Lucasville, Ohio, is a predominantly Black Muslim town. But that's only if you count the prison population at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility, where many or most Ohio executions occur. A ten-day uprising and cell-block occupation at SOCF in 1993 left nine prisoners dead and a host of corruption scandals, including the seating of jurors for the uprising trials who had previously signed petitions calling for the execution of all inmates involved. http://www.prisonersolidarity.org/...
Lucasville was named for surveyor John Lucas, brother of the infamous Robert Lucas, the chairman of the First Democratic National Convention in 1832, and the founder of Ohio's most long-standing political machine. Not coincidently, Lucasville is also the hometown of Ohio's current governor, a recent product of the Lucas machine, Ted Strickland. Strickland had just taken his seat in Congress, representing the Lucasville area, when the 1993 uprising occured.
Lucasville is now represented in Congress by Jean Schmidt.
(More below the fold.)
Two days ago, on September 15, Strickland stayed an execution at Lucasville, after the executioners failed to find an uncollapsed vein for the lethal injection, in the arms of convicted killer and black Muslim, Romell Broom.
This was only the latest in a series of botched executions at Lucasville, involving failed attempts at lethal injection. Yesterday, the ACLU called for an end to all Ohio executions. http://portsmouth-dailytimes.com/...
This past July, Ohio beat Texas to execute the one thousandth inmate in the United States by lethal injection, since the reinstatement of capital punishment by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1976. Go Buckeyes!
I happen to know two men, a father and son, who both worked as executioners at Lucasville. I shall not name them. They are shells of human beings. The father, now retired, accomplished most of his executions by electric chair, a procedure he once blandly described to me, where there was no issue of "finding a vein." Now he spends the vast majority of his time flipping the remote control of his TV. I can't relay any trenchant interview material from the pair, because there was none. I believe I once heard the father say, while watching ESPN, "Go Buckeyes!"
Capital punishment kills the killers, and it kills the killers of the killers. I can't help but wonder if the repeated failure of lethal injection at Lucasville doesn't represent intentional sabotage on the part of the execution teams, which now include "medical" personnel, people in some way bound to the Hippocratic Oath.
There is now some hullabaloo about fictional "death panels" established by the government under the guise of "health care." Ahem -- we already have real death panels established by the government under the guise of health care. They operate in our prisons, and Ohio leads the pack.
The ACLU case is clear. But Strickland is running for reelection in 2010, and ending capital punishment would be unpopular.
Go Buckeyes!