1. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Deadly Justice, Ch Delays on death row -Exonerations and Innocence -Methods
Announcements:
Catch-up from last time:
Questions before we start?
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

2. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Delays
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

3. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Appeals, not trials
Crime to death sentence
Death sentence to execution
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

4. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
About 10 percent “volunteer”. Note some do it right away, but others only after 20 years of waiting…
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

5. Constitutional questions
Lackey v. Texas (1995): Can they make me wait 15 years, and then execute me? Court: Yes.
Betterman v. Montana (2016): Can they make me sit in jail for 14 months, post-conviction, without telling me my punishment? Court: Yes.
Jones v. Chapell (2014): Can the state of California hold people routinely for 25+ years, then select a random handful for execution? Court: Federal judges have no jurisdiction, since the state of California has not completed its review of the case. (Note the irony – can the state take 45 years? 65 years? 100 years to review the case?)
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

6. Additional value of death, after 40 years of death row?
Judge in Jones v. Chapell (2014): the state has no additional penological interest in execution after such a long delay. Not deterrence. Not retribution. The punishment is already extreme.
Judge also noted that no law that mandated this punishment: 45 years in solitary confinement, followed by a random draw to determine which few get executed, would be constitutional. But that’s the California system.
But this case was never heard on the merits because the state had not completed its review of Mr. Jones’ case…
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

7. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Exonerations
DPIC exoneration list
161 individuals as of January 2018
National Registry of Exonerations
Over 2,100 exonerations since 1989, growing at about 3 per week
Includes non-death cases of course.
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

8. Death row exonerations
Numbers of exonerations per year
How long they wrongly served in prison
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

9. Fantastic book on this topic, from 2008.
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

10. Attention to Innocence transformed the debate
Media Coverage of innocence
Pro- v. anti-Death Penalty Stories
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

11. Methods: Hanging was most common once
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

12. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Modern methods: Hanging, then Electric Chair, Gas Chamber, then Lethal Injection
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

13. Contributions of the Gerry family to US history
Elbridge Gerry (elder): The original Gerrymander
Elbridge Gerry (younger): Chaired the State of New York commission to replace hanging with a more civilized method of execution. The choice: Electrocution
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

14. Westinghouse and Edison
No standard, AC or DC, huge commercial competition
Edison losing the “battle of the currents”
He promotes Westinghouse’s system as the ideal way to kill people.
Hopes this will discredit the rival and associate his system with danger.
Guarantees to lawmakers that it will “kill in the 10 thousandth part of a second”
Who is to argue, and they adopt it.
First electrocution in 1890, terrible botch.
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

15. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Lethal injections
Oklahoma medical examiner, let’s improve on the electric chair
3 drug cocktail
Sedative
Paralytic agent (stop all muscle movement, such as twitching, grimacing)
Stop the heart
Some key questions
If #1 fails, but #2 works, how would we know if #3 caused undue suffering?
What is the point of #2 anyway? Certainly not for the inmate’s benefit.
The Medicalization paradox
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

16. Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018
Post-mortem study of amount of anesthetic in the blood (Figure 10.4, from The Lancet)
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018

17. Back to the firing squad?
We have never gone backwards.
Each generation has declared finding a higher level of civilization compared to previous ones: electrocution, gas chamber, lethal injection.
None has proven immune to botched application
(No one has much practice, after all)
For the Court: Isolated mishaps must be distinguished from systematic torture
Lethal injection:
No doctors, so can a prison guard do it?
No drug imports, so can states get them from just anywhere?
Very hard to regulate a medical procedure if no doctors involved…
Baumgartner, POLI 203, Spring 2018