“A National Embarrassment”: Maine Gov. LePage; Bring Back The Guillotine
Maine Gov. Paul LePage says the guillotine should be brought back so there can be public executions of drug traffickers.
In a radio interview Tuesday on WVOM, LePage said legislative proposals to increase prison sentences for drug traffickers do not do enough.
“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers,” LePage said. “We should give them an injection of the stuff they sell.”
He said he was “appalled” at critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, who are angry over his comments, saying they are protecting drug traffickers.
“What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he said, interrupting the hosts. “We could have public executions and we could even have which hole it falls in.”
LePage, who is no stranger to controversial remarks, earlier this month got into hot water for comments he made about drug dealers impregnating white women.
“With the name D-Money, Smoothie, Shifty — these types of guys — they come from Connecticut and New York, they come up here, they sell their heroin, they go back home,” LePage said at a town hall event. He added, “Half the time they impregnate a young white girl before they leave.”
New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whom LePage has endorsed for president, defended his surrogate at the time.
“We all know that he shoots from the hip, and when he does that there are going to be times when even he, in retrospect, thinks he shouldn’t have said,” Christie said in an interview with “Morning Joe.”
By: Eliza Collins, Politico, January 26, 2016
“The Guillotine Finds A Modern-Day U.S. Proponent”: Maine’s Idiotic Gov Paul ‘Rage’ LePage Wants To Roll Back The Clock
Capital punishment has evolved over time, but the progression tends to move in one direction. As we discussed last year, those who believe that the government should have the authority to kill its own citizens have adapted over time to changing norms and technologies. When one method of execution is deemed gruesome, cruel, or of dubious efficacy, policymakers move towards another.
The standards have shifted more than once: from stoning to guillotines, nooses to firing squads, electric chairs to lethal injections. In each instance, the idea has been to make the killing process cleaner and more sanitary.
Occasionally, however, we’re confronted with an official who likes the idea of rolling back the clock. Politico reports today that Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) endorses use of the guillotine.
“I think the death penalty should be appropriate for people who kill Mainers,” LePage said…. He said he was “appalled” at critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union of Maine, who are angry over his comments, saying they are protecting drug traffickers.
“What we ought to do is bring the guillotine back,” he said, interrupting the hosts. “We could have public executions and we could even have which hole it falls in.”
It’s not altogether clear whether the governor was serious. With Paul LePage, it’s often hard to tell.
But the broader point about contemporary conservatives looking backwards for methods of executions is nevertheless true.
When Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam (R) last year raised the prospect of bringing back the electric chair when chemicals for lethal injections are unavailable, Deborah Denno, a professor at Fordham University School of Law and a national expert on capital punishment, said something interesting: “[T]hey’re going backwards. They’re going back to using a method of execution that was basically rejected because it was so problematic. That’s never happened before.”
As it turns out, some others want to go backwards, too.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 26, 2016
“Capital Punishment On Hold, For Now”: Supreme Court Strikes Down Florida’s Death Penalty System
The future of the death penalty in the United States is murky, and we know there are some justices who believe the Constitution’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment necessitates the policy’s end.
The resolution of that debate, however, remains on the horizon. Today’s decision on Florida’s death penalty isn’t entirely what it appears to be at first blush.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday declared Florida’s death penalty law unconstitutional because it requires the trial judge and not the jury to make the critical findings necessary to impose capital punishment.
That’s at odds with a string of Supreme Court cases which held that facts that add to a defendant’s punishment – known as aggravating circumstances – must be found by a jury.
It was an 8-1 ruling, the entirety of which is online, written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor. “The Sixth Amendment requires a jury, not a judge, to find each fact necessary to impose a sentence of death,” she wrote for the majority. “A jury’s mere recommendation is not enough.”
The sole dissent in Hurst v. Florida was written by Justice Samuel Alito.
So now what happens? The defendant, Timothy Lee Hurst, will see his case go back to the lower courts, while lawyers scramble to review the convictions of other inmates on Florida’s death row.
For opponents of capital punishment, it’s certainly a victory, but it’s worth emphasizing that it may be short-lived.
In this case, Florida’s current law was struck down, but the ruling focused on criminal procedure in the courtroom. The question of whether the law is cruel or unusual is left for another day.
The Miami Herald reports that state lawmakers are already preparing to “fix” what the Supreme Court said is broken.
Florida lawmakers are prioritizing a fix to Florida’s death penalty sentencing procedures after the U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a state law giving judges the final say on capital sentencing.
House Criminal Justice chairman Carlos Trujillo, R-Miami, said his committee will take on a bill to address the Supreme Court’s problems.
The article added that another member of the Republican-run legislature intends to use this opportunity to consider broader reforms to the system, including a proposal to “require jurors to unanimously find that there are aggravating circumstances in a case, which would warrant a death sentence. Right now, it only takes a simple majority – 7 of 12 jurors.”
Capital punishment in Florida is, for now, on hold. That may not last long.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 12, 2015
“Still Remains Popular Within The State”: South Carolina’s Complicated Relationship With The Death Penalty
If prosecutors convict Dylann Storm Roof and then seek the death penalty—and despite calls from Governor Nikki Haley, it’s not clear they will—the Charleston shooting suspect could be sitting on death row for a long time. The last execution in South Carolina was in 2011, despite a list of 44 people awaiting execution. The pace of executions has slowed to a crawl, in a state that has put 282 people to death over approximately the last century. And the reasons that this slowdown has happened may also give prosecutors pause in this case.
In its earliest days, South Carolina was notoriously expansive in its definition of what qualified for the death penalty; a slave could be put to death for destroying grain, for instance. It is still one of the top 10 states for per capita executions, following the Supreme Court suspension of the dealth penalty in 1976 and its subsequent reinstatement. But South Carolina’s relationship with capital punishment has gotten complicated, some for reasons that align with national trends and some specific to the state. On one hand, it’s a place where, just last year, a judge posthumously exonerated a black boy executed in 1944—the kind of case that has led some states to move away from the death penalty. On the other hand, months later, a state legislator sought the reintroduction of firing squads to make it easier to execute criminals.
One cause of the statewide drop in executions helps explain why there would even be a doubt about whether Roof will face the death penalty: It’s expensive. In 2012, one South Carolina prosecutor who had intended to seek the death penalty changed his mind because of the cost. “Once you file for the death penalty, the clock gets moving and the money, the taxpayers start paying for that trial,” he said, reflecting broader angst in the state about the price of death penalty trials, appeals, and retrials, compared to a life sentence. Mathematically, if fewer prosecutors seek the death penalty, the result is fewer executions. Roof’s case would seem a likely candidate to set aside the question of cost, and some predict the death penalty will indeed be sought. But then, it would surely be one of the costlier death penalty trials, because there’s a link between a case’s prominence and its price. (The prosecutor leading the Roof case is controversial with the black community.)
But there are other reasons for the decline in the execution rate, according to South Carolina government officials, namely the difficulty in acquiring drugs needed for lethal injections. “Right now, what we’re doing is we are looking and reaching out to pharmacies and suppliers et cetera to try to find pentobarbital,” S.C. Department of Corrections Director Bryan Stirling said, explaining how the shortage contributed to the slowdown. “We have thus far not been successful at that.” The availability of drugs is an issue other states are confronting, too. Overall, the drop in executions in South Carolina and the reasons for that are “consistent with across the country,” says Emily Paavola, executive director of the state’s Death Penalty Resource and Defense Center.
But the death penalty still remains popular within the state. Nationwide, public support for capital punishment has fallen, partly stemming from the number of exonerations of death row inmates and partly stemming from declining crime rates; that has, in turn, driven politicians in many states to oppose capital punishment. But even death penalty opponents admit that the same shift has yet to happen in South Carolina, except, Paavola says, with regard to the use of the death penalty for the mentally ill, the subject of a poll by her group in 2009.
Opponents of the death penalty have tried to seize on the case of South Carolina’s George Stinney to shift public attitudes. Even among historical exonerations, Stinney’s case stands out: The 14-year-old was electrocuted more than 70 years ago after a two-hour trial that convicted him of beating two white girls to death; in 2014, he was posthumuously exonerated by a judge who cited the all-white jury and a compromised confession. “The case has haunted the town since it happened,” the Washington Post wrote, and “Stinney’s case has tormented civil rights advocates for years.” One of the defense attorneys working the case said the state needed to correct the record. “South Carolina still recognizes George Stinney as a murderer,” Matt Burgess told CNN. “We felt that something needed to be done about that.”
But the Stinney case hasn’t put a halt to a steady stream of bills introduced in the Statehouse that meant to make capital punishment easier, like the legislation introduced by State Representative Joshua A. Putnam to allow firing squads to be used when lethal injection drugs aren’t available. Overall, Paavola’s group has watched the list of factors that makes a case qualify as death-eligible grow since 1976. “The Legislature has, over the years since the death penalty was reinstated, expanded that,” she said, but she noted that individual prosecutors have used their discretion differently. ”From our perspective, the result is, often, very arbitrary selection.”
The Death Penalty Resource and Defense Center isn’t commenting on the Roof case, at least not yet. But on the day of the Charleston shooting, the group called it a “sad day for all in SC.” And the group noted that it had just recently started working with State Senator Clementa Pinckney, who was among the murdered. He had been helping them fight a bill that would hide information about how lethal injections are carried out from the general public.
By: Tim Starks, The New Republic, June 19, 2015
“It’s Not About Them, It’s About Us”: Guillotine Revival Movement Gains Momentum
When things began to go terribly wrong with Clayton Lockett’s execution in Oklahoma the other day—when instead of drifting gently off into unconsciousness and death, Lockett began to moan and buck on the gurney—one of the first things the officials did was lower the blinds over the window through which observers peered into the death chamber. Because after all, people shouldn’t have to witness a man suffer as the state is killing him, right?
Lockett’s execution was hardly the first botched one we’ve had, particularly with lethal injection, a process prison officials seem extraordinarily incompetent at implementing properly. But for whatever reason, it has brought about a more substantial debate about the death penalty than we’ve had in some time. And as part of that, it looks like my semi-serious advocacy for the return of the guillotine is finally gaining momentum. It already has endorsements from Conor Friedersdorf and Sonny Bunch, with more sure to follow.
Frankly, I’ve never bought the argument that the death penalty violates the Constitution’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment.” Unusual, maybe—it has become not just unusual but unheard of in democratic countries (the nations with the highest number of executions last year were, in order, China, Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the U.S. of A.). But cruel? It seems that spending your life in prison is far worse than being executed. Though Lockett was in obvious pain for three-quarters of an hour before he finally expired, that pain couldn’t possibly match the extended agony endured by the tens of thousands of people we put in solitary confinement, where the lack of human contact literally drives them insane.
But back to our execution methods. It does seem that as the killing techniques have evolved, what we’ve called more “humane” methods are not about minimizing the suffering of the condemned, but about minimizing the gruesomeness of the spectacle, so that we can perform the execution without feeling like barbarians. It’s not about them, it’s about us. We did away with the firing squad in favor of the electric chair, even though the latter involves a lot more suffering, and why? Well, it involves just pulling a switch instead of actually pulling a trigger and sending a bullet hurtling toward a man’s heart. And there’s no blood splatter on the walls.
But the electric chair is pretty awful to watch—the body convulsing in obvious torment and all that—so we went to lethal injection. And despite the fact that we’re perfectly capable of knocking people out before surgery and gently putting a beloved pet to sleep, the geniuses who run our prisons can’t seem to do it without putting the condemned through substantial pain.
So if you recoil from the idea of the guillotine, ask yourself why. It’s fast, foolproof, and essentially painless. If you were going to be executed, wouldn’t it be near the top of your list for ways to go? You can’t argue that Clayton Lockett would have met a crueler end had his head been lopped off than what he actually went through. We could even come up with a more contemporary version, like a fast-moving saw blade that separates your brain from your body in a fraction of a second.
The visceral objection you have to that thought is not about the suffering of the one being executed, it’s about how you’d feel watching it. The guillotine, with its blood and severed head, would make us feel uncomfortable about what we’re doing when the state executes someone in our name. It would make us feel barbaric. As well it should.
If we’re going to keep the death penalty, we should be honest about what it’s for. It isn’t for deterrence, and it isn’t for justice. It’s for vengeance. We can try to make it “humane,” and we can draw the blinds when the truth of it comes uncomfortably close the surface. But that won’t change what it is.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, May 2, 2014
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