not midazolam is an effective sedative for purposes of executing inmates. As has been seen in botched executions in Florida, Ohio, Arizona and Oklahoma, midazolam has led to excruciating pain for inmates and even aborted executions.

In 2013 William Happ was executed in Florida using midazolam. Witness accounts state that he remained conscious longer than usual and made more body movements after losing consciousness than normal.

In 2014 Dennis McGuire was executed in Ohio using midazolam. After being administered the drug, Mr. McGuire clenched his fists, gasped and struggled to breathe.

That same year Clayton Lockett died in Oklahoma after being administered midazolam. The drugs didn't kill him and the execution was called off abruptly in midstream. Mr. Lockett then died of cardiac arrest that night.

Still later that year Joseph Wood was executed in Arizona using midazolam. It took over two hours for Mr. Wood to die and one reporter said that Mr. Wood gasped for air more than 640 times.

There is no proof that midazolam is the appropriate drug for use in killing inmates. Inmates awaiting execution in Tennessee filed suit against the state arguing that the lethal cocktail would violate their 8th Amendment right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment. The argument is that the paralytic will render the inmate incapable of letting anyone know he is undergoing extreme pain during the process. For those watching from the gallery there would be no way to know if anything was going awry in the process.

During the court proceedings a pathologist called by the plaintiff's testified that he reviewed autopsies on 32 inmates who were executed. In 27 of those cases, the pathologist performing the autopsy found signs of pulmonary edema meaning the inmates had suffered respiratory distress during the executions.

The court in Tennessee, however, denied the plaintiffs' request for relief on the grounds that while they may or may not have proven that the new drug protocol was cruel or unusual, they didn't provide the state with a viable alternative to kill themselves.

That's right. The U.S. Supreme Court held in Glossip v. Gross, if you're challenging the constitutionality of a drug protocol for executions, you have to give the state an alternative method of taking your life.

Now we can sidestep the absurdity of that test for purposes of this argument. If a state wishes to carry out executions, that state must come up with a protocol for killing inmates that doesn't run afoul of the 8th Amendment. If evidence is brought forth that the protocol in question amounted to torture, then it's the state's responsibility to draw up a new protocol. To place the burden on those awaiting execution to draw up a protocol for their own death is about as Kafkaesque as you can get.

It's also a cop out from a court that doesn't want to dirty its hands in death penalty litigation. I know that many folks out there couldn't care less about whether an inmate suffers during an execution because they are focused on the pain and suffering he or she caused by killing someone else. To them I would point out that the purpose of our criminal (in)justice system isn't to obtain revenge. The purpose is to rehabilitate as many folks as we can and release them back into society to become productive citizens - those who can't be rehabilitated are then kept behind bars so they can't harm anyone else.

In many cases of death row inmates we are also talking about men who did stupid and/or despicable things when they were in their 20's and who have sat behind bars, in isolation, for two decades or more. To believe that they are the same people now that they were when the committed their crimes is pure fantasy.

There is no place in civilized society for this barbarism.

Update: Another murder behind the Pine Curtain

The State of Texas murdered Jose Villegas last night. They strapped him down to a gurney, put an IV into his arm and pumped him full of what is supposed to be pentobarbital. Of course since the US Supreme Court decided that no one in Texas - outside of prison officials - has any right to know who produced the drug and whether it was what it was supposed to be, we don't know what was pumped into his veins.

We do know that something wasn't quite up to snuff because Mr. Villegas complained of a burning sensation as the death drug took its toll.

The murder of Mr. Villegas was put on hold for almost an hour as the Supreme Court considered an appeal from Mr. Villegas' attorneys arguing that to allow the execution would be to allow the state to take the life of a mentally retarded man. An IQ test taken this past February indicated that Mr. Villegas' IQ was 59 - well below 70, generally recognized as the indicator of mental retardation.

Texas officials argued that Mr. Villegas' attorneys had plenty of time to raise the issue of mental retardation before filing a last-minute appeal based on the February test.

Of course if he's retarded then he's retarded - whether a test was taken 10 years ago or last week. And, if the Nine in Robes have proclaimed that we shalt not execute a mentally retarded person, then Mr. Villegas shouldn't have been strapped down and murdered.

Yes, his crimes were heinous. He killed an ex-girlfriend, her child and her mother. But killing him didn't bring any of them back. Killing him didn't fill the hole that was left in the hearts of the victims' family and friends. Nueces County District Attorney Mark Skurka proclaimed that justice was done - after complaining that the murder of Mr. Villegas seemed so clinical.

What a funny concept of justice Mr. Skurka has. How does the murder of a person equate to justice? Revenge maybe, but certainly not justice. And ultimately that's what the execution of Mr. Villegas was all about - an exercise in public revenge. This is the point to which our society has evolved after thousands of years - we still consider revenge to be a perfectly acceptable goal in our criminal (in)justice system.

While doing some research on Mr. Villegas earlier this week I ran across a blog post from Laura Dimon that paints a chilling picture of the process of execution. I believe most of the material in her piece came from a radio documentary that first ran back in 2000. The documentary, Witness to an Execution, features interviews with prison officials and guards in Texas who facilitate executions.

Jeffrey Toobin expressed his opinion on state-sponsored murder when he stated that no matter how "humane" you try to make the process, you can never erase the fact that you're strapping a person to a table in order to kill him.

From Ms. Dimon's post:

Similarly, Toobin calls the search for humane execution "oxymoronic." He wrote, "It’s understandable that Supreme Court Justices have tried to make the process a little more palatable; and there is a meagre kind of progress in moving from the chair to the gurney. But the essential fact about both is that they come with leather straps to restrain a human being so that the state can kill him. No technology can render that process any less grotesque."

And so, when Mr. Skurka wants to complain that the process is too humane he's missing the point entirely. But sometimes knuckle-draggers can't quite grasp those higher levels of thought. Murder is murder - it doesn't matter who's doing it. It doesn't matter how they do it.

Deliberately taking the life of another is murder. And regardless of how you want to disguise the issue, everyone who participates in the execution of an inmate is an accessory to murder.

I leave you with this excerpt from Ms. Dimon's post:

One warden said, "You'll never hear another sound like a mother wailing when she is watching her son be executed. There's no other sound like it. It is just this horrendous wail. It's definitely something you won't ever forget."

Execution Watch: 4/16/2014

On Wednesday night, the State of Texas will kill again...

JOSE VILLEGAS, condemned in the slayings of his ex-girlfriend, her son and her mother. Villegas lost his bid to delay his execution date when a Corpus Christi district court judge ruled last week against his attorneys' assertions that he was unstable and not mentally competent to understand what he was doing when he committed the stabbings in 2001. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that the Constitution prohibits the execution of anyone deemed mentally incompetent.

We still don't know who produced the drug, how the state acquired it or whether its efficacy has ever been tested. But I guess that's just a bunch of 8th Amendment technicalities that we don't need to worry about.

RADIO SHOW PREVIEW

EXECUTION WATCH

Unless a stay is issued, we'll broadcast live:

Wednesday, April 16, 2014, 6-7 PM Central Time

KPFT-FM Houston 90.1 Online...

http://executionwatch.org > Listen

States look to old methods of executing inmates

Just what is a state supposed to do when its precious supply of drugs for its prescribed lethal cocktail runs out? What if they can't persuade a pharmacist who has no ethics to produce the drugs for the execution?

Lawmakers across the country are being forced to answer those questions. And some of them have come up with the idea of bringing back their old, barbaric means of killing inmates. Those methods include the electric chair, hanging, the gas chamber and the firing squad.

It is a mark of our race to the bottom as a society that anyone in a position of power would even contemplate bringing back methods of killing that were cast into the ash heap of history decades ago. Of course few folks are going to stand up and denounce such efforts because those convicted of capital murder don't have a big fan section. However, the way we treat those that we despise reveals an awful lot about ourselves.

The use of lethal injection as a means of murdering inmates rose out of the Supreme Court's abolition of the death penalty in the 1970's. States looked for a way to kill that didn't violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment. Lethal injection was relatively tame and appeared to be a somewhat sterile method that wouldn't raise anyone's ire if used.

But then something unexpected happened - the European-based manufacturers of the drugs used to kill placed export controls on their products and refused to sell to any entity involved in executions. States scrambled to find substitute drugs and pharmacists willing to be accessories to murder in exchange for a fee.

At least two recent executions are also raising concerns about the drugs' effectiveness. Last week, Ohio inmate Dennis McGuire took 26 minutes to die by injection, gasping repeatedly as he lay on a gurney with his mouth opening and closing. And on Jan. 9, Oklahoma inmate Michael Lee Wilson's final words were, "I feel my whole body burning."

The states that changed their protocols insisted that they were still human and that the inmate felt no pain during the process. Two executions this year have raised questions. In Oklahoma, Michael Lee Wilson's last words during his execution were that he could feel his body burning, Then, in Ohio, Dennis McGuire took almost 30 minutes to die and was visibly gasping for air during the process.

The new drug protocols were never tested for the purpose of killing people. The methods were instituted because someone swore up and down that the new drugs would work just as effectively as the old ones. No one knows if that's true. In states were compounding pharmacies are used to produce the drugs there are provisions in the law to keep the public from knowing where the drugs came from. The drugs are also not subject to any federal testing or regulation and so we have no idea whether they do what they are supposed to do in the manner in which they are supposed to do it.

More and more states have done away with their death penalties either because of the large number of exonerations that have taken place over the past decade or because no one was being sentenced to death. As each new state does away with its death penalty the process will become more and more unusual. As other states (primarily in the South) try to bring their gruesome tools of death back to life, the process will become more and more cruel.

And, lest anyone forget, violence against minorities and the powerless has long been a tool of social control in the South. There is a reason poverty rates are higher in the Deep South and minorities are disproportionately represented in prison. Your odds of getting the needle are still greatly enhanced south of the Mason-Dixon line if your skin is dark.

Attempts to bring back the old methods of execution are but another attempt at social control by a minority who sees their grip on power slipping.

Update: One life spared

Edgardo Cubas was scheduled to die last night for the 2002 rape and murder of a teenager in Houston. At the request of the Honduran embassy, a judge postponed Mr. Cubas' execution until May 29 in order for Mr. Cubas to undergo an examination to determine if he is competent enough to be murdered by the state.

Meanwhile, in Ohio, Dennis McGuire wasn't so lucky.

Mr. McGuire was also convicted and sentenced to die for a rape and murder. The only problem is that Ohio has been unable to obtain the necessary drugs to kill inmates due to restrictions on who the manufacturer will sell the drugs to. The solution in some states, such as Texas and Georgia, has been to use compounding pharmacies to produce the drugs - without the benefit of regulation. Ohio, on the other hand, opted for something different.

The State of Ohio decided that Mr. McGuire was a good test subject for their new two-drug execution protocol. Mr. McGuire became the first inmate murdered by a combination of midazolam, a sedative, and hydromorphone, an analgesic derived from morphine.

From the Los Angeles Times account of the execution:

McGuire was still for almost five minutes, then emitted a loud snort, as if snoring, and continued to make that sound over the next several minutes. He also soundlessly opened and shut his mouth several times as his stomach rose and fell. 

“Oh my God,” his daughter, Amber McGuire, said as she observed her father's final moments, the wire service reported. 

Bohnert, McGuire's attorney, said concerns about the manner of death had been confirmed by the sounds and the length of time it took for him to die.
“And more importantly, the people of the state of Ohio should be appalled at what was done here today in their names,” said Bohnert, who did not witness the execution.

No one knows what went on inside Mr. McGuire's body during that time. No one knows whether he suffered discomfort or pain. No one knows because no one has ever tested that drug combination.

And let's just stop and think about this for a little while. For fifteen minutes a roomful of people watched a man strapped down to a gurney not dying. The first drug in the cocktail is supposed to induce unconsciousness while the second drug is supposed to kill him like a drug overdose. Whatever was supposed to happen, however, didn't happen as it was supposed to. If that's not disturbing, I don't know what is.

I don't care what you think of the death penalty. I don't care how big a god complex you may have. You don't conduct medical experiments on human beings without their consent after being given all of the available information. As I wrote last week, arguing about the particular mode of execution is an exercise in futility. It is the imposition of the death penalty that is the problem.

The medical personnel who participated in the execution should all go before whatever panel in the State of Ohio oversees doctors and nurses. They should all be forced to explain how their role in the execution did not amount to a repudiation of the oath they took to do no harm. Whoever was in charge should also be forced to answer for his role in conducting medical experiments without having the informed consent of the test subject.

The death penalty causes folks to bend over backwards and do things they wouldn't ordinarily do in order to do the state's bidding. We have state officials defending premeditated murder. We have medical professionals rationalizing their role in killing people. We have judges who know damn well that innocent people get convicted. It's all an attempt to defend this notion that the state should have the right to decide who lives and who dies.

It's all about victims' rights, except when it's not

One of the justifications supporters of state-sponsored murder lean on is the victims' need for "finality" and "closure." These notions are, of course, only applicable to TV, the movie theater and that book on your nightstand.

In reality, there is no such thing as closure when talking about the loss of a loved one. No matter how many times the state sticks a needle in a vein and pumps a person full of drugs, no one's rising from the grave.

The threat of being strapped down and killed isn't going to stop folks from killing, either. Mix alcohol, drugs, money and women together and there's going to be an argument. And some of those arguments are going to turn into murders.

But I digress...

As Jeff Gamso so eloquently documents, not every victim of violent crime is after blood. Rais Bhuiyan was shot in the face during an attempted robbery by Mark Stroman. Mr. Stroman had killed two other men in his "mission" to avenge 9/11. Mr. Bhuiyan, however, survived the attack.

As we get closer to Mr. Stroman's appointment with Texas' murder apparatus, Mr. Bhuiyan has undertaken the task of trying to save Mr. Stroman's life.

Not because he thinks Mr. Stroman is innocent. But because he wants to understand why Mr. Stroman did what he did. He wants to sit down with Mr. Stroman. He and the spouses of the other victims of Mr. Stroman's acts want the state to spare Mr. Stroman's life.

They have come to grips with their losses. They understand that their loved ones aren't coming back. Mr. Bhuiyan understands that he can't go back to 2001 and pretend that night never happened. They don't see what is to be gained by murdering another man.

Gov. Perry likes to pontificate about "victims' rights" when he touts his ability to pump lethal doses of drugs into the veins of prisoners. Prosecutors use it as a crutch in plea negotiations. But who listens when the victims of crime ask that a life be spared?

Mr. Perry is trying to emulate his old boss and ride the Lethal Injection Express all the way to the White House. He doesn't give a damn about what the victims want. He knows that killing people is the way to the hearts and minds of his evangelical Christian followers and their fellow travelers, the Tea-baggers.

Executions no longer "made in America"

In a unique attempt to halt the death machine in the United States, anti-death penalty activists in England have filed suit in London to prevent the British manufacturer, Archimedes Pharma UK, of sodium thiopental (the first drug in the lethal cocktail pumped into the condemned's veins) from exporting the drug to the United States.

The human rights group Reprieve filed the suit in an attempt to force the British government to regulate the export of sodium thiopental.

The State of Tennessee has contracted with medical suppliers in England because the state is out of the drug used to anesthesize the inmate before the balance of the cocktail is injected.

See also:

"US man executed with lethal injection made in UK," The First Post (October 27, 2010)