From 'public burnings to hangings to electric chairs': We're still looking for 'humane way to kill'
This post was originally published on this site
Three attorneys wrote in an NBC News op-ed that if ever there were an inclination to sentence a person to death, it would be for Nikolas Cruz. He is the man who pleaded guilty to killing 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Feb. 14, 2018, in Parkland, Florida. Though paused this week, prosecutors and defense attorneys are in the process of seating 12 jurors and eight alternates in Cruz’s trial. He faces 34 charges, including murder and attempted murder, ABC-affiliated WPBF reported. “In many ways, this case is enough to test any death penalty opponent’s resolve: Cruz is responsible for the tragic, heart-wrenching deaths of children and heroic educators,” the attorneys wrote.
The legal experts continued, though, that we must as a society still make the decision to do away with the inhumane practice of state-sanctioned executions. “We cannot continue to prop up this failed system,” Parisa Dehghani-Tafti, Dan Satterberg, and Miriam Aroni Krinsky wrote. “No matter how horrific or heart-wrenching the case in front of us, we have to remember that as long as the death penalty exists, it will continue to amplify the worst parts of our justice system.”
RELATED STORY: Four years after the Parkland murders, America still loves its guns more than its children
Dehghani-Tafti is the commonwealth’s attorney for Arlington County and the City of Falls Church in Virginia. Satterberg is King County, Washington’s prosecuting attorney, and Krinsky is a former federal prosecutor and executive director of Fair and Just Prosecution, a project of The Tides Center nonprofit.
Now, I’m a mother who sends her children to school every day and prays they will make it home safely. In all honesty, I wouldn’t bat an eye if Cruz was handed down the death penalty, but a society that embraces capital punishment doesn’t only put the lives of people like Cruz on the line.
RELATED STORY: There is video of Nikolas Cruz aiming gun, while wearing a ‘Make America Great Again’ hat
It does the same for Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, Troy Davis, Carlos DeLuna, Jimmy Dennis, and Cameron Todd Willingham—all men who were sentenced to death despite evidence of their innocence, the Montana Innocence Project reported last year.
At the time, the Montana Legislature was considering a House bill that would have given the state greater power to choose drugs to perform lethal injections, but the bill died. “There are many reasons to oppose capital punishment, including the morality of its use, the relative costs associated with it, and whether it has a deterrent effect,” the Montana Innocence Project wrote. “Our focus is on the inherent risk of executing innocent people and the need to reform the system to prevent all wrongful convictions—including those in capital cases.”
There have been more than 165 innocent people sentenced to death and later exonerated since 1973, the Montana Innocence Project reported.
Davis, 42, was executed on Sept. 21, 2011. His conviction rested solely on the testimony of nine eyewitnesses, and seven of them later recanted in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, saying police pressured them to accuse Davis of shooting and killing a Savannah police officer trying to break up a fight in Georgia.
Carlos DeLuna, 27, was executed on Dec. 7, 1989 in the death of a Corpus Christi convenience store worker who was stabbed calling 911 in Texas. DeLuna maintained that he witnessed the attack and ran because he was convicted of a sexual assault and didn’t want any trouble. Police found him hiding and never looked into the man DeLuna said committed the murder. “Six years after DeLuna’s execution, James Leibman, a law professor at Columbia University, conducted one of the most thorough reviews of a death penalty case in U.S. history that revealed mounting evidence of DeLuna’s innocence,” the Montana Innocence Project reported.
Willingham, 36, was executed on Feb. 17, 2004, in the deaths of his 1-year-old twins and 2-year-old daughter in Corsicana, Texas. They died of smoke inhalation in a home fire from which Willingham fought so desperately to rescue them that firefighters told The New Yorker they had to handcuff him for his own safety.
Still, fire investigators determined a liquid accelerant under the children’s beds and down the hall toward the front door meant the fire amounted to arson, and prosecutors used Iron Maiden and Led Zeppelin posters in the home to assign a motive—Willingham’s alleged interest in “satanic-type activities,” the Montana Innocence Project reported. Fire scientist Craig Beyler told The New Yorker that the investigation violated “not only the standards of today but even of the time period.”
Dennis was 22 years old when he was convicted and sentenced to death in the shooting of a 17-year-old girl after a rumor that it was “Jimmy from the Abbotsford projects” connected him to the crime in Philadelphia, the Montana Innocence Project reported. Although Dennis produced a solid alibi—he had waved at a neighbor on a bus across town at the time of the murder—his conviction was ultimately overturned due to three Brady violations. He spent 25 years in prison.
Aguirre-Jarquin, a Honduran immigrant and restaurant worker, was sentenced to death after a neighbor told police she had a “gut feeling” he stabbed her mother and grandmother to death. According to the National Registry of Exonerations, the neighbor, Samantha Williams, admitted to killing her mother and grandmother, and Aguirre-Jarquin was released after being wrongfully imprisoned for 14 years.
And that kind of wrongful imprisonment isn’t as rare as you might think.
“For every nine people who have been executed since 1976, at least one condemned person has been exonerated,” Dehghani-Tafti, Satterberg, and Krinsky wrote.
The attorneys advocated that the death penalty is more likely to be invoked against Black defendants. The “single most important factor in determining whether someone will receive a death sentence is not the crime they are accused of but the jurisdiction where the crime took place.”
Still, our government continues to go about the pursuit of “looking for a humane way to kill”—an endeavor that Dehghani-Tafti, Satterberg, and Krinsky wrote has taken us “from torturous methods like public burnings to hangings to electric chairs.”
The attorneys wrote:
”After the state of Oklahoma killed John Grant last October, it announced that his execution had been carried out ‘without complication.’ The autopsy results, however, painted a different picture: In the nearly 15 minutes it took Grant to die, his lungs filled with fluid, which can create a sensation not unlike drowning, as he choked on his own vomit while struggling to breathe.
That is the fate we risk subjecting innocent people to when we continue to allow state-sanctioned executions.
Contribute to organizing and advocacy to end capital punishment