By Nat Hentoff
Nat Hentoff
I have been reporting for years on the kinds of executions that led Justice Harry Blackmun to declare in a Feb.22, 1994, dissent (Callins v. Collins) that he would no longer vote for the death penalty:
“The problem is that the inevitability of factual, legal and moral error gives us a system that we know must wrongly kill some defendants, a system that fails to deliver the fair, consistent and reliable sentences of death required by the Constitution.”
And Justice William Brennan told me more than once: “I can’t believe that the leader of the free world is going to keep on executing people. I still believe that eventually we become more civilized. It would be horrible if we didn’t.”
In addition to the increasing revelations that some prisoners on death row are innocent, there is the increasing shock — and I mean “shock” — of how some states carry out executions with the approval of the courts, including our highest court.
I knew Justice Brennan well, and I have no doubt how he would react to this July 24 press release from the always-carefully documented Washington, D.C.-based Constitution Project:
“Yesterday, Joseph R. Wood III was pronounced dead after a nearly two-hour long execution by the state of Arizona. Media witnesses, some of whom have observed previous executions, reported that Wood gasped for air more than 600 times during the execution.
“The process was so prolonged that Wood’s attorneys filed for a stay of execution in the midst of it, which was then rendered moot once Wood was pronounced dead” (“Transparency Needed Before Executions Continue,” The Constitution Project, July 24).
I asked if Wood’s 600 gasps was a typo and was assured it was not.
Quoted in the release is the former governor of Texas, Mark White, co-chair of The Constitution Project’s Death Penalty Committee:
“This was the fourth reported botched execution of the year. And in each one of these cases, the government has concealed vital information concerning the source, safety, and efficacy of the drugs to be used in the execution, refused to reveal information concerning the training and skill of the personnel involved in carrying out the execution, while also using drugs never before used to kill humans. Meanwhile, the courts continue to look the other way.”
Keep in mind: “Using drugs never before used to kill humans.”
But an execution in Kentucky that I’d previously reported on used a way of killing that many states …read more
Source: OP-EDS
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