Tag: capital punishment

The Story: The US Supreme Court will begin hearing arguments again on the first Monday in October. This year that falls on October 7.  Some...

The Department of Justice has decided to resume the death penalty for inmates on death row for the first time in decades. NBC's Pete Williams has details on the decision. » Subscribe to MSNBC: http://on.msnbc.com/SubscribeTomsnbc MSNBC delivers breaking news, in-depth…

It's an issue that ought to be deeply personal, and it is. For many people it is faith-guided or faith-based. It's an issue that really shouldn't be used as a partisan political instrument, but it is. Everything is today. Julie Slama, Megan Hunt and Machaela Cavanaugh were among the first to speak. But there's a difference if it's innocent life, several senators responded, a stark difference between death because of abortion and the execution of a convicted killer. Three Republicans who formerly were members of the Legislature were "kicked out" because they voted to repeal the death penalty, Sen. Patty Pansing Brooks said, listing them as former Sens. Jerry Johnson, Les Seiler and Al Davis, each of whom was politically targeted and failed to win re-election. In the end, the vote to advance Chambers' bill to eliminate the death penalty failed on a 17-25 vote. Eight of the 14 women in the Legislature voted for repeal; 26 of 35 men voted to retain the death penalty.

In seven angry pages, Justice Stephen G. Breyer recounted how the conservative majority on the court had refused his request to delay the execution of an Alabama inmate for a few hours so he and the other justices could discuss the matter in person at their usual Friday morning conference. Instead, by a 5-to-4 vote in the middle of the night, the court allowed the execution to proceed, with the conservative justices in the majority and the liberals in dissent. The dispute among the justices on Friday lasted long enough that Alabama officials postponed the execution of the inmate, Christopher L. Price, which had been scheduled for Thursday night. “To proceed in this matter in the middle of the night without giving all members of the court the opportunity for discussion tomorrow morning is, I believe, unfortunate.” The majority, in a brief unsigned opinion, said Mr. Price had waited too long to raise his claim that Alabama’s method of execution, a lethal injection of three chemicals, could subject him to excruciating pain. Mr. Price asked to be executed using nitrogen gas, a method allowed by Alabama law. Around 9 p.m. on Thursday, Alabama officials asked the Supreme Court to allow the execution to go forward. In dissent, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the majority was “profoundly wrong.” In March, the court halted the execution of a Buddhist inmate in Texas in similar circumstances, over two noted dissents, with the majority apparently satisfied that the request had been timely. In his dissent on Friday, Justice Breyer reviewed the proceedings in Mr. Price’s case and said undue haste had undermined justice. “I recognized that my request would delay resolution of the application and that the state would have to obtain a new execution warrant, thus delaying the execution by 30 days. “But in my judgment, that delay was warranted, at least on the facts as we have them now,” Justice Breyer wrote.

This week, Gavin Newsom, the governor of California, signed an executive order issuing a reprieve to all seven hundred and thirty-seven prisoners on the state’s death row, effectively nullifying California’s policy of capital punishment for the near future. Response to Newsom’s moratorium was mixed even among the families of victims. “I will not oversee execution of any person,” his order said. He was challenging death-penalty justifications in the “emotional” place where they live. A truly bold move would challenge not only the death penalty but its de facto fallback, life imprisonment. Today, it costs an average of eighty-one thousand dollars a year to keep a prisoner incarcerated in California. The cost of life imprisonment is relatively less than the cost of death row, according to a Florida investigation, from 2000, but it’s not peanuts, and long punishment may not help the public in proportion. Many countries of the European Union favor shorter sentences combined with intensive resocialization and rehabilitation programs; a study of the Dutch and German systems, in 2013, suggested that they were more effective in reducing crime than the United States’ mass-incarceration model. If we were serious about threats to society, we would support the most effective punishments, not the most severe. As it is, Newsom’s reprieve is a gesture of limited reform and a gesture of intractable executive power, too.

The Story: Yesterday, while Americans voted, the US Supreme Court heard arguments about the meaning of the constitutional phrase "cruel and unusual punishment," in a...

One source told Axios that Trump brings up Singapore’s policy of a mandatory death penalty for drug trafficking convictions “a lot.” "He says, 'When I ask the prime minister of Singapore do they have a drug problem [the prime minister replies,] 'No. Death penalty,’” the source said. “He often jokes about killing drug dealers,” a senior administration official also told Axios. “He’ll say, 'You know the Chinese and Filipinos don’t have a drug problem. They just kill them.’” The president has also reportedly said that he doesn’t believe more lenient approaches to drug offenders will work and that the government needs to teach children that they will die if they take illicit substances. White House senior adviser Kellyanne Conway, who is leading the administration’s drug policy office, told Axios that Trump is referring to drug dealers who sell substances that can cause thousands of deaths. "The president makes a distinction between those that are languishing in prison for low-level drug offenses and the kingpins hauling thousands of lethal doses of fentanyl into communities, that are responsible for many casualties in a single weekend,” she told Axios. Conway also told the news outlet that a bill lowering the threshold for a five-year mandatory minimum sentence from being convicted for tracking 40 grams of fentanyl to just two grams would receive widespread support. “There is an appetite among many law enforcement, health professionals and grieving families that we must toughen up our criminal and sentencing statutes to match the new reality of drugs like fentanyl, which are so lethal in such small doses,” she told Axios. Trump said during his State of the Union last month that the U.S. must get “much tougher on drug dealers and pushers” to end the opioid epidemic.

The Story: Recently the U.S. Supreme Court halted Alabama's execution of Vernon Madison in order to hear arguments that he is no longer competent to...