Andrew Cohen has a good Bench Conference today on last week's California federal court decision lambasting lethal injunction. And words of advice for Jeb Bush and officials in Florida.

Memo to Florida officials: Save your time and effort and money. Do not reinvent the wheel. Read and absorb the transcript of the lengthy and painstaking evidentiary hearing conducted earlier this year by Judge Fogel in the California case. And then implement the same changes that the judge has ordered California officials to implement before he will again allow executions in that state. It's clear what happened to Diaz. People who have no business executing someone were in charge of executing someone. And those people will screw up again if they are allowed to persist without proper oversight and regulation.

Maryland's courts weighed in today as well.

Responding to a federal court opinion last week finding California's death penalty procedures woefully inadequate, Gov. Arnold Schwarznegger is promising to fix them in 30 days.

Sorry, Arnie. That's not good enough. You need to suspend them until (if ever) they are fixed, like Jeb Bush did.

Today the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty, in conjunction with Murder Victims’ Families for Human Rights launched a two-week, ten-part series composed of excerpts of human stories from the brand new groundbreaking MVFHR report, “Creating More Victims: How Executions Hurt the Families Left Behind.” (pdf)

Each day will bring a different story. The series launched today and will run through Friday, Dec. 29th. You can follow it here.

Update: Say hello to the Florida Lethal Injection blog.

Doctors are now weighing in on the botched Florida execution of Angel Nieves Diaz (background here and here.)

They believe he died a slow, agonizing death, which one equates to torture.

``It really sounds like he was tortured to death,'' said Jonathan Groner, associate professor of surgery at the Ohio State Medical School, who has written several articles on lethal injection. ``My impression is that it would cause an extreme amount of pain.''

A federal judge in San Jose has declared Calfornia's lethal injection system to be in violation of the 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

[Judge] Fogel said that "substantial questions" had been raised by the records of previous executions in the state and that the California Department of Corrections' "actions and failure to act have resulted in an undue and unnecessary risk of an 8th Amendment violation."

The opinion is here (pdf). Check out Footnote 8 on how the execution of Stanley Tookie Williams:

Indeed, the execution team members’ reaction to the problem at the Williams execution was
described by one member as nothing more than “sh*t does happen, so.”

Florida Governor Jeb Bush has ordered all Florida executions be suspended after the state botched the execution of Angel NievesDiaz which lasted 34 minutes.

Medical examiner Dr. William Hamilton said Wednesday's execution of Angel Nieves Diaz took 34 minutes — twice as long as usual — and required a rare second dose of lethal chemicals because the needles were inserted clear through his veins and into the flesh in his arms. The chemicals are supposed to go into the veins.

Hamilton, who performed the autopsy, refused to say whether he thought Diaz died a painful death.

And in California, a judge has ordered the states' executions be stopped declaring the system of lethal injection "broken."

More on Diaz:

Death sentences are at their lowest level in decades.

The Death Penalty Information Center, a group based in Washington, reported that the number of death sentences, which had remained at about 300 a year in the 1990s, began to drop steadily in 1999 and has declined almost 60 percent since then.

At the Justice Department, the Bureau of Statistics reported last week that there were 128 death sentences in 2005, down from 138 the year before. While the department study does not include an estimate for 2006, the Death Penalty Information Center, which opposes the death penalty and tracks cases closely, says the number for this year will be about 114.

Why the drop?

Absolutely disgusting.

Angel Nieves Diaz, 55, was pronounced dead at 6:36 p.m., despite his protests of innocence and requests for clemency made by the governor of his native Puerto Rico. He appeared to move for 24 minutes after the first injection. His eyes were open, his mouth opened and closed and his chest rose and fell. He was pronounced dead 10 minutes after his last movement.

Reaction from Florida Department of Corrections spokeswoman Gretl Plessinger:

"It was not unanticipated. The metabolism of the drugs to the liver is slowed," Plessinger said.

Not only was the execution botched, it was barbaric. As are they all.

A panel at Wake Forest explored the death penalty in the context of a criminal justice system that produces wrongful convictions. Panelists included Darryll Hunt, who served many years for a rape he didn't commit, and Jennifer Cannino, whose mistaken identification sent Ronald Cotton to prison for 11 years.

For a while friends convinced Cannino that she did not owe Cotton an apology. They would tell her Cotton, who had had run-ins with the law before his wrongful conviction, may have ended up with a longer and better life in prison. ...

After PBS' "Frontline" featured Cotton's story on a 1997 episode, Cannino and Cotton finally met. Cotton held no grudge against her and they became what she described as "beyond what I could actually call a friend." ... "He literally is the person who taught me on that afternoon in 1997 about forgiveness, about mercy, about grace," said Cannino.

Tommy Munford hired Guy Tobias LeGrande to kill Munford's wife. A friend of Munford's knew of the plan and supplied the murder weapon. After the deed was done, prosecutors made a deal with Munford: he could avoid life without parole by testifying against Munford in a death penalty prosecution. Munford's friend who supplied the weapon wasn't even charged.

Munford and his friend are white. LeGrande is black. He's also mentally ill. He insisted on representing himself at trial, and he did so while wearing a Superman T-shirt. Despite his mental illness, North Carolina plans to execute him on December 1.

During the crucial penalty phase of the trial, LeGrande's incoherent ramblings reached a pinnacle when he goaded the all-white jury to "Pull the damn switch and shake that groove thing." The jury sentenced him to death after only 45 minutes of deliberation.

Texas executed Willie Shannon last night, it's 24th texecution of the year.

Shannon spoke directly to the widow, two children and brother of his victim, Benjamin Garza, and acknowledged that he "took a father."

"It wasn't my fault. It was an accident," he said of the shooting.

Shannon, 33, smiled and hummed as witnesses filed into the death chamber, and said he was going to heaven. He said if he saw his victim, he would ask Garza for forgiveness: "I'll say when I see him, 'I'm sorry.'" He urged the relatives of his victim to "go home, have fun, smile. I'm happy. Why should I lie now. I have no anger. I have no fear."

Ten minutes later at 6:24 p.m, he was pronounced dead.

I'm not expecting the new Congress to abolish the federal death penalty. When it comes to justice for the criminally accused, we didn't get a progressive Congress yesterday, we got a centrist Democratic one. Believe me, I'm thrilled we got that. It's way better than what we had under the Republicans. But I'm not expecting any major reforms for criminal justice for the accused.

The best we can hope for is the rejection of radical right judges and their covert sponsors, the Gang of 14. Filibustering should be safe now.

More about Willie Shannon is here.

Some judges seem to believe that no error during a trial is so egregious that it justifies overturning a death sentence. Half the judges on the Sixth Circuit were undisturbed that the jury didn't even learn Jeffrey Leonard's true identity before it voted for his execution. Nor did the jury learn anything of Leonard's grim past.

Mr. Leonard’s current lawyers say a competent investigation of his background would have yielded a trove of evidence that might well have persuaded the jury to spare his life. He is, for instance, apparently brain damaged, and he endured a brutal childhood.

By a 7-7 vote, the Sixth Circuit decided not to disturb a 2-1 panel vote that affirmed Leonard's death sentence on the theory that a fully informed jury would still have voted for death. The other seven judges must have been gazing into a different crystal ball. In dissent, Judge Coffman was appropriately skeptical of the opinion that no juror would have been swayed by the mitigating information that wasn't presented.