Florida Electric Chair Execution Protocol
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Read Our Full Report, Death in Florida, Now
USA DEATH IN FLORIDA GOVERNOR REMOVES PROSECUTOR FOR NOT SEEKING DEATH SENTENCES; FIRST EXECUTION IN 18 MONTHS LOOMS Amnesty International Publications First published on 21 August 2017 by Amnesty International Publications International Secretariat Peter Benenson House 1 Easton Street London WC1X 0DW United Kingdom www.amnesty.org Copyright Amnesty International Publications 2017 Index: AMR 51/6736/2017 Original Language: English Printed by Amnesty International, International Secretariat, United Kingdom All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publishers. Amnesty International is a global movement of 3 million people in more than 150 countries and territories, who campaign on human rights. Our vision is for every person to enjoy all the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international human rights instruments. We research, campaign, advocate and mobilize to end abuses of human rights. Amnesty International is independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion. Our work is largely financed by contributions from our membership and donations Table of Contents Summary ..................................................................................................................... 1 ‘Bold, positive change’ not allowed ................................................................................ -
Death by Electrocution Or Lethal Injection
DATA & INFORMATION RELEVANT TO S 200 – DEATH BY ELECTROCUTION OR LETHAL INJECTION S 200 proposes to make electrocution the only method for carrying out an execution in South Carolina if the director of the Department of Corrections (SCDC) certifies lethal injection is not “available” at the time a condemned inmate must select an execution method. Under current law, when an execution date is set for a condemned inmate, the inmate has a statutory right to elect between lethal injection and electrocution as the method of execution. If he waives his right to make an election (and was sentenced after the introduction of lethal injection), the default method of execution is lethal injection. S 200 would remove the inmates’ right of election if the director of SCDC certifies lethal injection is not available. See S.C. Code § 24-3-530. CONCERNS ABOUT S 200 LANGUAGE The bill does not define the term “available,” leaving it unclear what, if any, efforts SCDC must undertake to attempt to make lethal injection available as an execution method. SOUTH CAROLINA DEATH PENALTY INFORMATION 1 • Death Row: 39 men currently on death row • Executions: • 43 executions carried out since the death penalty’s reinstatement in 1977 (36 by lethal injection; 7 by electrocution). • Historically, from 1865–1972, South Carolina carried out 859 executions. • Last lethal injection execution carried out 5/6/2011 (Jeffrey Motts) • Last electrocution execution carried out 6/20/2008 (James Earl Reed, elected electrocution) • All executions are now carried out at the Capital Punishment Facility located at Broad River Correctional Institution. 1 Justice 360 death penalty tracking data. -
UNITED STATES of AMERICA the Execution of Mentally Ill Offenders
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA The execution of mentally ill offenders I cannot believe that capital punishment is a solution – to abolish murder by murdering, an endless chain of murdering. When I heard that my daughter’s murderer was not to be executed, my first reaction was immense relief from an additional torment: the usual catastrophe, breeding more catastrophe, was to be stopped – it might be possible to turn the bad into good. I felt with this man, the victim of a terrible sickness, of a demon over which he had no control, might even help to establish the reasons that caused his insanity and to find a cure for it... Mother of 19-year-old murder victim, California, November 1960(1) Today, at 6pm, the State of Florida is scheduled to kill my brother, Thomas Provenzano, despite clear evidence that he is mentally ill.... I have to wonder: Where is the justice in killing a sick human being? Sister of death row inmate, June 2000(2) I’ve got one thing to say, get your Warden off this gurney and shut up. I am from the island of Barbados. I am the Warden of this unit. People are seeing you do this. Final statement of Monty Delk, mentally ill man executed in Texas on 28 February 2002 Overview: A gap in the ‘evolving standards of decency’ The underlying rationale for prohibiting executions of the mentally retarded is just as compelling for prohibiting executions of the seriously mentally ill, namely evolving standards of decency. Indiana Supreme Court Justice, September 2002(3) On 30 May 2002, a jury in Maryland sentenced Francis Zito to death. -
JACKIE BLACK: LAST MEAL August 7, 2020–January 31, 2021
JACKIE BLACK: LAST MEAL August 7, 2020–January 31, 2021 All works: Jackie Black (American, born 1958) Last Meal (series), 2001–2003 Archival pigment on paper 12 x 12 inches Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, N.Y., Museum purchase with funds provided by the Bessemer Trust, 2016.33(a-x) 1. Thomas Andy Barefoot Executed: October 30, 1984 Education: Not listed Occupation: Oil field roughneck Last Statement: ”I hope that one day we can look back on the evil that we’re doing right now like the witches we burned at the stake. I want everybody to know that I hold nothing against them. I forgive them all. I hope everybody I’ve done anything to will forgive me. I’ve been praying all day for (the victim’s) wife to drive the bitterness from her heart because that bitterness that’s in her heart will send her to Hell just as surely as any other sin. I’m sorry for everything I’ve ever done to anybody. I hope they’ll forgive me. .” 2. Charles Frances Rumbaugh Executed: September 11, 1985 No background information given Last Statement: “. About all I can say is goodbye, and for all the rest of you, although you don’t forgive me for my transgressions, I forgive yours against me. I am ready to begin my journey. .” 3. Charles William Bass Executed: March 12, 1986 No background information given Last Statement: “I deserve this. Tell everyone I said goodbye.” 4. Jeffrey Allen Barney Executed: April 16, 1986 No background information given Last Statement: “. .I am sorry for what I’ve done. -
Execution Ritual : Media Representations of Execution and the Social Construction of Public Opinion Regarding the Death Penalty
University of Louisville ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository Electronic Theses and Dissertations 5-2011 Execution ritual : media representations of execution and the social construction of public opinion regarding the death penalty. Emilie Dyer 1987- University of Louisville Follow this and additional works at: https://ir.library.louisville.edu/etd Recommended Citation Dyer, Emilie 1987-, "Execution ritual : media representations of execution and the social construction of public opinion regarding the death penalty." (2011). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. Paper 388. https://doi.org/10.18297/etd/388 This Master's Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ThinkIR: The University of Louisville's Institutional Repository. This title appears here courtesy of the author, who has retained all other copyrights. For more information, please contact [email protected]. EXECUTION RITUAL: MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF EXECUTION AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PUBLIC OPINION REGARDING THE DEATH PENALTY By Emilie Dyer B.A., University of Louisville, 2009 A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of the University of Louisville in Partial Fullfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Department of Sociology University of Louisville Louisville, Kentucky May, 2011 -------------------------------------------------------------- EXECUTION RITUAL : MEDIA REPRESENTATIONS OF EXECUTION AND THE SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF PUBLIC OPINION REGARDING THE DEATH PENALTY By Emilie Brook Dyer B.A., University of Louisville, 2009 A Thesis Approved on April 11, 2011 by the following Thesis Committee: Thesis Director (Dr. -
Last State to Use Death Penalty
Last State To Use Death Penalty HarryIsolable remains and eastwardly feastful and Bear Hispanic. never jollifies Zestful considering and post-obit when Esau Murdock disembowel face-lift her his adscripts colt. Fallen orchestrates Thurston orframe-up incages very out-of-hand. conceptually while History whose Capital Punishment in California Capital Punishment. Many prominent organizations and restore capital punishment quietly amending its protocol was permitted execution because that capital punishment from accepted his bicycle. Garrett argues, why now? But said last meal for death penalty today have access to uses a class. Arrangements will promptly comply with state. Capital Punishment The end of the recent penalty. Barr said in several of violent criminals most cases to state use death penalty, it take so much discretion of state currently administered equitably to death sentence for. Conviction and use? Florida state death penalty states. Not be executed by staff and are added or depraved manner designed to anchors on their last state to death penalty? Rescuers evacuate residents from their flooded homes in Bekasi on Feb. Supplementary Information in Federal Register documents. Statistical Brief Presents statistics on persons under sentence of death four year-end 2016. Federal executions have been exceedingly rare until recent decades. And that settle that rare are its more relate to convince a focus that mitigating factors justify a picture other hand death. The Department would then either distinct to hope its convenient system known an execution by that manner more than lethal injection or pay box the use over State however local facilities and gamble to beat the execution. -
A Systematic Examination of the Rituals and Rights of the Last Meal
Mercer University School of Law Mercer Law School Digital Commons Faculty Publications Faculty 2014 Cold Comfort Food: A Systematic Examination of the Rituals and Rights of the Last Meal Sarah Gerwig-Moore Mercer University School of Law, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.mercer.edu/fac_pubs Part of the Criminal Law Commons, and the Criminal Procedure Commons Recommended Citation Sarah L. Gerwig-Moore, et al., Cold Comfort Food: A Systematic Examination of the Rituals and Rights of the Last Meal, 2 Brit. J. Am. Legal Stud. 411 (2014). This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Faculty at Mercer Law School Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Faculty Publications by an authorized administrator of Mercer Law School Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. COLD (COMFORT?) FOOD: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF LAST MEAL RITUALS IN THE UNITED STATES SARAH L. GERWIG-MOORE1 Merceer University School of Law ANDREW DAVIES2 State University of New York at Albany SABRINA ATKINS3 Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz P. C ABSTRACT Last meals are a resilient ritual accompanying executions in the United States. Yet states vary considerably in the ways they administer last meals. This paper ex- plores the recent decision in Texas to abolish the tradition altogether. It seeks to understand, through consultation of historical and contemporary sources, what the ritual signifies. We then go on to analyze execution procedures in all 35 of the states that allowed executions in 2010, and show that last meal allowances are paradoxically at their most expansive in states traditionally associated with high rates of capital punishment (Texas now being the exception to that rule.) We con- clude with a discussion of the implications of last meal policies, their connections to state cultures, and the role that the last meal ritual continues to play in contem- porary execution procedures. -
Death Row U.S.A
DEATH ROW U.S.A. Fall 2020 A quarterly report by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Deborah Fins Consultant to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc. Death Row U.S.A. Fall 2020 (As of October 1, 2020) TOTAL NUMBER OF DEATH ROW INMATES KNOWN TO LDF: 2553 (2553 – 180* - 877M = 1496 enforceable sentences) Race of Defendant: White 1,076 (42.15%) Black 1,062 (41.60%) Latino/Latina 343 (13.44%) Native American 24 (0.94%) Asian 47 (1.84%) Unknown at this issue 1 (0.04%) Gender: Male 2,502 (98.00%) Female 51 (2.00%) JURISDICTIONS WITH CURRENT DEATH PENALTY STATUTES: 30 Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, CaliforniaM, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Oklahoma, OregonM, PennsylvaniaM, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Wyoming, U.S. Government, U.S. Military. M States where a moratorium prohibiting execution has been imposed by the Governor. JURISDICTIONS WITHOUT DEATH PENALTY STATUTES: 23 Alaska, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire [see note below], New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Dakota, Rhode Island, Vermont, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin. [NOTE: New Hampshire repealed the death penalty prospectively. The man already sentenced remains under sentence of death.] * Designates the number of people in non-moratorium states who are not under active death sentence because of court reversal but whose sentence may be reimposed. M Designates the number of people in states where a gubernatorial moratorium on execution has been imposed. -
Sounding the Last Mile: Music and Capital Punishment in the United States Since 1976
SOUNDING THE LAST MILE: MUSIC AND CAPITAL PUNISHMENT IN THE UNITED STATES SINCE 1976 BY MICHAEL SILETTI DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Musicology in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Professor Jeffrey Magee, Chair and Director of Research Professor Gayle Magee Professor Donna A. Buchanan Associate Professor Christina Bashford ABSTRACT Since the United States Supreme Court reaffirmed the legality of the death penalty in 1976, capital punishment has drastically waxed and waned in both implementation and popularity throughout much of the country. While studying opinion polls, quantitative data, and legislation can help make sense of this phenomenon, careful attention to the death penalty’s embeddedness in cultural, creative, and expressive discourses is needed to more fully understand its unique position in American history and social life. The first known scholarly study to do so, this dissertation examines how music and sound have responded to and helped shape shifting public attitudes toward capital punishment during this time. From a public square in Chicago to a prison in Georgia, many people have used their ears to understand, administer, and debate both actual and fictitious scenarios pertaining to the use of capital punishment in the United States. Across historical case studies, detailed analyses of depictions of the death penalty in popular music and in film, and acoustemological research centered on recordings of actual executions, this dissertation has two principal objectives. First, it aims to uncover what music and sound can teach us about the past, present, and future of the death penalty. -
The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst
The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst By Robert Blecker, Palgrave MacMillan, N.Y., 314 pages, $28 hardcover. Jeffrey Kirchmeier , New York Law Journal May 12, 2014 When Oklahoma recently botched the lethal injection of a condemned man, death penalty opponents decried the execution as inhumane. While many death penalty advocates also criticized the procedural mistakes, some people argued that the man's horrible crime justified his agony. Throughout history, humans have debated how much suffering governments should inflict on criminals, and in his new book, "The Death of Punishment: Searching for Justice Among the Worst of the Worst," New York Law School Professor Robert Blecker explores the role of retribution in the criminal justice system. While arguing that our system should be more grounded in retributive theories, he concludes that the United States both under-punishes some crimes and over-punishes others. In "The Death of Punishment," Blecker critiques a system that focuses on housing criminals as a way of punishing and preventing crime. He reasons that society gives too little weight to retributive goals of sentencing, arguing that our anger at horrible crimes justifies more severe punishments. As an advocate for the death penalty, he asserts that egregious murderers should suffer a painful, but quick, death. He prefers the firing squad to lethal injection because the former looks like punishment, not a medical procedure. Further, he complains that prisons house people in too much comfort when prisons should be punitive institutions of suffering where inmates are constantly reminded of their victims in an unpleasant environment with tasteless food. -
The Chair, the Needle, and the Damage Done: What the Electric Chair and the Rebirth of the Method-Of-Execution Challenge Could M
Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy Volume 15 Article 5 Issue 1 Fall 2005 The hC air, the Needle, and the Damage Done: What the Electric Chair and the Rebirth of the Method-of-Execution Challenge Could Mean for the Future of the Eighth Amendment Timothy S. Kearns Follow this and additional works at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cjlpp Part of the Law Commons Recommended Citation Kearns, Timothy S. (2005) "The hC air, the Needle, and the Damage Done: What the Electric Chair and the Rebirth of the Method-of- Execution Challenge Could Mean for the Future of the Eighth Amendment," Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy: Vol. 15: Iss. 1, Article 5. Available at: http://scholarship.law.cornell.edu/cjlpp/vol15/iss1/5 This Note is brought to you for free and open access by the Journals at Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy by an authorized administrator of Scholarship@Cornell Law: A Digital Repository. For more information, please contact [email protected]. THE CHAIR, THE NEEDLE, AND THE DAMAGE DONE: WHAT THE ELECTRIC CHAIR AND THE REBIRTH OF THE METHOD-OF-EXECUTION CHALLENGE COULD MEAN FOR THE FUTURE OF THE EIGHTH AMENDMENT Timothy S. Kearnst INTRODUCTION ............................................. 197 I. THE ELECTROCUTION CASES ....................... 201 A. THE KEMMLER DECISION ............................ 201 B. THE KEMMLER EXECUTION ........................... 202 C. FROM IN RE KMMLER to "Evolving Standards" ..... 204 II. THE LOWER COURTS ................................ 206 A. THE CIRCUIT COURTS ................................. 206 B. THE STATE COURTS .................................. 211 C. NEBRASKA - THE LAST HOLDOUT .................. -
Content Analysis of Prisoners' Last Words, Innocence Claims And
DEAD MEN TALKING: CONTENT ANA LYSIS OF PRISONERS’ LAST WORDS, INNOCENCE CLAIMS, AND NEWS COVERAGE FROM TEXAS’ DEATH ROW Dan F. Malone, B.J. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2006 APPROVED: Jacqueline Lambiase, Major Professor James Mueller, Minor Professor Richard Wells, Committee Member Mitchell Land, Director of the Mayborn Graduate Institute of Journalism Susan Zavoina, Chair of the Department of Journalism Sandra L. Terrell, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Malone, Dan F. Dead Men Talking: Content Analysis of Prisoners’ Last Words, Innocence Claims and News Coverage from Texas’ Death Row. Master of Arts (Journalism), August 2006, 91 pp., 5 tables, references, 64 titles. Condemned prisoners in Texas and most other states are given an opportunity to make a final statement in the last moments before death. An anecdotal review by the author of this study over the last 15 years indicates that condemned prisoners use the opportunity for a variety of purposes. They ask forgiveness, explain themselves, lash out at accusers, rail at the system, read poems, say goodbyes to friends and family, praise God, curse fate – and assert their innocence with their last breaths. The final words also are typically heard by a select group of witnesses, which may include a prisoner’s family and friends, victim’s relatives, and one or more journalists. What the public knows about a particular condemned person’s statement largely depends on what the journalists who witness the executions chose to include in their accounts of executions, the accuracy of their notes, and the completeness of the statements that are recorded on departments of correction websites or records.