Suchergebnisse

On October 10, 2014, the Oklahoma State Penitentiary opened its doors to the media to reveal a new state-of-the-art death chamber and announced that it had created an efficient execution facility. To complement the improvements to the prison architecture and the punishment technology, the Oklahoma legislature amended the state's execution protocol to formulate effective procedures delineating what it considered appropriate pharmacology to render a constitutional execution. This advance in design and regulation, however, has not prevented subsequent maladministration by various members of the Department of Corrections' execution teams. On January 16, 2015, Charles Warner was executed with the prison receiving and using the wrong drugs. On October 16, 2015, due to further operational mistakes, the District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma declared Richard Glossip's case to be administratively closed. To investigate these systematic failings, a Multicounty Grand Jury was convened and it considered evidence from stakeholders in the execution process. Its Interim Report provided damning findings, which demonstrate that the death penalty is still struggling for institutional legitimacy. The continuation of botched executions, inappropriate alterations to the protocol, and the claims of punishment experimentation on non-consenting human subjects is contributing to a growing lack of confidence that Oklahoma can maintain a humane form of capital punishment through lethal injection. These unacceptable circumstances occurred primarily as a result of the uncomfortable relationship between the purported "science" of lethal injection and the "constitutional law" of lethal injection, and therefore a clear interpretation of the intellectual interplay of these two disciplines is required. Both the procedural review parameters provided by the principles of comity and finality, and the scientific methodologies of atomism and holism for determining the epistemology of the pharmacology, will prove illuminating. There are compelling questions concerning whether the adjudicative process can produce sound reasoning for assessing the death penalty. We are left with the situation in which there are still, and perhaps always will be, ardent circumstances challenging the constitutionality of Oklahoma's lethal injection.

The U.S. Supreme Court has held that death row inmates possess an Eighth Amendment right protecting them against execution methods posing a substantial risk of serious harm. Despite the clear existence of this liberty interest, lower federal courts have repeatedly denied inmates' requests to know important details of the lethal injection procedure the state plans to use. This Article argues that the Eighth Amendment includes an implicit due process right to know such information about the state's planned method of execution. Without this information, inmates cannot protect their Eighth Amendment right against an excruciating execution, because the state can conceal crucial details of its execution procedure, effectively insulating it from judicial review. As in other constitutional contexts, then, due process norms require that the government provide people with information necessary to protect their other constitutional rights. These norms similarly require courts, rather than administrative agencies, to judge the execution procedure's constitutionality. Judicial recognition of this due process right would both protect Eighth Amendment values and also encourage states to make their execution procedures more transparent and less dangerous. Just as importantly, judicial recognition would also discourage secretive governmental practices more generally, thereby promoting openness and fair process as important democratic values.

"From the beginning of the Republic, this country has struggled to reconcile its use of capital punishment with the Constitution's prohibition of cruel punishment. Death penalty proponents argue both that it is justifiable as a response to particularly heinous crimes, and that it serves to deter people from committing them in the future. However, since the earliest executions, abolitionists have fought against this state-sanctioned killing, arguing, among other things, that the methods of execution have frequently been just as gruesome as the crimes meriting their use execution. Lethal injection was first introduced in order to quell such objections, but, as Austin Sarat shows in this brief history, its supporters' commitment to painless and humane death has never been certain. This book tells the story of lethal injection's earliest iterations in the United States, starting with New York state's rejection of that execution method almost a century and half ago. Sarat recounts lethal injection's return in the late 1970s, and offers novel and insightful scrutiny of the new drug protocols that went into effect between 2010 and 2020. Drawing on rare data, he makes the case that lethal injections during this time only became more unreliable, inefficient, and more frequently botched. Beyond his stirring narrative history, Sarat mounts a comprehensive condemnation of the state-level maneuvering in response to such mishaps, whereby death penalty states adopted secrecy statutes and adjusted their execution protocols to make it harder to identify and observe lethal injection's flaws. What was once touted as America's most humane execution method is now its most unreliable one. What was once a model of efficiency in the grim business of state killing, is now marked by mayhem. The book concludes by critically examining the place of lethal injection, and the death penalty writ large, today"--

This research examines the influence of lethal injection drug shortages on Texas criminal justice officials' decision to change the state's three-drug lethal injection protocol to the use of pentobarbital as a single drug protocol, without judicial oversight. We analyze data collected under the three- and one-drug protocols from 1982 through 2020 and compare differences in the length of time the lethal injection took, and complications reported by media witnesses. Findings suggest a higher rate of botched executions under the one-drug protocol than the three-drug protocol. We discuss the role compounding pharmacies may play in our results, the impact of this work on the U.S. Supreme Court's death penalty jurisprudence, and implications concerning the unilateral decision making by Texas state officials.