Attorney General Jeff Sessions doesn’t want to miss a single opportunity to demonstrate his commitment to draconian “law and order” policies. While the Obama administration moved away from using the death penalty, Sessions has reversed course. Keen on surpassing the last administration’s use of the death penalty, he’s expanded the types of crimes for which the Justice Department will approve pursuing the death penalty and urged prosecutors to take an active role in helping him.
Mr. Sessions views the death penalty as a “valuable tool in the tool belt,” according to a senior Justice Department official. The official said the death penalty isn’t only a deterrent, but also a “punishment for the most heinous crimes prohibited under federal law.” [...] The Justice Department under President Donald Trump expects to authorize more death penalty cases than the previous administration did, the official said.
It’s just the latest in a series of decisions meant to shore Sessions’ (and Trump’s) “law and order” claims.
Mr. Sessions has put combating violent crime at the center of his agenda, encouraging prosecutors to pursue longer prison sentences and approving the hiring of dozens of new violent-crimes prosecutors.
Under Sessions, federal prosecutors have already been instructed to charge defendants with the most serious crimes possible and seek the harshest sentences.
Sessions’ move on the death penalty comes even as evidence of problems with the death penalty, from prosecution and conviction to execution, grow. Statistics on race and the death penalty are particularly startling.
The color of a defendant and victim's skin plays a crucial and unacceptable role in deciding who receives the death penalty in America. People of color have accounted for a disproportionate 43 % of total executions since 1976 and 55 % of those currently awaiting execution. A moratorium of the death penalty is necessary to address the blatant prejudice in our application of the death penalty.
While white victims account for approximately one-half of all murder victims, 80% of all Capital cases involve white victims. Furthermore, as of October 2002, 12 people have been executed where the defendant was white and the murder victim black, compared with 178 black defendants executed for murders with white victims.
In addition to bias, there’s a pretty big wrongful conviction issue.
Since 1973, 151 people have been released from death rows throughout the country due to evidence of their wrongful convictions. In 2003 alone, 10 wrongfully convicted defendants were released from death row.
At least one method of execution is very obviously at odds with the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment—most states won’t even let vets use it to euthanize animals.
The three-drug protocol has an ignoble history. In the late 1970s, a medical examiner in Oklahoma, Jay Chapman, developed a procedure that involved, first, an anesthetic to render the prisoner unconscious; second, a paralyzing agent to render him immobile; and third, potassium chloride to stop his heart. No one in the scientific or medical community vetted Chapman's creation, nor was it subjected to testing of any kind. Chapman himself had no expertise in this area; as a medical examiner, he admitted that he "was an expert in dead bodies but not an expert in getting that way."
Nevertheless, virtually every death penalty state adopted Chapman's procedure.
A criticism of the three-drug protocol, and one key reason that its current use may constitute cruel and unusual punishment, is that the paralyzing agent serves no medical purpose, nor is it needed to cause death. Instead, paralysis renders it virtually impossible to discern whether the prisoner is suffering.
This is no fanciful concern. Paralyzing drugs are derived from a poison called curare, which was used in the barbaric 19th century practice of vivisection — the dissection of living animals for medical experimentation. In 1868, Swedish physiologist A.F. Holmgren described the use of curare as changing one "instantly into a living corpse, which hears and sees and knows everything, but is unable to move a single muscle, and under its influence no creature can give the faintest indication of its hopeless condition."
Forty-two of 50 states bar the use of such drugs in animal euthanasia because if something goes wrong and the animal is not properly rendered unconscious, it's impossible to know. As one animal welfare organization wrote to New York legislators in 1987 in support of a ban on paralytics in euthanasia, "drugs containing paralytic agents ... can cause acute suffering before an animal dies." The Humane Society of the United States has stated that it is the "moral and ethical duty" of its members to end the practice of "injecting animals with curare-based or paralytic substances."
Sessions’ quest to make the justice system less just—and his propensity for ignoring fact and science—is characteristic of the Trump administration.
