Fixin' to Execute Steve Staley

As though sane people are short of reasons to decry capital punishment.

Steve Staley may be the new poster boy for state barbarism.   Stanley is on Death Row in Texas for the 1989 murder of a restaurant manager he shot while trying to elude police.

Steve has been mentally disturbed since childhood.  "He has a long history of paranoid schizophrenia and depression. Staley was abused as a child by his mother, who was also mentally ill; when he was 6 or 7 she tried to pound a wooden stake through his chest. His father was an alcoholic. Staley tried to kill himself as a teenager. Doctors who have examined Staley on death row have said that he talks in a robot-like monotone yet has “grandiose and paranoid” delusions, including the beliefs that he invented the first car and marketed a character from Star Trek. He has given himself black eyes and self-inflicted lacerations and has been found spreading feces and covered with urine. Medicated with the anti-psychotic drug Haldol, Staley complained of paralysis and sometimes appeared to be in a catatonic state. He has worn a bald spot on the back of his head from lying on the floor of his cell."

The problem facing the Texas courts right now is a U.S. Supreme Court decision prohibiting execution of the insane.

"The court quoted British judges in the 17^th century worrying about the “miserable spectacle” of “extream (sic) inhumanity and cruelty” presented by executing a “mad man.” It served no retributive purpose, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, to execute a person “who has no comprehension of why he has been singled out.” He also noted “the natural abhorrence civilized societies feel at killing one who has no capacity to come to grips with his own conscience or deity.”

When Staley stopped taking his meds, a Texas judge found him incompetent, unfit for execution, and then overcame that problem by authorizing the state to forcibly medicate the condemned.

"...the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association hold that it is ethically unacceptable for doctors to prescribe drugs to restore competency for the purpose of execution. This should be an easy call for the Texas courts as well. If it’s awful to imagine psychotic prisoners going without their meds, it’s more awful to force shots on them so the state can kill them. If Texas fails to grasp this, other inmates will follow Steven Staley. Mental illness is common on death row. The only reason that the issues raised in Staley’s case haven’t been decided before, defense lawyers tell me, is that humane prosecutors and judges don’t insist on executing people whose sanity is so uncertain."
Staley is scheduled to be executed next week, if Texas authorities can drug him adequately by then so they can then drug him again and kill him.

When Are The Tories Going to Exploit the Williams Case to Revisit Capital Punishment?

Canada's radical Right, a.k.a. the Conservative Party, didn't get where they are today by passing up any opportunity to exploit emotion and, right now, the most emotional thing - thanks hugely to the lurid appetites of Canada's media - is the Russell Williams murder case.

On a strictly emotional level I suspect a lot of us would support the execution of Williams and that's blood I suspect the Tory sharks scent.

So, what do you think?  Will the Wedgies go for it - again?  You know they're aching for a tasty bit of the ol' eye for an eye.

Kyle Unger - Why We Don't Execute Convicted Murderers

There are plenty of ways for an innocent person to wind up convicted of murder. Lazy or dishonest cops, incompetent prosecutors and defence counsel, botched forensics, a bad judge or an even worse jury - it happens and it happens all too often to run around topping people based on the reliability of our judicial system.


Kyle Unger knows what it means to be wrongly convicted of murder. After wasting 14-years in prison for a crime he did not commit, the Winnipeg man has been cleared.

The evidence against Unger in the killing of a young girl at a rock concert included the testimony of a forensics expert who testified that a hair found on the victim's body was Unger's. Guess what? It wasn't. It didn't belong to Unger. In fact the Crown Attorney today admitted there was no trace of Unger on the deceased's body.

Harper and his redneck supporters don't much care about the Ungers who get wrongly caught up in the system. To them, executing innocents is just a cost of doing business in a real, red-meat, law & order nation.

In Canada, Britain's Prime Minister Could Be a Dead Man

British PM Gordon Brown had better keep his temper on his own side of the Atlantic. Over here, we kill men for less. From The Guardian:

The strain shows, say current and former Brown aides: among other things, it has inflamed a temper that has always been the subject of gallows humour among those who work with him.

The prime minister, 58, has hurled pens and even a stapler at aides, according to one; he also says he once saw the leader of Britain's 61 million people shove a laser printer off a desk in a rage.

Another aide was warned to watch out for "flying Nokias" when he joined Brown's team.

Pens and a staper, even cell phones? In Canada this guy would be dead meat. He'd be Tasered straight into the Afterlife or, as it's known at "A" Division headquarters, given "The Full Mountie."

Save Bucks - Abolish Capital Punishment

And that's just what's happening in various parts of the United States. The hard economics of death penalty cases is coming home to roost in cash-strapped states. They're coming to realize it's a losing proposition - for the state. From The New York Times:

When Gov. Martin O’Malley appeared before the Maryland Senate last week, he made an unconventional argument that is becoming increasingly popular in cash-strapped states: abolish the death penalty to cut costs.

Lawmakers in Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska and New Hampshire have made the same argument in recent months as they push bills seeking to repeal the death penalty, and experts say such bills have a good chance of passing in Maryland, Montana and New Mexico.

Capital cases are expensive because the trials tend to take longer, they typically require more lawyers and more costly expert witnesses, and they are far more likely to lead to multiple appeals.
In New Mexico, lawmakers who support the repeal bill have pointed out that despite the added expense, most defendants end up with life sentences anyway.

That has been true in Maryland. A 2008 study by the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan public policy group, found that in the 20 years after the state reinstated the death penalty in 1978, prosecutors sought the death penalty in 162 felony-homicide convictions, securing it in 56 cases, most of which were overturned; the rest of the convictions led to prison sentences.

Since 1978, five people have been executed in Maryland, and five inmates are on death row.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/25/us/25death.html?_r=1&th&emc=th

The paper reports that a lot of states are beginning to lose their appetite for jailing swarms of non-violent offenders too.