On Nov.19, a Davidson County judge ruled that Tennessee’s lethal injection procedure was unconstitutional, possibly delaying the execution of Stephen Michael West and others on death row. Chancellor Claudia Bonnyman, who issued the ruling, said that the state’s lethal injection procedure “allows for death by suffocation while conscious,” because it did not specify a sufficient dosage for sodium thiopental, the first of three drugs used in lethal injections. In Baze v. Rees, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that Kentucky’s lethal injection method was constitutional, although the decision did not specifically address the amount of sodium thiopental used in executions, provided it was administered properly. Federal public defender Stephen Kissinger presented two medical experts who testified that autopsies performed on executed inmates showed that concentrations of two of the drugs used in lethal injections were too low to cause their intended effect. Medical experts found that levels of sodium thiopental (the first drug used) in all three autopsies were too low to cause unconsciousness and levels of potassium chloride (the final drug used) were not enough to stop the heart. UPDATE: Tennessee Supreme Court upheld the state's execution procedure, allowing West's execution date to be set for Nov. 30.
In other states: a federal court in Oklahoma approved the use of the anesthetic pentobarbital as the first of 3 drugs to be used in its executions. It would be used in place of sodium thiopental, which is in short supply. Oklahoma has an execution scheduled on Dec. 16. Pentobarbital has been used in the euthanasia of animals. In Texas, the Attorney General has ruled that the source of the state's lethal injection drugs should be made public. Texas reportedly has sufficient quantities of sodium thiopental for 39 executions, but the supply has an expiration date in March 2011. In California, the state has so far refused to divulge its source of sodium thiopental. Arizona, which secured a supply of this drug around the same time as California, obtained the drug from overseas and carried out an execution. Litigation in the United Kingdom is seeking to block the exportation of drugs used in executions after it was reported that U.S. states were acquiring sodium thiopental from a British company. (Various news stories.)
More information has emerged about the wrongful conviction of Anthony Graves (pictured), who was exonerated from Texas's death row in 2010. Prosecutor Kelly Siegler, who had tried many capital murder cases and sent 19 people to death row as a Harris County assistant district attorney, and Otto Hanak, a state trooper and Texas Ranger for 28 years, were brought into the case after an appeals court found that the original prosecutor, Charles Sebesta, had withheld statements from the defense and elicited false testimony. It was originally thought that Siegler would retry the case against Graves. According to prosecutor Siegler, Sebesta used ethically questionable tactics to persuade a co-defendant to testify against Graves. Sebesta also violated the rules of evidence by introducing only a partial transcript of a taped interview of the co-defendant and not introducing the actual tape. During her investigations, Siegler was never able to find the tape of the interview. When the co-defendant faced execution in 2000, he admitted that he lied about Graves’s involvement in the crime. After reviewing 19 boxes of evidence and interviewing more than 50 witnesses, Siegler and Hanak independently concluded that Graves was not guilty. Siegler said, "There came a time I believed he was innocent, but I wanted Otto to arrive at that on his own. One morning he came in and said, 'I don't think he did it.’” Hanak added, “In all these years I've been in this business, I never thought I would be party to saving someone who was on death row.” The original prosecutor, Charles Sebesta, plans to take out full page ads explaining his side of the story. "We've got some things on Siegler that when push comes to shove, we've got things that are going to sink her ship," he said.
A recent op-ed by Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Nicholas Kristof (pictured) of the New York Times focuses on the possible innocence of Kevin Cooper, a black defendant on California's death row. Kristof writes, “This case is a travesty. It underscores the central pitfall of capital punishment: no system is fail-safe. How can we be about to execute a man when even some of America’s leading judges believe he has been framed?” Cooper faces execution for a 1983 quadruple-murder of a white family. According to Kristof, numerous anomalies in the case suggest that evidence used to implicate Cooper in the murders may have been corrupted. For example, a beige T-shirt was offered as evidence because it had a trace of Cooper’s blood, but the blood sample contained preservatives used by the police when they keep blood in test tubes. Later, a forensic scientist found that a sample from the test tube that contained Cooper’s blood held by the police contained blood from more than one person, suggesting that someone removed blood from the test tube and later filled the tube back to the top with another person’s blood. Police also failed to investigate other suspects. A woman reported that one of her housemates had shown up with several other people on the night of the murders wearing blood-spattered overalls and driving a vehicle similar to the one stolen from the murdered family. The witnesses said the man was no longer wearing a beige T-shirt he had on earlier in the evening and his hatchet, now missing from his tool area, resembled the one found in the crime scene. The witnesses gave the bloody overalls to the police for testing, but because of the police's focus on Cooper as the suspect, they threw the overalls in the trash. The full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to rehear the case, but five of its federal judges concluded, “California may be about to execute an innocent man.” Six other judges dissented from the decision not to review the case. Read full op-ed below.
Recent DNA tests raise serious doubts about the conviction of a man executed in Texas in 2000. The tests revealed that a strand of hair found at the scene of a liquor-store shooting did not belong to Claude Jones, as was originally implied by the prosecution. Instead, the hair belonged to the victim. Jones was executed for the murder of the store's owner. The strand of hair was the only piece of physical evidence that placed Jones at the scene of the crime, and this revelation raises the question of whether Texas executed the wrong person for the murder. Before his execution in 2000, Jones’s lawyers filed petitions for a stay with both a district court and with the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, requesting that the strand of hair be submitted for DNA testing. The necessary DNA technology had not been developed at the time the crime in 1989, but was available in 2000. Both courts, along with then-Governor George W. Bush, denied Jones a stay of execution. Apparently, Gov. Bush was not even informed by his clemency advisors about the request for the DNA test. Barry Scheck, co-founder of the Innocence Project, said “The DNA results prove that testimony about the hair sample on which this entire case rests was just wrong. Unreliable forensic science and a completely inadequate post-conviction review process cost Claude Jones his life.”