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Study Of Death Penalty In U.S. Urges Overhaul

Study Of Death Penalty In U.S. Urges Overhaul

By Timothy M. Phelps, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The death penalty should be overhauled “from the moment of arrest to the moment of death,” and the lethal drug cocktail used in Oklahoma’s botched execution last week should be abolished in favor of a single drug, according to a bipartisan panel of criminal justice experts.

The committee, which included death penalty supporters who have been responsible for carrying it out, recommended using a single anesthetic or barbiturate approved by the Food and Drug Administration to bring on death, as well as 38 other changes.

“Without substantial revisions — not only to lethal injection, but across the board — the administration of capital punishment in America is unjust, disproportionate and very likely unconstitutional,” said committee member Mark Earley, who was a Republican attorney general of Virginia when the state carried out 36 executions.

The study by the panel at the Constitution Project, a Washington legal research group, is billed as one of the most comprehensive reviews of the ultimate punishment ever undertaken in the U.S.

Thirty-two states have the death penalty on the books, but its use has declined rapidly. Five states have abolished it in the last seven years.

Particularly timely is the report’s recommendation that the most commonly used drug protocol for lethal injections — a barbiturate for anesthesia, followed by a muscle relaxant to stop breathing and an electrolyte to stop the heart — be replaced by large doses of a single anesthetic or barbiturate. The report said that difficulties in obtaining the proper drugs, complicated procedures for mixing them and the lack of trained medical staff willing to administer them have led to unnecessary suffering on the part of the condemned.

In Oklahoma last week, Clayton Lockett writhed, gasped and grimaced for more than 30 minutes before his execution was called off, only to die of what appeared to be a heart attack about 10 minutes later. The Constitution Project said the state used an untested three-drug cocktail obtained from undisclosed sources.

According to the group, eight states have used the single-drug method. That includes Texas, which performs the most executions of any state. Six others have announced plans to use a single drug.

The committee that undertook the two-year study was led by Mark White, former governor of Texas; Gerald Kogan, former chief justice of the Florida Supreme Court; and attorney Beth Wilkinson, who helped prosecute the Oklahoma City bombing case. The panel included former FBI Director William S. Sessions and several prosecutors and judges, as well as death penalty opponents.

“We need to make sure if we’re going to have a death penalty that it’s carried out properly and that due process is not short-circuited in the name of expediency,” Earley said in an interview.

White said the report should be useful to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., whom President Barack Obama asked to examine how the death penalty is carried out in light of what happened in Oklahoma.

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation, a pro-death penalty group in Sacramento, Calif., disputed the Constitution Project’s claim that its report was bipartisan.

“The Constitution Project always takes the side of the defendants,” Scheidegger said. “Their claim to be neutral is dishonest.”

But he said he agreed with the one-drug approach to capital punishment.

The report says state and federal courts too often refuse to hear claims of new evidence presented by prisoners on death row and use other procedural means to deny prisoners their rights.

It calls on states to adopt new procedures to evaluate whether a defendant is intellectually disabled. It urges new federal standards for forensic labs and examiners, and says they should operate independently from law enforcement, which would be a major change.

The report also says states should no longer execute people for “felony murder,” in which someone who participates in a crime resulting in death can be convicted of murder even if he or she did not do the killing.

White said he supported the death penalty, but worried that it could be applied incorrectly.

“It’s gotten to the point where we don’t have proper procedures to make sure we’re not executing innocent people,” said White, a Democrat who oversaw 19 executions as governor from 1983 to 1987.

Photo: javacolleen via Flickr

Republicans’ Medicare Crisis

Remember the names of these four Republican house members: Rep. Walter Jones, N.C.; Rep. Dave McKinley, W.V.; Rep. Ron Paul, Texas; and Rep. Denny Rehberg, Mont.

Out of 240 House Republicans, these four intrepid individuals cast the only votes on the House floor against the bold blueprint of House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., to dramatically shrink the responsibility of the federal government in providing for the general welfare and to convert Medicare into a voucher program.

Out of 47 Republicans in the U.S. Senate, just five — Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Rand Paul of Kentucky — defied Republican orthodoxy and voted against the Ryan budget plan.

These congressional votes put Republicans squarely on the record in support of completely overhauling Medicare. This is a serious problem for Republicans, because Medicare, in its current form, is enormously popular with three sizable groups of Americans: A) those who are old themselves, B) those who personally care about someone who is old and C) those who think they, themselves, might one day be old.

It is true that most Americans probably do not have an encyclopedic understanding about the specific dollar costs of Medicare, but they know for certain how strongly they do care about Medicare.

By 2022, when Ryan’s Medicare plan would become law, the average 65-year-old, according to the authoritative Congressional Budget Office, would have to pay between $6,400 and $7,000 more per year than she would pay under the traditional Medicare program.

Not surprisingly, information like the preceding has taken a major toll on pubic support for the GOP plan. When the CNN/Opinion Research poll asked in a national survey “from everything you have heard or read about the Republicans’ plan to change Medicare so far, do you favor or oppose it,” just 35 percent of all respondents favored the Republican plan, while 58 percent expressed their opposition to it.

Disapproval was consistent across the board: Americans under the age of 50 (36 percent favor/57 percent oppose), those over the age of 50 (33 percent favor/60 percent oppose) and political independents (34 percent favor/57 percent oppose).

The lonely island of support for the Republican Medicare plan was, surprise, among Republican voters who backed the party position by 68 percent to 26 percent.

Similarly, when the ABC News-Washington Post poll this spring asked, “In order to reduce the national debt (the Republicans’ 2011 unifying mission), would you support or oppose cutting spending on Medicare, which is the government health insurance program for the elderly?” a mere 21 percent of those surveyed favored cutting Medicare spending, while a landslide 78 percent opposed any Medicare spending cuts.

In fact, any public criticism by a Republican of the Ryan plan puts the dissenter at risk of condemnation by party theologians as a heretic. Former House Speaker and current presidential candidate, as well as onetime keeper of the conservative flame, Newt Gingrich, was all but officially excommunicated from the GOP for his gratuitously disparaging knocking of the Ryan plan.

Here is where the Republicans’ Medicare voucher policy becomes a painfully risky political dilemma for Republican candidates in 2012. By uncritically backing the Ryan plan — which is overwhelmingly supported by Republican primary voters — the Republican candidate improves his chances of winning a contested Republican primary. But the route to victory in a November general election against a competitive Democrat may well require that the Republican candidate divorce and distance himself from the Ryan-Medicare voucher plan, which, as we have seen, is emphatically unpopular with the large majority of voters who are not Republicans.

Already, Republicans’ all-out support for the Ryan Medicare plan has cost them the loss, in a special congressional election in upstate New York, of a previously safe Republican House seat.

It is agreed that the winning Democrat, Kathy Hochul, was the decidedly superior candidate. But still there was a good chance that without Republican Jane Corwin’s having stated that if she had been in the House she would have voted for the Ryan plan, Hochul — a committed opponent of the Ryan plan — would not have won. At least, that’s how many Republican and Democratic observers of that upset victory read the outcome. And in politics, as we know, perception is reality.

This is why the Republicans have themselves to blame heading into 2012 for their party’s Medicare crisis.

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COPYRIGHT 2011 MARK SHIELDS