St. Louis CofCC Blog

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Supreme Court upholds Kentucky’s use of lethal injections

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court upheld Kentucky’s use of lethal injection executions Wednesday.

The justices, by a 7-2 vote, turned back a constitutional challenge to the procedures in place in Kentucky, which uses three drugs to sedate, paralyze and kill inmates.

“We … agree that petitioners have not carried their burden of showing that the risk of pain from maladministration of a concededly humane lethal injection protocol, and the failure to adopt untried and untested alternatives, constitute cruel and unusual punishment,” Chief Justice John Roberts said in an opinion that garnered only three votes. Four other justices, however, agreed with the outcome.

Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and David Souter dissented.

This probably means that Missouri’s execution method is square with the Supreme Court’s interpretation du jour of the Constutition. Then again, what business it is of the Federal judiciary that condemned murderers might feel a tiny fraction of the pain while being executed that they put their victims and victims’ loved ones through is beyond me.

Baltimore Sun:

Texas has wanted to put Jose Medellin to death for a long time. It looks like the state is going to get its way.

The U.S. Supreme Court Tuesday sided with Texas against the Bush administration in a highly charged dispute over whether international treaty obligations can affect state criminal proceedings.

In a 6-3 decision written by Chief Justice John Roberts, the court rejected the administration’s claim that Texas should abide by a ruling from a world court that Medellin merited a new trial. Medellin is a Mexican native who has lived most of his life in the United States.

In 1993, Medellin and a gang of boys in Houston attacked, raped and murdered two teenage girls walking home. He was arrested, found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death.

After Medellin was convicted, Mexico brought suit in the International Court of Justice, the judicial body of the United Nations, charging that the U.S. had violated the Vienna Convention. That treaty requires that foreign nationals arrested in a signatory country be allowed to meet with a consular official from their home country. It’s a tool treasured by diplomats, American and otherwise, worldwide.

(snip)

Texas state courts have found repeatedly that under state law, Medellin has no right to challenge his conviction and sentence, even if the Vienna treaty was violated. There is no dispute that Medellin wasn’t notified of his treaty rights when he was arrested, but the state has argued he failed to raise that objection at trial, forfeiting the claim.

It’s tempting to think that this ruling means that SCOTUS loves the 10th Amendment and/or is suspicious of the reach of foreign treaties and their deleterious effects on the Bill of Rights.  But I’m not reading any of this into their decision.  All I think it means is that SCOTUS doesn’t think that the circumstances of the Medellin trial violate the terms of the Vienna Convention, and therefore President Bush had no authority to “mess with Texas.”  It’s not that they’re saying that Texas’s states’ rights supersede the Vienna Convention.

I do find it interesting that SCOTUS ignores internationalist reasoning here, but the same SCOTUS used the concept of world opinion to eliminate the death penalty for people under the age of 18 several years back.

Angus Reid Global Monitor (H/T John Lott):

Half of Britons Would Reinstate Death Penalty

Half of adults in Britain would be in favour of restoring the death penalty for cases of murder, according to a poll by YouGov. 50 per cent of respondents share this opinion, while 40 per cent disagree.

This blogmeister has predicted in the past that as each European country becomes increasingly non-white, they will one by one bring back capital punishment.  It looks like that prediction is slowly coming true.

Just as I have used that phrase lately as a metaphor for Missouri executions (even though Missouri uses lethal injection), the Nebraska Supreme Court has declared that the state’s electric chair as a means of execution is unconstitutional.

AFP:

WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Nebraska Supreme Court ruled Friday that the electric chair, the only method used for executions in the state, violated human dignity and was therefore unconstitutional.

Confirming the death penalty imposed on Raymond Mata in 2000 for the murder of a three-year-old boy, the court said, however, that he should not be electrocuted.

“Electrocution’s proven history of burning and charring bodies is inconsistent with both the concepts of evolving standards of decency and the dignity of man,” the court said in its unanimous decision.

And I suppose that murdering a 3-year old boy is consistent with the evolving standards of decency and the dignity of man.

The secret plot hatched by the CofCC and the CIA (inasmuch as they’re really different entities) early in 2005 to assassinate the noted social justice advocate and community activist Kevin “Rock Head” Johnson is that much closer to fruition as of today.  The secret CIA operative, disguised as a trial-level state judge in the St. Louis County circuit, sentenced Mr. Johnson to “capital punishment,” (let’s call it that, wink wink), with frequent waterboarding in the interim.

Now, the only remaining order of business for our cabal is to sweep those nagging constitutional concerns about the death penalty out of the way.

(Note to sane people:  Don’t take this entire story literally.  Note to anarchists:  Take this entire story literally.)

St. Louis Post-Dispatch:

Inmates seek IDs of executioners

Lawyers for five death row inmates are pressing Missouri to provide the names of members of its execution team after a Post-Dispatch investigation revealed that one was a convicted stalker.

In papers filed last week in federal court in Kansas City, the lawyers said the executioner’s criminal record, detailed in a front-page story Jan. 13, raises questions about his “temperament and suitability” to help with executions.

The newspaper reported that [*****], a licensed practical nurse then on probation, worked on Missouri executions and was permitted to join a federal team that executed Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh in Indiana in 2001.

[*****], originally charged with felonies for allegedly stalking and damaging the property of a man who had a relationship with his estranged wife, pleaded no contest to misdemeanors and received a suspended imposition of sentence. That cleared his record once he served two years on probation.

(snip)

Those circumstances raise questions about the state’s screening procedures and desire to have qualified executioners, claimed lawyers for convicted killers Reginald Clemons, Richard Clay, Jeffrey Ferguson, Roderick Nunley and Michael Taylor.

Of course those on death row want to know the name of the doctor that will send them to their just rewards.  That way, they can pass that name on to their friends, cohorts, cronies, and fellow gang members, and they can find the doctor and then assassinate him or her.

But don’t look for him actually to be executed anytime soon — the U.S. Supreme Court is reviewing Missouri’s execution method, to see if the particular way the state sends certain convicted murderers to their just reward is “cruel and unusual punishment” for the murderers. If SCOTUS rules against Missouri, then the state will probably have to spend years coming up with a new method which will square with the Federal Judiciary.

And that’s not counting all the years and decades of appeals his case will go through, on top of his being Mumia-ized by the far-left. Remember, the real Mumia was also convicted, and is still on death row, for knocking off a white cop.

Yes, I’m talking to you, Damon Davis.

So it’s time for my familiar score.

AP:

Polling has shown that the public increasingly believes that life in prison without parole will keep the worst offenders off the streets. A recent Associated Presss-Ipsos poll that asked what method of punishment people prefer for murderers found only a slight preference for the death penalty over life in prison - 52 percent to 46 percent.

Until they break out of prison, and kill someone else.  If they’re not confined in a Pelican Bay or a Potosi, then they’re in gen-pop and an incessant threat to guards, inmates in prison for a less serious conviction, and (shudder the thought) wrongly convicted and incarcerated people.

At the same time, there have been several studies, challenged by the anti-death penalty camp, that have shown a deterrent effect in the use of capital punishment. Also, public support for executions remains high. More than two-thirds of those polled favor the death penalty for murderers when the question does not include other possible punishments.

And those studies demonstrate that somewhere between 3 and 18 lives are saved with each execution.

Of the many things that President Bush was known for until recently, counting his days as Texas Governor, two were steadfast support for capital punishment, and opposition to anti-American international institutions and their attemped meddling into American anti-terror and other policies.

But there’s something about Mexico and its people toward which President Bush has a blind side.

Fox News:

President Bush, who presided over 152 executions as governor of Texas, wants to halt the state’s execution of a Mexican national for the brutal killing of two teenage girls.

The case of Jose Ernesto Medellin has become a confusing test of presidential power that the U.S. Supreme Court, which hears the case this week, ultimately will sort out.

The president wants to enforce a decision by the International Court of Justice that found the convictions of Medellin and 50 other Mexican-born prisoners violated their rights to legal help as outlined in the 1963 Vienna Convention.

That is the same court Bush has since said he plans to ignore if it makes similar decisions affecting state criminal laws.

(snip)

Medellin was born in Mexico, but spent much of his childhood in the United States. He was 18 in June 1993, when he and other members of the Black and Whites gang in Houston encountered two teenage girls on a railroad trestle.

The girls were gang-raped and strangled. Their bodies were found four days later.

(snip)

“The president does not agree with the ICJ’s interpretation of the Vienna Convention,” the administration said in arguments filed with the court. This time, though, the U.S. agreed to abide by the international court’s decision because ignoring it would harm American interests abroad, the government said.

Therefore, the price of “American interests abroad,” (read: cheap labor from Mexico) is the increased risk of American domestic murder victims at the hands of Mexican nationals, due to the obvious impossibility of the death penalty for such murderers, and the proven deterrent effects of the death penalty.

Related: U.S.eless Border Patrol quislings use 1963 Vienna Convention as an excuse to report Minuteman Civil Defense Corps activities to Mexican government (May 10, 2006)

Cybercast News Service:

New Jersey is moving rapidly towards outlawing capital punishment in the face of academic studies challenging the view that the death penalty is not an effective deterrent to murder and despite opinion polls showing that two-thirds of Americans see capital punishment as morally acceptable.

Although New Jersey has a death penalty statute dating back to 1982, it has not executed anyone since 1963. It is now looking to abolish the death penalty altogether.

Fear not, New Jersey. That toy gun ban will save you.

Some of the newest studies about the deterrent effects of the death penalty concludes that as many as 18 lives are saved with each execution.