Oklahoma Botched an Execution With Untested Lethal Injection Drugs 1198
Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "The state of Oklahoma had scheduled two executions for Tuesday, April 29th. This in spite of myriad objections that the drugs being used for both lethal injections had not been tested, and thus could violate the constitutional right to the courts, as well as the 8th Amendment: protection from cruel and unusual punishment. After much legal and political wrangling, the state proceeded with the executions anyway. It soon became clear that the critics' worst case scenarios were coming true — Oklahoma violently botched the first execution. The inmate "blew" a vein and had a heart attack. The state quickly postponed the second one. 'After weeks of Oklahoma refusing to disclose basic information about the drugs for tonight's lethal injection procedures, tonight, Clayton Lockett was tortured to death,' Madeline Cohen, the attorney of Charles Warner, the second man scheduled for execution, said in a statement. Katie Fretland at The Guardian reported from the scene of the botched attempt to execute Lockett using the untested, unvetted, and therefore potentially unconstitutional lethal injection drugs."
sciencehabit also points out a study indicating that around 4% of death row inmates in the U.S. are likely innocent.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Not that the crime is entirely relevant to whether state executions should be okay or not, but you appear to suffer from reading comprehension issues. The crime you refer to was committed by the inmate who had their execution stayed after the first botched one.
Re:Punishment fits the crime (Score:5, Informative)
We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive.
And carrying out a death penalty also has it's costs. Take a read of costs death penalty [deathpenaltyinfo.org]. (I may be cherry picking a bit here but) From that article it was estimated that California could save $170 million a year by commuting al death sentences to life in prison.
So do you want to pay more or less taxes?
Re:Punishment fits the crime (Score:5, Informative)
We have to pay for this monster to live for the rest of his life. We *all* pay taxes for that. It's expensive. Tell me how that doesn't affect us. A death-row inmate costs, what, $50-75-100K/yr to house and feed? We get no value from this. This is akin to toxic waste disposal. How many doctors, teachers, scientists can we hire for the amount of money we pay to house these people? How much further would we be as a society if we spent the money on getting ahead, not waste disposal
There are approximately 3,000 people on death row. I would imagine a liberal estimate, if we never killed any, would put mayby 10,000 people that might otherwise, eventually, be executed in prison for life.
As of 2011, there were 2,300,000 people in pirson.
So to answer your question as a percentage: We could save less than 00.5% of our prison budget... assuming executations themselves add $0 cost to the process, and assuming that those executions were carried out before even the trial happened. If you have trials, and waits, and there's a cost to the execution: we save less still.
And remember: these are based on grossly liberal estimates. If I just use current numbers, the savings is closer to 00.1% before lowerign it further with execution costs.
How about you drop the pretense that the issue is cost?
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Because, murderer or no, they are human beings? Nothing is actually gained through their suffering, besides pleasing the bloodthirsty.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:so? (Score:4, Informative)
If you commit a capital crime in the US, are tried and convicted for it, and your skin is black, you have a MUCH higher chance of actually being executed for it.
Frankly that fact alone should be enough to rule out capital punishment in the US for the foreseeable future.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Time to move into the Century of the fruit bat. (Score:5, Informative)
You're taking away liberty and, usually, the pursuit of happiness. So why not life, if we're grouping them all together?
Because when you take a life, you cannot give it back if you find out that you made a mistake. Cameron Todd Willingham [wikipedia.org] was executed in Texas in 2004. More modern analysis of the evidence has led many to believe that he was innocent. Oops.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, took some digging on the proceedings of the national academy of sciences.
Essentially they applied comparative statistical methods on exoneration rates of those on death row(but not yet executed), those not on death row, and found that while the latter mapped to a Poisson distribution for exoneration occurrences, the former fell off sharply at the time of execution(but until then fitting the same model).
They then extrapolated that curve forward past the point of execution, concluding that if they had been continuing to fight for exoneration 4.1% would have gotten it. This includes the very small dataset of those who actually were exonerated after death. They call those conclusion a conservative estimate because it's entirely possible that exoneration rates don't actually cover the full set of unjustly punished.
Re:so? (Score:5, Informative)
First result:
Race of death row inmates executed since 1976 (US). [deathpenaltyinfo.org]
Comparing the percentage of executions by race to the population data shown lower on the page, I don't think your statement is correct. More whites are executed, but more blacks have pending executions.
Re:Jury Panel (Score:5, Informative)
For that, closed mental institutions exist.
Closed mental institutions don't exist anymore. Since the late 60's we have, as a society, been systematically closing these vital institutions. This has made our penal system our de facto long term option for people like this with untreatable mental disease.
Re:so? (Score:5, Informative)
Baldus and Woodworth answered a lot of your questions. Case-controlled studies are never perfect, but they're the best evidence we have.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.or... [deathpenaltyinfo.org]
Two of the country's foremost researchers on race and capital punishment, law professor David Baldus and statistician George Woodworth, along with colleagues in Philadelphia, have conducted a careful analysis of race and the death penalty in Philadelphia which reveals that the odds of receiving a death sentence are nearly four times (3.9) higher if the defendant is black. These results were obtained after analyzing and controlling for case differences such as the severity of the crime and the background of the defendant. The data were subjected to various forms of analysis, but the conclusion was clear: blacks were being sentenced to death far in excess of other defendants for similar crimes....
Another measure of race's impact on the death penalty is the combined effect of the race of the defendant and the race of the victim. In the Philadelphia study, the racial combination which was most likely to result in a death sentence was a black defendant with a nonblack victim, regardless of how severe the murder committed. Black-on-black crimes were less likely to receive a death sentence, followed by crimes by other defendants, regardless of the race of their victims.