The Government Has Not Explained How These 13 People Were Selected to Die
The Government Has Not Explained How These 13 People Were Selected to Die
The federal death penalty cannot be fixed. It’s time to end it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/18/opinion/federal-death-penalty.html
By Elizabeth Bruenig
Ms. Bruenig is an Opinion writer.
Feb. 18, 2021
-snip-
It turned out that the pause in executions would last only until the government had the will to end it. A few months into Mr. Trump’s term, his Justice Department began taking steps to cloak the identities of pharmaceutical manufacturers and testing laboratories. With their brand names hidden — and their profits protected — those companies set about compounding and testing pentobarbital, a drug commonly used to euthanize animals. By summer of 2020, the government was ready to deploy its new stock of poison.
-snip-
“Rather than permit an orderly resolution of these suits,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a dissent issued before the execution of the last to die, Dustin Higgs, “the government consistently refused to postpone executions and sought emergency relief to proceed before courts had meaningful opportunities to determine if the executions were legal. Throughout this expedited spree of executions, this court has consistently rejected inmates’ credible claims for relief. The court has even intervened to lift stays of execution that lower courts put in place,” she added, “thereby ensuring those prisoners’ challenges would never receive a meaningful airing.”
-snip-
Random chance plays an enormous role in capital punishment, from the makeup of juries (one study found that majority female juries are much less likely to sentence defendants to death than juries with equal numbers of men and women) to the immigration status of defendants (liberals and conservatives alike are less likely to sentence U.S.-born individuals to death than authorized or undocumented immigrants.)
-snip-
Bernard Harcourt, a professor of law and political science at Columbia who has defended clients on death row, told me: “Basically we value less the life of an African-American person than we do the value of a white person, because we impose the death penalty so many times more” — four to seven times as often — “on people who are accused of killing a white person.”
-snip-
= new reply since forum marked as read
