Death Penalty/ Capital Punishment

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Here we go again...

Judge: Ohio Lethal Injection Unconstitutional
June 11, 2008 - Judge: Ohio Must Change Lethal Injection Drugs; Ohio judge says state's lethal injection process unconstitutional because drugs can cause pain

Ohio's method of putting prisoners to death is unconstitutional because two of three drugs it uses for lethal injection can cause "an agonizing and painful death," a county judge ruled Tuesday. Ohio must stop using its three-drug combination and instead use a single, anesthetic drug to execute its condemned prisoners, because the current lethal injection process doesn't provide the quick and painless death required by Ohio law, Lorain County Common Pleas Judge James Burge said. Burge ruled in favor of Ruben Rivera and Ronald McCloud, who are awaiting trial in separate murders cases and could receive death sentences if convicted.

Jeffrey Gamso, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represented the two men, predicted death row inmates will "breathe a bit of a sigh of relief because they would rather, if they are going to be killed, they would rather not be tortured to death." State officials were reviewing the decision and had not determined if they would appeal to the Ohio Supreme Court, said Jim Gravelle, a spokesman for the state attorney general. In April, the U.S. Supreme Court turned back a constitutional challenge to the lethal injection procedure in Kentucky, which uses the same three drugs as Ohio. The high court ruled that Kentucky's procedure didn't constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

Ohio's lethal injection procedure is similar to Kentucky's, but not identical. Burge's ruling also specifically took into account Ohio law, which requires the death penalty to be painless. In the Ohio case, two anesthesiologists testified that one drug — sodium thiopental — would be enough to kill and that the other two drugs increase the risk of suffering. Gamso had argued the state could reduce that risk if it used only sodium thiopental and eliminated the other two drugs — pancuronium bromide, which causes paralysis, and potassium chloride, which stops the heart.

More ABC News: Judge: Ohio Lethal Injection Unconstitutional

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Granny says, "Dat's right - he done got enough free meals an' free health an' dental care...

Bush OKs execution of Army death row prisoner
28 July `08 WASHINGTON - President Bush on Monday approved the execution of an Army private, the first time in over a half-century that a president has affirmed a death sentence for a member of the U.S. military.

With his signature from the Oval Office, Bush said yes to the military's request to execute Ronald A. Gray, the White House confirmed. Gray had had been convicted in connection with a spree of four murders and eight rapes in the Fayetteville, N.C., area over eight months in the late 1980s while stationed at Fort Bragg.

"While approving a sentence of death for a member of our armed services is a serious and difficult decision for a commander in chief, the president believes the facts of this case leave no doubt that the sentence is just and warranted," White House press secretary Dana Perino said. In the military courts, "Private Gray was convicted of committing brutal crimes, including two murders, an attempted murder and three rapes. The victims included a civilian and two members of the Army. ... The president's thoughts and prayers are with the victims of these heinous crimes and their families and all others affected."

Unlike in the civilian courts, a member of the U.S. armed forces cannot be executed until the president approves the death sentence. Gray has been on death row at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., since April 1988. Members of the U.S. military have been executed throughout history, but just 10 have been executed by presidential approval since 1951 when the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military's modern-day legal system, was enacted into law.

President Kennedy was the last president to stare down this life-or-death decision. On Feb. 12, 1962, Kennedy commuted the death sentence of Jimmie Henderson, a Navy seaman, to confinement for life. President Eisenhower was the last president to approve a military execution. In 1957, he approved the execution of John Bennett, an Army private convicted of raping and attempting to kill an 11-year-old Austrian girl. He was hanged in 1961. The death penalty was outlawed between 1972 and 1984, when President Reagan reinstated it.

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Even Mexicans agree he deserved to die...

Crime-weary Mexico barely focuses on US execution
6 Aug.`08 MEXICO CITY - Mexicans struggling with increasingly gruesome crimes at home devoted the least attention in recent memory to the execution of one of their citizens in Texas.

With Mexico riveted on its own kidnap and killing of a 14-year-old boy, the normally anti-death penalty country expressed far less outrage at the death on Tuesday of Jose Medellin, a Mexican national convicted in the 1993 rape and murder of two Texas girls. Some Mexicans on Wednesday even called for the death penalty at home. "There is no reason for outrage. The man was a rapist," said lawyer Gustavo Sanchez, 40, as he got his shoes shined on a Mexico City street. "If we had the death penalty here, there wouldn't be so many crimes."

His sentiments echoed Emilio Gamboa, the congressional leader of Mexico's former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, who called for capital punishment earlier this week. In contrast, the 1997 execution of Mexican Irineo Tristan Montoya for robbery and murder sparked angry demonstrations in Mexico. His body was given a hero's welcome.

But the domestic kidnapping case dominated almost all of the daily front pages Wednesday, while Medellin's execution merited small mentions lower down, if at all. Fernando Marti, the son of a prominent businessman, was snatched on a Mexico City street in June and found dead last week, even though his family paid the ransom his captors demanded. Several policemen have been detained for questioning in the death. Prosecutors believe they may have supplied kidnappers with information about the victim.

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See above post...

No Help for Mexico's Kidnapping Surge
Friday, Aug. 08, 2008 - Mexico's leftist opposition may denounce the administration of President Felipe Calderón as a government of the rich, but the rich are not so sure.

In fact, they're rapidly losing confidence in the state's ability to ensure their physical safety. And the reasons for their skepticism were made clear in the recent kidnapping and murder of a 14-year-old and the arraignment of two police officers in the case. A week ago, the decomposed body of Fernando Mart�*, son of the Mexican businessman Alejandro Mart�*, who last year sold his chain of fitness clubs for $562 million, was found inside the trunk of a parked car in Mexico City. Near the body was a note, which read, "For not paying, yours truly La Familia." The boy had been asphyxiated more than a month earlier, having been kidnapped some 53 days previously when the armored vehicle in which he was being driven was stopped at what appeared to be a checkpoint of the AFI, Mexico's Federal Agency of Investigations. The kidnappers wore AFI uniforms and insignia, according to information revealed to police by a bodyguard who survived to tell the tale. The body of the driver had been sent to the family soon after the snatch to demonstrate the seriousness of the kidnappers.

But the note left with Fernando Mart�*'s body lied: His family had paid a ransom of more than $2 million. And after the money was handed over, they heard nothing, so they went to the offices of the attorney general and the secretary of public security, as well as to President Calderón. Heads rolled: the deputy attorney general in charge of investigating organized crime was reassigned, while the attorney general and the secretary of public security had a very public fight during a Security Cabinet meeting, each blaming the other for the deteriorating security situation in the country. According to the newspaper Reforma, last year there were some 438 kidnappings in Mexico. But the secretary for public security has revealed that this year's figures so far show an 80% increase. And those are only reported kidnappings — Mexico's Human Rights Commission believes that fewer than one in three kidnappings are ever reported to the authorities, because so many Mexicans have little confidence in a law-enforcement system riddled with criminal elements.

The AFI is the Mexican federal agency tasked with investigating kidnappings, but since so many of its members have been implicated in criminal acts, victims have little confidence in its ability to protect them. Fernando Mart�*, after all, was taken at what appeared to be an AFI checkpoint. Amid the public outrage generated by the case, the local authorities in Mexico City suspended all law-enforcement checkpoints in the city. Two of the three suspects arraigned in the case were active-duty policemen, one of them reportedly a senior figure in the force.

More No Help for Mexico's Kidnapping Surge - TIME

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Texas 7 member asks for execution
Sunday, Aug. 10, 2008 — Michael Rodriguez remembers the exhilaration of newfound freedom when he hid in the back of a stolen truck as he and six of his buddy convicts staged one of Texas' most notorious prison breaks.

Then he recalls seeing his photo on national TV and grasping the reality that their Hollywood-style plan to rob a Nevada casino had gone terribly awry. He and his fellow fugitives were being hunted everywhere as the killers of a police officer, Aubrey Hawkins, at a store they robbed outside Dallas. This week, Rodriguez is set to become the first of the six surviving members of the infamous "Texas 7" — all of them now on death row — to go to the death chamber. "I'm glad we got caught, so no one else would get hurt," Rodriguez said, discussing with a reporter for the first time his involvement in the crime spree eight years ago.

"It was so thrilling that we actually got away with it," he said of the December 2000 escape from a maximum security prison. "But after Mr. Hawkins got killed, and I saw (ABC's) Peter Jennings on the TV news with our pictures, I thought: 'Oh my God, Oh my God. Am I in trouble!'" After some six weeks of evading an intense manhunt, the fugitives were captured in Colorado. One of the seven killed himself as authorities closed in on him. "I'm glad it ended when it did. It would have been a mess."

Rodriguez, 45, said he welcomes this week's execution, set for Thursday. "I have a lot of people here telling me how unfair the system is," he told The Associated Press in what he said would be his first and last media interview. "At some point in our lives, you have to have some sort of accountability. I can't see how people in my situation deny that."

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He gets his wish...

"Texas 7" Fugitive Executed
Aug. 14, 2008 - Michael Rodriguez Was Member Of Infamous Gang Of Escapees Convicted Of Killing Cop

A member of the infamous "Texas 7" gang of escaped fugitives was executed Thursday for killing a Dallas-area police officer during their weeks on the run. Michael Rodriguez, who had dropped all appeals and volunteered for lethal injection, apologized profusely to the officer's widow and his own former sister-in-law before the lethal injection. He had been serving a life sentence for killing his wife at the time of the 2000 escape.

"My punishment is nothing compared to the pain and suffering I've brought you," Rodriguez said. "I'm not strong enough to ask for forgiveness. I ask the Lord to forgive. I've done horrible things that brought sorrow and pain to these wonderful people," he said, looking directly at the women. "I'm sorry, so sorry," he said. As the drugs took effect, Rodriguez, 45, was praying in a whisper. "I'm ready to go, Lord," he said. Seven minutes later, at 6:20 p.m. CDT, he was pronounced dead. Outside the prison, several dozen police officers stood at attention while the execution was carried out, their hands clasped in front of them.

Rodriguez, the first of the six surviving "Texas 7" band to be put to death, pushed to have his punishment carried out for more than two years. "Let's do the right thing - for once," he explained in a recent interview with The Associated Press. "My parents raised me to be accountable." A federal judge held competency hearings to ensure Rodriguez could make such a decision. After the judge approved, the execution was stalled while the U.S. Supreme Court considered challenges that lethal injection was unconstitutionally cruel. After the justices earlier this year ruled the method was not improper, Rodriguez's execution date was set.

More "Texas 7" Fugitive Executed, Michael Rodriguez Was Member Of Infamous Gang Of Escapees Convicted Of Killing Cop - CBS News

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China Official Gets Death Sentence
Friday, Aug. 15, 2008 — A former land use official in Shanghai has been sentenced to death as an investigation into bribe-taking in return for real estate approvals winds down in China's biggest city, reports said Friday.

A Shanghai court ordered the death sentence Thursday after finding Yin Guoguan, former deputy director of the city's Housing, Land and Resources Administration Bureau, guilty of taking bribes among a "host of crimes," said the official Xinhua News Agency and other reports. However, the court ordered the actual execution be "suspended" for two years, the reports said. Such sentences in China are usually commuted to life imprisonment.

Yin and his former subordinates were among dozens of officials and business people implicated in a scandal involving unauthorized use of city pension funds as loans for real estate and other deals. Yin and his wife, Chen Wei, who was sentenced to seven years, were convicted of taking bribes worth about $5 million in 2000-2004, Xinhua said. It said Yin also failed to account for the sources of assets for more than $600 million.

China's business capital has seen a number of top officials and business leaders punished recently in corruption scandals, including the sentencing in April of the city's former Communist Party chief, Chen Liangyu, to 18 years in prison for his role in a pension fund scandal.

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