Okay...this should solve that problem.
Posted on 03/08/2006 8:00:32 PM PST by NormsRevenge
The American Civil Liberties Union claimed in a federal lawsuit Wednesday that California's lethal injection protocol violates the First Amendment rights of execution witnesses by not allowing them to see if the inmate is experiencing pain before death.
The suit, filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, says the only reason San Quentin State Prison officials inject a paralyzing agent is to sanitize the execution and prevent witnesses from perhaps seeing convulsions.
The paralyzing drug, according to the lawsuit, "makes it impossible for witnesses to determine whether death row inmates in California are being subjected to substantial and unnecessary pain before dying."
The induced paralysis, the group argued, conceals significant information to which the public is entitled.
The ACLU, which filed the suit on behalf of San Francisco-based Pacific News Service, made a similar argument a year ago before the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on behalf of a condemned inmate. The court rejected it on procedural grounds, and did not reach the merits of the challenge.
In response to Wednesday's filing, Nathan Barankin, spokesman for Attorney General Bill Lockyer, said "The ACLU does not have a right to determine what method the state of California should use in carrying out the death penalty." He said the "paralyzing agent effectively stops inmate breathing."
Under California's injection protocol, a sedative, then a paralyzing agent and finally heart-stopping drugs are injected. The state is seeking court permission to drip a sedative continually to ensure unconsciousness.
At California executions, about two dozen members of the media, in addition to public officials and relatives of the slain are present. They are able to see prison officials strap the condemned man onto a gurney, see them wrap the inmate's fists into a ball of tape and watch as they poke him with needles.
Prison officials then move out of public site and the drugs begin pouring.
Wednesday's lawsuit comes two weeks after the execution of California prisoner Michael Morales was called off amid questions of whether inmates suffer too much pain during the execution in violation of the Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment.
Litigation is ongoing in the Morales case, with hearings on California's injection protocol set to begin May 2 in San Jose federal court. The Supreme Court has never addressed whether lethal injection amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, and 37 states use an injection protocol similar to California's.
The case is Pacific News Service v. Woodford, 06-1793
Would the ACLU object if a 12 person firing squad was used?
Second Amendment violation?
Anyone who thinks sedating and then killing a convicted murderer is cruel and unusual punishment needs help. What do they want death to be for killers? Pleasant?
What I cannot see is how a news organization would have standing to challenge the execution process.
Okay...this should solve that problem.
The funny thing is, if I was going the the death house, for what ever unimaginable reason, I would much prefer the rope to the needle. You die on your feet (sort of) not on you back strapped to a gurney with IV's in your arms.
Even "old Sparky" sounds better than that to me
Hell, if the ACLU wants to see ways an execution will show the pain and sufferning a murderer should feel, I'll be happy to get out some old horror movies for inspiration.
A firing squad circumvents those problems nicely.>>>
Make it circular and take bets on who gets hit.
Guillotine.
And have it setup so that the first time it drops it stops a few inches above the neck.
Pacific News Service is a nonprofit media organization that was founded in 1969 as an alternative source of news and analysis on the U.S. role in Vietnam. Since then, we have evolved into a highly experimental communications hub for journalists, scholars, filmmakers, artists and young people dedicated to bringing the seldom heard, often most misunderstood or ignored voices and ideas into the public forum. PNS produces a daily news syndicate and sponsors magazine articles, books, TV segments (including Richard Rodriguez's essays for PBS's "News Hour with Jim Lehrer") and films (including the 1997 Oscar-winning documentary "Breathing Lessons"). PNS History
The nonprofit, Pacific News Service was founded in 1969 by Orville Schell (now a noted author, journalist and Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California-Berkeley) and UC-Berkeley historian and sociologist Franz Schurmann (former head of the Center for Chinese Studies and author of numerous books on China and on foreign affairs). Its original purpose was to provide mainstream newspapers with an independent source of expertise and reportage on the U.S. Role in Indochina during the Vietnam War. Each week it produced and syndicated – and continues to syndicate – six to eight newspaper articles to mainstream newspaper subscribers, weeklies and alternative publications, college newspapers and the ethnic press.
Franz Schurmann
Emeritus professor of history and sociology at UC Berkeley. Founded Pacific News Service.
Richard Rodriguez
Award winning PBS NewsHour essays on American life. Richard is an editor at Pacific News Service.
Andrew Lam
Andrew is an Associate Editor at Pacific News Service, a short story writer, and and a regular commentator on NPR.
Walter Truett Anderson
Associate editor, commentator, political scientist who writes widely on technology and global governance.
Rene Ciria-Cruz
Associate editor at PNS and also a longtime editor for Filipinas Magazine.
Orville Schell was born in New York City in 1940, graduated Magna Cum Laude from Harvard University in Far Eastern History, was an exchange student at National Taiwan University in the 1960s, and did graduate work at the University of California, Berkeley, in Chinese History where he earned a Ph.D (Abd). He has worked for the Ford Foundation in Indonesia, covered the war in Indochina as a journalist, and travelled widely in China.
He is also a contributor to such magazines as The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, The Los Angeles Times Magazine, Granta, Wired, Newsweek, Mother Jones, The China Quarterly, and The New York Review of Books.
Schell serves on the boards of Human Rights Watch, the Sundance Documentary
Fund jury, and the Social Science Research Council. He is also a member of the Pacific Council, the Council on Foreign Relations and a regular particpant in the World Economic Forum at Davos.
Schell is currently the Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.
http://orvilleschell.com/portraitWEB.jpg
But you'd still probably want to strap them to a gurney, in case they tossed a fit after the hatch was dogged down.
Does ACLU have a suggestion on how to conduct death penalty painless? I thought giving them a sedative has already been quite humane (well, perhaps giving sleeping pills with strawberry flavor, so the person doesn't have to feel any pain from injection, would be even 'nicer').
Jonathan Schell is brother of Orville Schell, founder of Pacific News Service in 1969
Jonathan Schell, The Nation's peace and disarmament correspondent, decries war as a political tool
Jonathan Schell now teaches at Wesleyan University and the New School and is the Harold Willens Peace Fellow at The Nation Institute.
Mr. Schell was a writer and editor at the New Yorker between 1967 and 1987 and — and Deputy Editor for 1987-88.
We need a disintegrator. Instant, painless... poof!
Actually toss 'em into a smelter, or a modern coal turbine power plant furnace. Flash evaporation. Plus, at least we'd get a half a KWh out of 'em. They keep bitching about energy costs...
The ACLU thugs want it both ways. They would claim a firing squad constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and violates the second amendment.
Hanging would be cruel and unusual, too.
Maybe we should let them chose the method of death.
Only if we can use Florida's Old Sparky.
Gotta probably couch that with, "no, you can't choose old age".
But we have a number of deadly diseases we need cures for. Volunteer ? :)
Im sure they would say the first ammendment give us the right to rape ..Complete assh*les they are. Who the hell payes these idiots to sit around thinking up this stupidity ?
YEEEE-HAAAWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!
Criminals don't have the same rights as citizens. It was a nice try though.
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