Thursday, January 14, 2021

The U.S. Death Penalty : Federal Executions

"The spate of executions during this last year of the Trump administration has been extraordinary."
"I don't think that there's anybody who's been paying attention to the federal death penalty who thinks that anything like that will continue once Trump leaves office."
David Dow, Cullen Professor, University of Houston Law Center
"The federal death penalty applies in all 50 states and U.S. territories but is used relatively rarely. About 55 prisoners are on the federal death row, most of whom are imprisoned in Terre Haute, Indiana. Three federal executions have been carried out in the modern era, all by lethal injection, with the last occurring in 2003."
"The federal death penalty was held unconstitutional following the Supreme Court’s opinion of Furman v. Georgia in 1972. Unlike the quick restoration of the death penalty in most states, the federal death penalty was not reinstated until 1988, and then only for a very narrow class of offenses. The Federal Death Penalty Act of 1994 greatly expanded the number of eligible offenses to about 60."
"The use of the federal death penalty in jurisdictions that have themselves opted not to have capital punishment—such as Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, and many states—has raised particular concerns about federal overreach into state matters."
Death Penalty Information Center 
The first federal execution of 2020 was that of Daniel Lewis Lee in July at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
The first federal execution of 2020 was that of Daniel Lewis Lee in July at the Federal Correctional Complex in Terre Haute, Indiana.
"With a stroke of your pen, you can stop all federal executions, prohibit United States Attorneys from seeking the death penalty, dismantle death row at FCC Terre Haute, and call for the resentencing of people who are currently sentenced to death."
Letter to incoming President-elect Joe Biden signed by 40 members of Congress
 
"No president in the 20th or 21st century before this year presided over double-digit executions in any calendar year. The Trump administration has carried out ten in the space of five months,"
"You'd have to go back to 1896 and President Grover Cleveland's second presidency to find this many federal civilian executions in a single year."
"Traditionally, out of respect for the incoming administration, and because executions are a matter of life and death, executions weren't carried out during a transition period."
"Everybody else knew that it was more important to protect the public health than it was to kill prisoners now, who could be executed when it was safe to do so later. Only the federal government moved forward with those executions."
"Nearly 25% of the population of death row is now in counties where prosecutors say they won't use the death penalty or are going to significantly restrict its use. All of that suggests the numbers will stay low in most of the country going forward."
Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center
Normally, when the thinking public's mind turns to the death penalty, Iran, and Saudi Arabia come to mind, ultra-fundamentalist regimes whose idea of punishing extreme crimes finds the death penalty more than suitable to sending a message to their populations. Countries like Pakistan and Afghanistan also qualify, where the justice system views insulting the Prophet and Islam or conversion away from Islam to be deserving death-penalty issues. On the other hand, dictatorships like China consider criticism of Beijing and its politboro worthy of the death penalty.

The United States is considered by itself and the world community to be a civil democracy with fairly liberal values that for the most part set the standard for responsible governance, the rule of law and a fair and equitable system of justice. But it has never, like most democratic nations of the world, abolished the death penalty, which places it in the company of countries like China, Iran and Pakistan. There has been an increasing tide of rejection of the death penalty, where many States take it upon themselves to no longer recognize the death penalty.

The federal government appeared to be reaching a like conclusion that the death penalty had no place in the justice system of a civilized society. Lately, however, there has been a decided swing back to enacting justice by taking a life as punishment for taking a life. The Trump administration saw the recent execution of two men who committed dreadful crimes while in their teen years. On death row for over a decade each, both were executed in 2020. 
 
The execution of the first, 19 at the time he murdered two people, represented the first federal execution in 68 years of an offender, a teen at the time of his crime. The second, Brandon Bernard, on trial with Christopher Vlalva for the same offence, was 18 at the time of the double murder. He was 40 years old by the time he was taken off death row and executed for his crime committed in 1999. A high profile campaign to spare his life failed, and he met his destiny with death through federal execution in December. 

The U.S. Department of Justice amended its federal execution method rules in late November with a ruling that any methods permitted by states may be used to executive federal prisoners. Lethal injection being the most common method, though nine states allow the use of the electric chair, six the use of the gas chamber, and three firing squad while another three allow for hanging executions. 

A year-long search for drugs that would work efficiently culminated in ten men being executed in the U.S. federal death chamber in Indiana; the lethal drug cocktails used historically no longer available leading to experimental execution drugs which occasionally saw executions gruesomely botched. Many death row inmates sought alternative ways to die, given their fear of the needle, after the well-publicized executions that malfunctioned with experimental drug cocktails.

When Florida's electric chair malfunctioned several times and the heads of two condemned men were set on fire, that method of execution went into retirement.  Yet fear of death by three-drug cocktail spurred Nicholas Sutton in February of 2020 to be executed by the state of Tennessee by electric chair, citing the dangers of lethal injection drugs.

Women lay flowers at a candlelight vigil for Brandon Bernard on December 13 in Los Angeles. Bernard, 40, was the youngest person to be executed in the US in nearly 70 years, and was put to death for a crime committed when he was a teenager.
Women lay flowers at a candlelight vigil for Brandon Bernard on December 13 in Los Angeles. Bernard, 40, was the youngest person to be executed in the US in nearly 70 years, and was put to death for a crime committed when he was a teenager.

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posted by Pieface @ Thursday, January 14, 2021

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