Thursday, March 20, 2014
The Compassionate Executioner
If it were an art to overcome heresy with fire, the executioners would be the most learned doctors on earth.
— Martin Luther, To the Christian Nobility of the German States (1520)
At last a touch of concern for the beneficiary has entered the death penalty arena and a timely thing too. Heretofore the discussion and court cases have always centered on the plight of the poor executioner who is unable to find the proper drugs with which to dispatch the condemned. No one seemed to be concerned about the comfort of the person being executed.
The executioner’s problem comes about because of the unavailability of the preferred potions that have been used ever since hanging, firing squads, gassing and electrocution left the scene because they did not seem like civilized ways to rid society of its unwanted. How, where and what drugs the executioner can obtain, however, remain a significant concern as shown by a case in Oklahoma where two executions slated for March have just had to be rescheduled for April.
Because of an unfortunate quirk in Oklahoma law, if the executioner is unable to acquire the drugs needed to conduct an execution, the execution may not take place. Whereas the Oklahoma legislature considered the possibility that lethal injection might be found to be unconstitutional and provided that were that to happen the executioner could use electrocution or hire a firing squad instead, that alternative did not apply if the required drugs were unavailable.
Oklahoma is, needless to say, desperate. Anxious to make sure the death deadlines can be met, in a brief filed with the court, Assistant Attorney General Seth Branham describes “a herculean effort” to get the necessary death dealing drugs, an effort that everyone in Oklahoma (except for the inmates) surely applauds. Up to now its efforts have been unsuccessful. That is because both foreign and domestic drug manufacturers are cutting off supplies of drugs that have been used in executions for many years. To deal with this problem, states are resorting to finding drugs and providers that are not tested and in two recent cases the individuals being executed have shown through their death throe actions that they are experiencing great pain during the execution. When that is revealed to the public it immediately reacts negatively since such conduct by the person being executed suggests that the executioner is not performing the task in a kind and humane way. To make matters worse from a public relations standpoint, one of the favored drugs in conducting human executions is a drug that the American Veterinary Medical Association has decreed cannot be used when euthanizing animals since it is often ineffective in performing its assigned task and is considered inhumane.
Deborah Denno, a law professor at Fordham Law School was quoted in the New York Times as saying: “We’ve never seen so many changes and so many troubles in getting these drugs. The states are more secret than they’ve ever been. And it’s a much riskier process than it’s ever been.”
An article in USA Today entitled “Death penalty spurs Wild West scramble for drugs” describes some of the questionable practices being used by states in their quest for drugs so that executions can proceed in an orderly fashion.
The result of this wild West approach is that those who will receive the drugs no longer have the certainty they had before procurement became a problem, that the drugs would help them die in a comfortable way. It seemed to those on death row that recent executions where the victims clearly suffered great pain violated the provisions of the 8th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that Judge Kermit Bye of the US Court of Appeals for the 8th Circuit said in a recent case: “prohibits the unnecessary and wanton infliction of pain through torture, barbarous methods or methods resulting in a lingering death.” All that is what gives rise to the renewed interest by condemned inmates in the types of execution planned by the state in which they happen to be in residence.
Courts are beginning to showing a willingness to acknowledge the condemned person’s right to know the particulars of the execution in which he or she plays such an important part and a single sentence in a recent U.S. Supreme Court order suggests the time may be approaching when that Court will consider the question. In the Missouri case of Michael A. Taylor a “miscellaneous order” was entered in which the Court declined to consider Mr. Taylor’s appeal from a lower court order permitting his execution to go forward. Accordingly he was executed without knowing the composition of the drugs used to kill him. Three of the Supreme Court’s justices, however, said they would have been open to considering Mr. Taylor’s argument that he was entitled to know what drugs would be administered to him during his execution.
Once the courts decide that the condemned are entitled to know what combination of drugs will be administered to ease their passage into the hereafter we will once again demonstrate to the 140 countries that have abolished the death penalty, that although we remain in the company of the likes of Nigeria and North Korea in permitting capital punishment, we do all we can to make the experience one to which the condemned can look forward being fully informed.
Thursday, March 13, 2014
I Spy
It seems to me what the nine hundred ninety four dupes needed was a new deal.
—A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain
Gracious. That’s all one can say. It is simply a question of whose ox is getting gored or, in the real world, who’s spying on whom. Diane Feinstein (D.Calif) called him a traitor and even said that if he had simply come to the House or Senate Intelligence Committees and presented all his information to the Committee, the Committee could have evaluated it. She said his failure to do that was an enormous disservice to the country. She said he was not simply a whistle blower. “He took an oath-that oath is important. He violated the oath, he violated the law. It’s an act of treason in my view.” She was joined in her condemnation of Edward by John Boehner who said of Snowden: “He’s a traitor. . . . The disclosure of this information . . . . [is] a giant violation of the law. . . . The president outlined last week that there were important national security programs to help keep Americans safe, and give us tools to fight the terrorist threat that we face. The president also outlined that there are appropriate safeguards in place to make sure that there’s no snooping, if you will, on Americans here at home. . . .” That was, of course, said, before Mr. Boehner and Ms. Feinstein learned that the Senate Intelligence Committee was being snooped on by the CIA and the CIA said it was being snooped on the staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
Senator Feinstein had harsh words for what the CIA was doing-the same kind of words used by citizens to describe the activities of the NSA when they learned of its spying on citizens and the likes of Germany’s Angela Merkel and Brazil’s Dilma Rousseff. Senator Feinstein said the CIA may have violated the Constitution and U.S. laws by spying on committee computers being used by staff members to review CIA documents about the programs used by the CIA to interrogate terror suspects. The CIA was also searching internal messages and staffers’ work on other computers. Commenting on the CIA activities Senator Feinstein said: “I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation –of-powers-principles embodied in the U.S. Constitution.” As she explained, the CIA has violated federal law and undermined the constitutional principle of congressional oversight.
Senator Feinstein referred an internal agency investigation of the CIA’s activities to the Justice Department so that it can consider criminal prosecution of the CIA for its activities. She not only wants the activities by the CIA stopped, she wants the CIA to apologize and acknowledge that what it did was wrong. The CIA has neither apologized nor acknowledged its misbehavior and appears to have no intention of doing so. Instead, it told the Council on Foreign Relations that the CIA had done nothing wrong. And that’s not all the CIA did. Not wanting to be outdone by Senator Feinstein, it made a criminal referral to the Justice Department. It wants the Justice Department to determine if committee staff members broke the law by gaining unauthorized access (spying) to CIA computers and taking CIA documents from a secure facility.
Although he was not called on to address the pillow fight between the CIA and the Committee, Judge Richard J. Leon’s words in a December 2013 decision about the NSA spying might well apply to the activities of all the parties involved in this scuffle. He described the NSA spying practices as “almost Orwellian,” saying that the NSA phone snooping violates American’s privacy rights. He said that James Madison would be “aghast” at the NSA’s activities. After the judge announced his decision Senator Bernard Sanders (I.Vt.) chimed in saying: “The NSA is out of control and operating in an unconstitutional manner.” They would probably have said the same things about the CIA and the Senate Intelligence committee had they known of their activities.
Not all Senators thought Senator Feinstein’s criticism of the CIA appropriate. Senator Saxby Chambliss (R.Ga.) said he and Senator Feinstein “have some disagreements as to what the actual facts [about the CIA activities] are.” Senator Richard Burr (R.NC) was critical of Senator Feinstein for discussing the dispute publicly. Like those who thought Mr. Snowden should have kept quiet about what he knew about misbehavior by the NSA, he said: “I personally don’t believe that anything that goes on in the intelligence committee should ever be discussed publicly.” He is apparently of the school that believes that what goes on in government is not the people’s business, especially if the activities being concealed are activities that impact the constitutional rights of citizens.
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Olympic Games and the Poor
The Olympian is a difficult foe to oppose.
— Homer, The Iliad
Now that the Olympics are over and Sochi proved itself such a triumph (and eagerly awaits the Winter Paralympic Games that begin almost exactly one week after Mr. Putin invaded Crimea,) we can begin looking forward to the summer Olympics of 2016 in Rio de Janeiro. They will, in some respects, involve the same kinds of things that the Sochi games involved although their conclusion will not be punctuated by Brazil invading another country since that does not happen to comport with its mind-set. There will, however, be similarities in what the two cities experience and a select group of Sochi residents may want to go Rio de Janeiro to describe for its residents how the whole thing worked out for them and what their impoverished residents can anticipate.
Countries that host Olympic games are always eager to show the world their best sides and in the case of the residents of Sochi that meant a number of people living in towns near Olympic facilities contributed to the redevelopment of Sochi in order to help it become the magnificent venue it was.
The village of Vesyoloye on the outskirts of Sochi was typical of the sorts of communities that contributed to the success of the games. On Akatsiy street, for example, the residents have for years had neither running water nor a sewage system. The communal outhouse that the residents enjoyed using was ordered to be torn down by a judge because authorities said it was an eyesore, being adjacent to the new super highway being built. (The judge ordering its destruction told the residents to get an eco toilet. Some residents told reporters they were using buckets instead.) The $635 million highway that was built to get people in and out of Sochi cut many of Vesyoloye’s residents off from the city center. One resident on that street told a reporter: “Everyone was looking forward to the Olympics. We just never thought they would leave us bang in the middle of a federal highway!” Thousands of people in Sochi were dislocated and promised new homes that three weeks before the beginning of the games had not been provided. Some Sochi residents who had not been displaced had a new neighbor in the form of a dump that was created to contain Olympic construction waste. Construction waste has polluted rivers and streams. Although the affected residents contributed to the success of the Olympics in their modest ways, none of them was given tickets to any of the events. It should not be hard to organize a group to visit Rio in order to tell its citizens what to anticipate. They may be too late.
Slum dwellings in Rio de Janeiro are called favelas. With the prospect of the Olympics, rents in slum areas for favelas that have wonderful views have begun to climb in anticipation of the games although photos do not make it immediately apparent why visitors to the Olympics would want to stay in such places. Reports suggest that if the dwellings themselves are not desirable, the land beneath them is and prices of the favelas are soaring.
In some areas where the government has made efforts to relocate residents so the slums can be redeveloped in preparation for the World Soccer Cup and the Olympic games, residents have resisted. Commenting on events, Christopher Gaffney, a professor at Rio’s Fluminense Federal University said: “These events were supposed to celebrate Brazil’s accomplishments, but the opposite is happening. We’re seeing an insidious pattern of trampling on the rights of the poor and cost overruns that are a nightmare.” Evictions are taking place in slums all over the city. In some places those who refused to move continue to live in the rubble left when their slum dwellings were destroyed. The owner of one slum dwelling that was razed to make way for an express way was told by the government she could accept $2,300 for her house when adjacent residences were selling for $50,000, accept an apartment in a distant housing project or take nothing. The replacement apartment she was given is 35 miles from the center of Rio. Amnesty International says 19,200 people have been moved since 2009. Another advocacy group estimates 100,000 people will eventually be moved to make way for the Olympic facilities. These figures notwithstanding, displaced Rio residents should not feel too bad. For the 2008 Beijing Olympics 1 million people were displaced. For the 1988 Korean summer games 720,000 people were displaced. There is one group of people who should feel bad but don’t. The International Olympic Committee.
The International Olympic Committee selects the sites for the games. That Committee can think of nothing worse than having the summer and winter games take place in the same venue every four years thus depriving Committee members of the pleasure of travelling around the world being sumptuously entertained by countries hoping to host the games.
All of the foregoing notwithstanding, there is one thing rich and poor alike can feel good about. At the conclusion of the Brazilian games, Brazil will not invade any of its neighbors.