Death penalties: the last word

Current Affairs
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saw this story on skynews

The last words of hundreds of death row inmates have been revealed for the first time.

Execution chamber

Texas has more than 300 Death Row inmates and has executed 18 people this year.

Authorities in Texas, where more people have been executed than in any other US state, have published the last statements of everyone put to death since 1982.

The most recent of the 441 final statements is that of Christopher Coleman, who was killed by lethal injection last week.

The 38-year-old, who was convicted of killing three men during a drug deal, simply said: “Yes. Ain’t no way fo’ fo’, I love all y’all.”

Christopher Coleman

Christopher Coleman

The majority of those about to be killed maintained their innocence, including Willie Pondexter who was executed in March this year.

“They may execute me but they can’t punish me because they can’t execute an innocent man,” he said.

Pondexter, 35, was convicted of shooting an 85-year-old woman in the head during a burglary.

After shooting the woman the intruder took $18 from her purse, and fled in her car.

A number of inmates used their last words to make a protest against capital punishment.

See you on the other side. Warden, murder me.

Executed Death Row inmate James Jackson

“I ask each of you to lift up your voices to demand an end to the Death Penalty,” said Johnny Johnson, who was convicted of the rape and murder of a young woman in 1995.

"If we live, we live to the Lord. If we die we die to the Lord. Christ rose again, in Jesus name.

“Bye Aunt Helen, Luise, Joanna and to all the rest of y’all. You may proceed Warden.”

Leonel Herrera was convicted of the murder of a police officer who stopped him for speeding in 1981.

Before his execution in 1993, he said he was “innocent, innocent, innocent.”

Leonel Herrera

Leonel Herrera

"Make no mistake about this: I owe society nothing. Continue the struggle for human rights, helping those who are innocent.

“I am an innocent man, and something very wrong is taking place tonight.”

“May God bless you all. I am ready.”

But Newton Anderson, who was executed in February 2007, was candid about his crime.

“I am guilty,” he said. “I don’t deny that. They had good evidence. Witnesses saw me. What can I say?”

The 33-year-old shot and killed a couple during a burglary at their home in 1999.

In the same month, James Jackson, who was convicted of the murder of his partner and two stepdaughters, said: “See you on the other side. Warden, murder me.”

Texas has already executed 18 people this year, and has more than 300 inmates on Death Row.

The publication of the ‘last words’ comes a week after the botched execution of 53-year-old Romell Broom in Ohio.

His execution was called off after staff failed to find a vein to administer the lethal combination of drugs into his body

the quotes are here http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/executedoffenders.htm

had a quick scan and no mention of frog ward’s last words

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mong:rolleyes:

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[quote=“artfoley”]The publication of the ‘last words’ comes a week after the botched execution of 53-year-old Romell Broom in Ohio.

His execution was called off after staff failed to find a vein to administer the lethal combination of drugs into his body

[/quote]

I had a similar experience in a blood donor clinic on Westmoreland St when the nurse bollixed up the insertion of the needle and aborted the procedure altogether after a minute or so. Dreadful scenes.

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I’d feel sorry for some of the offenders.

This one was a bad bitch though.

http://www.tdcj.state.tx.us/stat/bassosuzanne.htm

http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/women/suzanne_basso/2.html

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I’ve always been amused at the “humane” way in which American authorities try to kill their people. They’re constantly making an utter bollocks of these injections which are not meant to cause any pain to the executee (is that a word?).

I mean, surely in a country where every 5 year old totes a semi-automatic weapon, they’d just shoot them and be done with it.

And I do love these born again evangelical god botherer’s who spend half their lives promoting killing their fellow man.

Capital punishment - the last bastion of a savage society.

I heard a great description of Canada the other day - they’re like a nice quiet Mormon family living above a biker ganghouse.

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Newton knew the score, if only Frog Ward could have died with such dignity, but dignity is not to be expected of a traveller.

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…Justice in Texas…

Yours in drop-wheeze-gasp-pop-choke-poop-die,
GSH.

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What utter shite being spouted here “a country where every 5 year old totes a semi-automatic weapon” Fuck right off.

America does fuck up executions by lethal injection, the mistake they’re making is when it does go wrong that they don’t have a fail safe whereby a gun blows the brains out of the cunt they’re killing.

America controls the World. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?

NOTHING. Because you can’t.

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Death row in Japan will be discussed on Tom Dunne this morning on Newstalk. Should be interesting.

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[quote=“Flano”]What utter shite being spouted here “a country where every 5 year old totes a semi-automatic weapon” Fuck right off.

America does fuck up executions by lethal injection, the mistake they’re making is when it does go wrong that they don’t have a fail safe whereby a gun blows the brains out of the cunt they’re killing.

America controls the World. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?

NOTHING. Because you can’t.[/quote]

Hail To The Chief!

Hanter!

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[quote=“Flano”]What utter shite being spouted here “a country where every 5 year old totes a semi-automatic weapon” Fuck right off.

America does fuck up executions by lethal injection, the mistake they’re making is when it does go wrong that they don’t have a fail safe whereby a gun blows the brains out of the cunt they’re killing.

America controls the World. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it?

NOTHING. Because you can’t.[/quote]

You don’t seem yourself Flango, is something wrong?

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Crazy fucking yanks.

US authorities urged to overturn death sentence after jury consulted Bible

The Texas jury didn’t hesitate to find Khristian Oliver guilty of shooting and bludgeoning an elderly man to death. Oliver had stood over his bleeding victim, repeatedly hitting him in the head with a rifle butt before robbing his house.

But then came the difficult decision over whether to sentence Oliver to death, and that’s when the Bibles came into their own.

A clutch of jurors huddled in the corner with one reading aloud from the Book of Numbers: “The murderer shall surely be put to death” and “The revenger of blood himself shall slay the murderer.”

Another juror highlighted passages which she showed to a fellow juror: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, the murderer shall surely be put to death.”

Ten years later Oliver, now 32, is just three weeks from execution. Two appeals courts have rejected his pleas for the jury’s death sentence in 1999 to be overturned on the grounds it was improperly influenced by references to the Bible. Some of the jurors have made no secret of the part their religious beliefs played in reaching their decision but the US supreme court has refused to take up a case that has been condemned as “a travesty”.

Amnesty International has said the use of biblical references “to decide life or death in a capital trial is deeply, deeply troubling” and called on the authorities in Texas, which has carried out nearly half of the 39 executions in the US this year, to commute the sentence.

Oliver’s lawyers called four members of the jury that convicted him to testify at an appeal hearing. At the hearing, one of them, Kenneth McHaney described how another juror, Kenneth Grace, read the Bible aloud to a group of jurors.

Donna Matheny showed McHaney a Bible in which she highlighted passages including one that “says that if a man strikes someone with an iron object so that he dies, then he is a murderer and should be put to death”.

Maxine Symmank told the court that she too had read a passage from the Book of Numbers: “And if he smite him with an instrument of iron, so that he die, he is a murderer: the murderer shall surely be put to death.” Another juror, Michael Brenneisen, told a journalist in 2002 that he asked himself “Is this the way the Lord would decide the case?” But Brenneisen also said that in discussing the Bible the jury “went both directions in our use of the scripture - forgiveness and judgement”.

McHaney said there were about four Bibles in the jury room.

A Texas state appeal court rejected Oliver’s plea to strike down the sentence because, it said, he had not “presented clear and convincing evidence” that the Bible influenced the jury’s decision. The court acknowledged that there was reference to the Bible by the jurors but said it was not improper. It said “a conscientious, dedicated” jury was “uninfluenced by any outside influence of any kind shown to the court in this hearing”.

A federal appeal court disagreed, saying that references to the Bible inside the jury room were improper but it still refused to overturn the death sentence on the grounds that Oliver’s lawyers had not proved that the readings influenced the death penalty decision. The court ruled that the jurors would have applied their own moral judgements which would, in any case, have been influenced by their religious beliefs.

Oliver’s lawyer until last month, Winston Cochran, said the rulings are the result of an impossible situation in which he was prevented at the first appeal hearing from directly asking the jurors if the Bible readings had an influence on their decision. The federal court then turned down a subsequent appeal on the grounds that the jurors had not explicitly said they were swayed by the Bible.

“We were prohibited from asking the question we were later being asked to prove,” he said.

Cochran also criticised the appeal court view that jurors were merely applying moral beliefs they already held.

“The problem is there was testimony the Bible was passed around and shown to people. It was part of the discussion. It wasn’t just used by individuals to reinforce their existing belief,” he said.

With the supreme court refusing to take up Oliver’s case, his remaining options are the Texas board of pardons and the state governor, Rick Perry. The board of pardons rarely recommends clemency and Perry is unlikely to set aside a death sentence in a deeply religious state on the grounds that jurors referred to the Bible.

Perry has in any case shown no interest in revisiting controversial death penalty cases. This week he described a man executed in 2004 for burning his three children to death as a “monster” despite a growing body of evidence that he was wrongly convicted on spurious scientific evidence. Perry described claims that Cameron Todd Willingham was innocent as anti-death penalty propaganda.

“Willingham was a monster. He was a guy who murdered his three children, who tried to beat his wife into an abortion so that he wouldn’t have those kids. Person after person has stood up and testified to facts of this case,” he said.

Perry has sacked some members of the Texas Forensic Science Commission just as they were about to review a new scientific report highly critical of the evidence used to convict Willingham. If the commission had decided the evidence was flawed, it could have led to the first official admission of a wrongful execution in Texas.

“Getting all tied up in the process here frankly is a deflection of what people across this state and this country need to be looking at,” Perry said.

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[SIZE=6]Oklahoma inmate dies after execution is botched[/SIZE]

McALESTER, Okla. (AP) — A botched execution that used a new drug combination left an Oklahoma inmate writhing and clenching his teeth on the gurney Tuesday, leading prison officials to halt the proceedings before the inmate’s eventual death from a heart attack.

Clayton Lockett, 38, was declared unconscious 10 minutes after the first of the state’s new three-drug lethal injection combination was administered. Three minutes later, though, he began breathing heavily, writhing, clenching his teeth and straining to lift his head off the pillow.

The blinds were eventually lowered to prevent those in the viewing gallery from watching what was happening in the death chamber, and the state’s top prison official eventually called a halt to the proceedings. Lockett died of a heart attack a short time later, the Department of Corrections said.

“It was a horrible thing to witness. This was totally botched,” said Lockett’s attorney, David Autry.

The problems with the execution are likely to fuel more debate about the ability of states to administer lethal injections that meet the U.S. Constitution’s requirement they be neither cruel nor unusual punishment. That question has drawn renewed attention from defense attorneys and death penalty opponents in recent months, as several states scrambled to find new sources of execution drugs because drugmakers that oppose capital punishment — many based in Europe — have stopped selling to prisons and corrections departments
http://news.yahoo.com/oklahoma-inmate-dies-execution-botched-005638821.html