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SURVIVING DEATH ROW

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 00:13:56 GMT

Since 1930, when reliable statistics started being kept, and August 2007, there were 4,936 government-sanctioned executions carried out in the United States during that seventy-seven year period. It has been reported that during the sixty-nine year period between 1882 and 1951 an additional 4,730 lynchings in America.

Americans are a people who fervently believe in the death penalty’s “eye for an eye” concept of justice.

This was made evident following Furman v. Georgia – a 1972 United States Supreme Court decision that effectively vacated the 408 death sentences which had been imposed on condemned inmates in this country. The Furman decision did not abolish the death penalty. The Supreme Court, in a split 5-4 decision, simply held that the penalty as it was then indiscriminately applied violated the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment. Following Furman, thirty-seven states, and the Federal government, enacted death penalty statutes that satisfied the Supreme Court’s constitutional guidelines.

CRIME VICTIMS MOVEMENT AND THE DEATH PENALTY

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:14:19 GMT

Newton Anderson was put to death by lethal injection in Texas on February 22, 2007 for a double murder that occurred eight years ago.

“For all those that want this to happen,” he said in final statement before his execution, “I hope you get what you want and it makes you feel better and gives you some kind of relief.”

It didn’t.

Revenge always leaves the person who exacts it feeling empty, cheated, and somewhat shallow.

The death penalty is fueled by the demands for revenge of crime victims.

Why?

Organized anger, or what has become known as “the victim’s rights movement,” first injected itself into the nation’s criminal justice system in California in the late 1970s. The first notable target of the movement was Willie Archie Fain who, in the 1960s, killed a 17-year-old boy and raped his teenage girlfriend. A “Keep Fain In Committee” was formed by relatives and friends of Fain’s victims with the specific purpose of keeping the convicted murderer in prison. With careful orchestration of public outrage against crime in general and a growing public dissatisfaction with the way the criminal justice system functioned, the committee collected some 84,000 letters opposing Fain’s release. With those letters and the publicity they generated, the “victim’s rights movement” was born.

TWO CASES OF INNOCENCE

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:07:27 GMT

Nearly two hundred innocent persons have been freed from the nation’s prison system over the last two decades through DNA evidence – dozens had been condemned to die and awaiting execution at the time their innocence was discovered.
The nation’s criminal justice system, dangerously infected with an unbridled law-and-order virus, has sent scores of innocent people to prison because of unethical, and criminal, tactics of prosecutors who knowingly fabricated evidence, suppressed favorable evidence, or used perjured testimony to secure these convictions.

THE LETHAL INJECTION PROTOCAL

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:06:46 GMT

Philip Ray Workman was executed in the Tennessee death chamber on May 9, 2007.

Twenty-six years before, on August 5, 1981, Workman robbed a Wendy’s restaurant in Memphis. He forced all the employees and a customer into the manager’s office where he collected the day’s receipts into a bag. See, Workman v. Bredesen, ____ F.3d _____, 2007 WL 1311330 (6th Cir. Tenn.) [May 7, 2007].

THE EXECUTION OF ROBERT WAYNE WILLIAMS

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 15:06:12 GMT

The death penalty is state lynching.
It is an evil response to the primal need in man to take revenge. This need was graphically illustrated in a dank, foul-smelling Iraqi death chamber moments before Saddam Hussein’s neck was snapped by the hangman’s noose in December 2006 as his enemies celebrated.