By Carolyn Shore Aresu as Libby Shaw
On Tuesday morning after my husband brought in the newspapers (yes, we read the print editions) I heard him mutter "barbarians" as he opened the front page of the New York Times. When I saw the paper I understood what he meant. The article, above the fold, read Confronted on Execution, Texas Proudly Says It Kills Efficiently.
Cringing, as I normally do when Republican lunacy erupts from the state, I thought of ghastly ghouls and barbarians.
New York Times reporters had asked state officials if Texas would hold off on executions given the tragedy that occurred at a horribly botched execution in Oklahoma. The lethal drug did not work as expected. Instead of dying painlessly the prisoner writhed in pain and died of a massive heart attack 40 minutes after the injection.
Ghastly ghouls.
The reporters learned Texas will not hold off on executions because, according to state officials, we do our executions differently here. "We do them right." Texas uses a different lethal cocktail for one thing. And because we execute so many prisoners in the nation's busiest death chamber Texas has become a leading expert at killing as frequently and as efficiently as possible.
Lawyers for Mr. Campbell are trying to use the Oklahoma debacle to stop the execution here. But many in this state and in this East Texas town north of Houston, where hundreds have been executed in the nation’s busiest death chamber, like to say they do things right.
We have become so good at killing that people from other states come here to learn how we do it.
Prison administrators from other states often travel here to learn how Texas performs lethal injections and to observe executions. Texas officials have provided guidance and, on at least a few occasions, carried out executions for other states.
I guess it's nice to know we are better at executions than we are of taking care of the
health care needs of some of our residents.
Felix, a Texas field organizer for the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, and her petite, perfectly coiffed 65-year-old mother, Lucila Ceballos, have been leading reproductive health workshops in the valley, an economically depressed stretch of borderland at the state's southernmost tip, since 2011. That's when the GOP-controlled Texas legislature slashed $73 million from the state’s family-planning budget, leaving approximately 147,000 women without access to affordable preventative health care and shuttering more than 50 clinics statewide. It’s a move that women’s rights advocates—and some legislators—say is more about restricting access to abortion and contraception than saving money. "Of course this is a war on birth control and abortions and everything—that's what family planning is supposed to be about," declared state Rep. Wayne Christian, a Republican, in an interview with The Texas Tribune. Lawmakers also passed a ban on "abortion affiliates," thereby barring all Planned Parenthood health centers from receiving state funding. The legislation is estimated to impact upwards of 50,000 women, many of them with low incomes.
Rick Perry and
Pay Day Loan Enabler Greg Abbott don't want to talk about what their Party did to women's reproductive health and choices in South Texas.
But they will talk without hesitation about their death chamber in Huntsville, north of Houston.
In Texas the Killing Business is Business as usual.
Cross posted on Texas Kaos.
Even the protesters and television cameras that used to accompany executions here have, in most cases, dissipated. “It’s kind of business as usual,” said Tommy Oates, 62, a longtime resident who was eating lunch last week at McKenzie’s Barbecue, about one mile from the prison known as the Walls Unit. “That sounds cold, I know. But they’re not in prison for singing too loud at church.”
Rick Perry believes our killing methods are appropriate. A supposed deeply devout Christian, who is known to pray for rain during droughts, Perry believes in the eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth rule.
Gov. Rick Perry is a staunch defender of the state’s record, saying that “in Texas for a substantially long period of time, our citizens have decided that if you kill our children, if you kill our police officers, for those very heinous crimes, that the appropriate punishment is the death penalty.” On NBC’s “Meet the Press” recently, he added, “I’m confident that the way that the executions are taken care of in the state of Texas are appropriate.”
When attorneys for a death row prisoner filed an appeal to halt his execution due to the debacle at the Oklahoma prison, Texas Attorney Greg Abbott countered. Apparently the lethal drug here is "safe" but Greg Abbott is not about to reveal its ingredients. Now, normally when Greg Abbott and Rick Perry want to keep something secret it very likely means someone is making money off of the secret. And these two boys are probably getting some of it.
Greg Abbott, the Texas attorney general, has opposed the request to stop the execution, arguing in a brief on Monday that Texas’ execution protocol is “vastly different” from Oklahoma’s, and that pentobarbital has been used successfully in 33 executions in Texas. He wrote that testing showed the batch of the drug to be used, which came from a compounding pharmacy, was potent and “free of contaminants.”
Texas has declined to disclose how its drug is tested for potency and purity.
Secrecy and defaulting to death are not uncommon traits among Greg Abbott and the Texas GOP.
Rick Perry, Greg Gerrymandering Abbott and their Republican colleagues have made some very unwise and poor decisions where quality of life issues and potential cures for cancer are concerned. When Rick Perry's political appointees turned the taxpayer funded state cancer institute into cash cow for themselves and favorite politicians, oversight chief Greg Abbott looked the other way.
His crony donors pocketed $42 million in grants awarded by the institute.
Rick Perry and the Texas GOP also made a very bad and nasty decision when they decided to turn down federally expanded Medicare as part of the Affordable Care Act. Once again the Texas GOP sided with the grim reaper.
But there’s one big snag. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that states have the right to refuse to expand Medicaid. Texas Gov. Rick Perry is among several governors, mostly southern and Republican, who are resisting. To make the expansion more palatable, the federal government will pay for all the people added to Medicaid rolls until 2017; after that, it will reimburse 90 percent of the costs. In effect, Americans around the country would help pay for the health insurance of more than a million Texans.
If Texas doesn’t expand Medicaid, it will reject more than $100 billion in federal money the first decade, according to the state’s own figures. To get that sizeable federal reimbursement, the state would have to spend about $16 billion over 10 years. The governor’s refusal to take the federal government’s billions puts him in an awkward position opposite some of the state’s most powerful economic players: hospital chains, local governments and chambers of commerce. Given that political pressure, Perry might strike a deal with the Obama administration, or the Texas Legislature could push for a Medicaid expansion.
Beyond the economics and politics, lives are at stake. Lack of insurance will certainly mean more deaths. How many more? Approximately 9,000 a year, according to Dr. Howard Brody, director of the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston. Brody calculated that figure by extrapolating from a recent Harvard University study published in The New England Journal of Medicine that found that states that expanded Medicaid saw a 6.1 percent reduction in the death rate among adults below 65 who qualified for the program. In a recent op-ed in the Galveston Daily News Brody wrote, “This means that we can predict, with reasonable confidence, if we fail to expand Medicaid . . . 9,000 Texans will die each year for the next several years as a result.”
Well, at least Rick Perry and Greg Abbott can take comfort in knowing they have perfected the killing chamber in Huntsville. Texas does it as well as Iran, apparently.
David R. Dow, a law professor at the University of Houston who has represented more than 100 death row inmates during their appeals, explained the state’s record of seeming success simply. “When you do something a lot, you get good at it,” he said, adding archly, “I think Texas probably does it as well as Iran.”
Are we desperately ready for change?
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