A columnist for the Wichita Eagle compares recent homicide prosecutions and reasonably concludes that the haphazard application of the death penalty makes it unfair in any particular case, no matter how ugly the facts.

With all of the variants, including where and how a murder occurs, who gets killed and the makeup of the jury, the death penalty forces society into the ridiculous practice of comparing tragedies and assigning a sliding scale of value to victims' lives.

Is killing a child as heinous as killing a law officer, or more so? Should we kill rapists? Does the victim's race or the killer's race matter? All of these factors, which we like to pretend don't matter, give the death penalty a capriciousness that ought to make us sick. ...

Our state hasn't executed anyone since 1965, and we simply can't execute anyone anymore without inviting a million moral and ethical questions about the system's fairness.

Robert Smith, the district attorney of Hinds County, Mississippi, dismisses concerns that the death penalty is disproportionately imposed on nonwhite offenders. His evidence?

"I've visited Parchman [a maximum security prison]. It was when I was with the public defenders office and we toured death row, and I saw a lot of white guys," he said.

Well, if he saw "a lot of white guys," the system must be fair, right? Apparently he didn't notice the black guys.

Of the 64 inmates on death row now, 32 are black, 31 are white and one is Asian, according to the Mississippi Department of Corrections' Web site.

The actual evidence that the death penalty disproportionately burdens nonwhite offenders contradicts the conclusions drawn by the DA after his stroll through death row. Smith's insistence that the death penalty is an effective crime deterrent is similarly based on perception rather than facts. (more ...)

At the Death House Door airs tonight at 9:00 pm ET on IFC, the Independent Film Channel: It is the story of a minister to death row inmates in Texas, who became convinced that the risk that even one innocent person will be executed justifies abandoning capital punishment.

One person who shares such a conviction is Carroll Pickett, minister to death row inmates at a penitentiary in Texas; for 15 years, Pickett had no reservations about presiding over executions, until that fateful day when his path crossed with that of a Hispanic man named Carlos de Luna, unjustly accused of homicide.

Shortly before this - his 96th official execution - was to occur, Pickett tape recorded much of his last day with de Luna. Listening to it, he became unshakably convinced of the man's innocence, and used his inner conviction as an impetus to team up with crime reporters from the Chicago Tribune and delve into the facts surrounding De Luna's highly questionable arraignment. With their documentary At the Death House Door, James and Gilbert both tell Pickett's heart-rending story and use it as a springboard into broader penetrative issues about capital punishment.

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The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole granted clemency to Samuel David Crowe today three hours before his scheduled execution. He had already eaten his last meal.

Crowe, age 47, will now serve life without parole. The board found he expressed sincere and exceptional remorse.

At Thursday's hearing, his lawyers presented a dossier of evidence attesting to his remorse and good behavior in jail, according to local media reports. The lawyers also said he was suffering from withdrawal symptoms from a cocaine addiction at the time of the crime.

109 men remain on Georgia's death row.

Stephen Bright of the Southern Center for Human Rights, a champion in the defense of capital cases and a personal hero of mine, discusses what's next for the death penalty in the video above and in a blogpost today at MoBlogic.tv .

Although public opinion polls continue to show support for the death penalty, imposition of the death penalty is down by more than 50% over 10 years. In the late 1990s, around 280-300 people were being sentenced to death a year. In the last 5 years, it’s been around 125 to 150 a year. No one has noticed this. But it is significant that a country this large with as many homicides as we have is sentencing so few people to death each year.

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William Earl Lynd was executed in Georgia last night.

Lynd's execution at 7:51 p.m. was the first since the court ruled April 16 that the three-drug protocol most commonly used in executions by states and the federal government did not constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Last week, a former death row inmate was freed in North Carolina. The Death Penalty Information Center reports:

Around the country, the 129th person was recently freed from death row in North Carolina. Levon Jones was exonerated after his conviction was overturned because of inadequate representation. The state's star witness has also recanted her testimony implicating Jones. The District Attorney dismissed all charges against him on May 3. Jones is the sixth person to be freed from death row in the past 12 months, the eighth person from North Carolina, and the 3rd from North Carolina since December 2007. The last four inmates who have been freed from death row in the U.S. are black.

The New York Times reports questions of fairness remain.

The New York Times reports that states are rescheduling executions now that the Supreme Court has ruled in Baze v. Rees that the three drug cocktail used by states does not violate the 8th Amendment's prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The Fourth Circuit has a new challenge on its hands.In Emmett v. Johnson, Emmett is arguing that the way in which Virginia administers the drugs is unconstitutional because unlike Kentucky and other states, it doesn't allow enough time for the first drug, which anesthetizes and renders the inmate unconscious, to take effect before administering the other two drugs which cause pain. To make it worse, when there seems to be a problem with the first drug, rather than giving more of the drug, Virginia increases the doses of the pain-causing second and third drugs, but not the first.

In its brief (available here pdf) Emmett's lawyers make the argument that there is a painless way to kill someone with just one drug: [More...]

Levon "Bo" Jones leaves a North Carolina penitentiary today after serving 13 years on death row.

This is not a DNA reversal.

Levon "Bo" Jones of Duplin County spent 13 years on death row, convicted of robbing and shooting a well-liked bootlegger. In 2006, a federal judge ordered Jones off death row and overturned his conviction, declaring his attorney's performance so poor that his constitutional rights had been violated.

Today, Jones will become the eighth North Carolina man spared execution after charges against him were dropped. Judges turned the inmates loose after discovering a variety of problems in their cases, ranging from hidden evidence to inadequate defense attorneys.

Jones had been awaiting a retrial. The prosectuor intended to go for a life sentence this time around. Then, "his case collapsed" when a key witness recanted. [More...]

Adam Liptak in the New York Times examines the results of a new study on the death penalty and crime. There are two key findings.

The first one is not a surprise: The death penalty is imposed more often when the victim is white.

The second is potentially ground-breaking:

It found that the race of the defendant by itself plays a major role in explaining who is sentenced to death.

It has never been conclusively proven that, all else being equal, blacks are more likely to be sentenced to death than whites in the three decades since the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976. Many experts, including some opposed to the death penalty, have said that evidence of that sort of direct discrimination is spotty and equivocal.

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The good news is that every member of the Supreme Court agrees that disemboweling, beheading, drawing and quartering, dissecting, and burning alive all violate the Eighth Amendment's prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment. The bad news is that seven justices in a maze of opinions (the lead opinion, written by Chief Justice Roberts, is joined only by Justices Kennedy and Alito) agree that Kentucky's lethal injection protocol is not cruel and unusual, at least on the record that was made in the Kentucky case.

The decision and the multiple opinions it generated may or may not end the de facto moratorium on death penalty implementation, but it will only fuel the growing debate about the wisdom of death as punishment for a crime. Consider, for instance, the concluding remarks in Justice Breyer's opinion concurring in the result:

Clifton White will not be executed. The Ohio Supreme Court today ruled a judge erred in substituting his opinion for that of experts as to whether White was mentally retarded. Case synopis here and the full opinion is here. (pdf).

In 2002, the Supreme Court in Atkins v. Virginia banned execution for the mentally retarded as cruel and unusual punishment. White was pursuing post-conviction relief at the time.

Later that year, the Supreme Court of Ohio in State v. Lott established criteria and procedures to be applied ....a petitioner is required to show by a preponderance of the evidence:

• “(1) significantly subaverage intellectual functioning,

• (2) significant limitations in two or more adaptive skills, such as communication, self-care, and self-direction, and

• (3) onset (of the intellectual and adaptive limitations) before the age of 18.”

The trial court in White's case appointed experts and held a hearing. Both the state's expert and the defense expert determined he met the criteria. [More...]

Since 2004, I've been writing about how vets won't put dogs down using the chemicals prisons use to execute inmates.

A new study, Anesthetizing the Public Conscience: Lethal Injection and Animal Euthanasia, is out comparing the two -- and witnesses are testifying in an Ohio death penalty case to exactly that: you wouldn't do a dog this way.

First, the Ohio case:

An anesthesiologist testified Monday that Ohio's lethal injection procedure isn't appropriate for dogs or cats, let alone humans. Dr. Mark Heath's testimony on behalf of two murder defendants came in a Lorain County hearing on the constitutionality of state's method for putting prisoners to death.

Heath, an assistant professor of anesthesiology at Columbia University, says it's possible to perform lethal injection of prisoners in a humane manner, but that Ohio's method falls below the standard for euthanizing household pets.

The problems in a nutshell:[More...]