Tag: oklahoma
Two stories about capital punishment
May 2, 2014 May 2, 2014 1 Comment
"Study: 1 in 25 death penalty cases likely innocent"
About one in 25 people imprisoned under a death sentence is likely innocent, according to a new statistical study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. And that means it is all but certain that at least several of the 1,320 defendants executed since 1977 were innocent, the study says.
From 1973 to 2004, 1.6 percent of those sentenced to death in the U.S. — 138 prisoners — were exonerated and released because of innocence.
But the great majority of innocent people who are sentenced to death are never identified and freed, says professor Samuel Gross of the University of Michigan Law School, the study's lead author.
The difficulty in identifying innocent inmates stems from the fact that more than 60 percent of prisoners in death penalty cases ultimately are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment. Once that happens, their cases no longer receive the exhaustive reviews that the legal system provides for those on death row.
Death sentences represent less than one-tenth of 1 percent of prison sentences in the U.S., but they account for 12 percent of known exonerations of innocent defendants from 1989 to 2012. One big reason is that far more attention and resources are devoted to reviewing and reconsidering death sentences.
"The high rate of exoneration among death-sentenced defendants appears to be driven by the threat of execution," says the study. "But most death-sentenced defendants are removed from death row and resentenced to life imprisonment, after which the likelihood of exoneration drops sharply." The study estimates that if all defendants sentenced to death remained in that status, "at least 4.1 percent would be exonerated. We conclude that this is a conservative estimate of the proportion of false conviction among death sentences in the United States."
"Oklahoma stops execution after botching drug delivery; inmate dies"
A vein on an Oklahoma inmate "exploded" in the middle of his execution Tuesday, prompting authorities to abruptly halt the process and call off another execution later in the day as they try to figure out what went wrong.
The inmate, Clayton Lockett, died 43 minutes after the first injection was administered — according to reporter Courtney Francisco ofCNN affiliate KFOR who witnessed the ordeal — of an apparent heart attack, Oklahoma Department of Corrections Director Robert Patton said.
That first drug, midazolam, is supposed to render a person unconscious. Seven minutes later, Lockett was still conscious. About 16 minutes in, after his mouth and then his head moved, he seemingly tried to get up and tried to talk, saying "man" aloud, according to the KFOR account.
Other reporters — including Cary Aspinwall of the Tulsa Worldnewspaper — similarly claimed that Lockett was "still alive," having lifted his head while prison officials lowered the blinds at that time so that onlookers couldn't see what was going on.
Dean Sanderford, Lockett's attorney, said that he saw his client's body start "to twitch (and) he mumbled something." Then "the convulsing got worse, it looked like his whole upper body was trying to lift off the gurney."
Admittedly, no one has suggested that Lockett is innocent didn't carry out the truly horrendous crime for which he was convicted. But unless something changes, it's only a matter of time before an innocent person is tortured to death by the state.