Free Republic

After a botched execution that took 34 minutes to end a convicted murderer’s life, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush has suspended all death sentences until a commission can review lethal-injection procedures “to ensure they don’t inflict cruel and unusual punishment on their helpless victims.” In a gesture of goodwill, Florida’s leading association of murderers also announced a temporary hold on premeditated and/or serial killings as well as brutal rapes, according to a spokesman, “until we can determine if some of our victims experience discomfort or pain.” The Sunshine State Coalition of Capital Criminals released the statement through its ACLU attorney, pledging...

SAN FRANCISCO - A federal judge who imposed a moratorium on executions in California ruled Friday that the state's method of lethal injection is unconstitutional because it violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment. California's "implementation of lethal injection is broken, but it can be fixed," U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel said. Fogel said the case raised the question of whether a three-drug cocktail administered by the San Quentin State Prison is so painful that it "offends" the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment. Fogel said he was compelled "to answer that question in the affirmative." Fogel's...

MIAMI, Dec. 15 -- Executions by lethal injection were suspended in Florida and ordered revamped in California on Friday, as the chemical method once billed as a more humane way of killing the condemned came under mounting scrutiny over the pain it may cause. Gov. Jeb Bush (R) ordered the suspension in Florida after a botched execution in which it took 34 minutes and a second injection to kill convicted murderer Angel Nieves Diaz. A state medical examiner said that needles used to carry the poison had passed through the prisoner's veins and delivered the three-chemical mix into the tissues...

A federal judge declares California's application of the current method of execution unconstitutional. But in a grand gesture of understanding says that ... "it can be fixed" See more at the link...

SEATTLE -- This city's school district decided in 2000 that because the son of Jill Kurfirst and the daughter of Winnie Bachwitz are white, they should be assigned to an inferior and distant high school. If they had not left the Seattle school system, this would have required them to rise at 5 a.m. in order to leave home by 5:30 a.m., alone and in the dark, to take the first of three buses, returning home between 8 p.m. and 9 p.m., with almost no time left for homework, family activities and adequate sleep. The parents argue that the racial...

After decades of excoriating evangelical Christians as bigoted morons, foaming-at-the-mouth fanatics and vile hypocrites -- both sexually-obsessed and sexually-repressed (part Elmer Gantry, part Elmer Fudd) -- the media has hit on a new tactic. The cover story ("America's God Complex - Like George W. Bush, The Religious Right Is At The Crossroads") in the November 13th Newsweek explains that evangelicals aren't really all that bad - it's just that the poor fools have been duped by the Republican Party, their energies (which should be devoted to more worthwhile endeavors) diverted to sordid politics. But there's hope that the Bible Belt...