Via Sentencing Law and Policy, a legislator in New Hampshire has introduced a bill to restore executions by firing squad.

Burridge’s bill recommends a firing squad of five men, one whose gun carries blanks, to keep it unclear which shooter is responsible for death. During the execution, the prisoner would be hooded and wear a target over his heart. Each shooter would aim for that target.

Burridge said he chose the method primarily for its public-relations value. He said he thought a death by shooting might be more likely to stick in the minds of would-be criminals and deter them from committing crimes using guns. “I call it the enhanced death penalty,” he said. “You’ve got to love the marketing.”

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Wayne Tompkins is scheduled to be executed tonight in Florida. From the Florida Innocence Project(via e-mail):

We believe there are very serious doubts about whether Tompkins is guilty of murder – because the body in the case might not be that of the alleged victim, meaning no murder even took place. Several individuals have signed affidavits saying they have seen the victim alive since the alleged murder, but the Governor has failed to stay the execution.

Yesterday, we sent a letter to Governor Charlie Crist (pdf). Today, we filed a motion to preserve the evidence in the case, signaling our intent to go ahead with DNA testing, even if Tompkins is executed. One day soon, the truth will come out, and perhaps Governor Crist will become the first in US history to execute a man who was proven to be innocent.

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In state death penalty news:

• New Mexico's House Judiciary Committee voted 8-to-5 Friday to recommend passage of a bill that would repeal the state's death penalty. Similar House bills met their deaths in the Senate Judiciary Committee in recent years, perhaps because stories like this one can't resist coupling news of a potential death penalty repeal with the grizzly details of a murder that happened 15 years ago. The reporter found those more newsworthy than the facts that persuaded the Judiciary Committee to favor repeal.

• As TalkLeft noted here, Nebraska is considering a repeal of the death penalty. In the meantime, executions are on hold as legislators decide whether to enact a lethal injection law in light of a state supreme court ruling that death by electrocution is unconstitutional. The compelling policy questions confronting the state legislature were deemed unworthy of consideration by the reporter of this story, who instead led with the angst-ridden concern that a death sentence recently imposed on Roy Ellis might never be carried out.

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A bill to repeal the death penalty in Maryland has for years fallen one vote shy of being recommended to the full Senate. A Washington Post editorial explains why this is the year the full Senate should consider (and pass) the bill.

Even some supporters of the death penalty admit that the evidence presented by the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment was compelling. The commission, chaired by former U.S. attorney general Benjamin Civiletti, concluded that capital punishment has little deterrent effect on murder and that the extended legal proceedings may add to the anguish of the victim's family. The commission also found that capital punishment is applied inconsistently across the state and that prosecutors are more likely to pursue a death sentence if the victim is white.

It's time for an up-or-down vote in the full Senate. Members of the deadlocked committee should give the full Senate a chance to decide the question.

Time Magazine reports on declining death penalty numbers, saying a shift has developed against capital punishment.

Last year saw just 37 executions in the U.S., with only 111 death sentences handed down. Although 36 states and the Federal Government still have death penalty laws on the books, the practice of carrying out executions is limited almost entirely to the South, where all but two of last year's executions took place. (The exceptions were both in Ohio.)

Law Prof Doug Berman of Sentencing Law and Policy isn't as positive about the meaning of the decline:

The last few weeks of January 2009 brought seven executions (five of which were in Texas), the most in any concentrated period since June 2007. In addition, there are two executions scheduled for tomorrow (one in Tennessee and one in Texas). Also, Virginia's legislature recently voted to expand that state's death penalty law.

Death penalty opponents do see a shift. Time notes: [More..]

Bump and Update: The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has granted a reprieve to Larry Swearingen, set for Texecution Tuesday. More here. [Note: I initially wrote it was a 30 day reprieve. It's for an unlimited time.]

Original Post Jan. 24

Texecution set for Tuesday: Four Pathologists Say He's Innocent

Larry Swearingen is scheduled to be executed in Texas on Tuesday for a murder that four pathologists say he could not have committed. He was in jail at the time of the murder for which he was convicted:

As anticipated, Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley announced Thursday that he will work to win the repeal of the state's death penalty during the second half of his term.

[H]is promised introduction of a death-penalty repeal bill will face strong opposition, probably leading to a major political battle. O'Malley said the death penalty is not a deterrent, wastes resources that could be better spent fighting violent crime and leaves the state open to the possibility of executing innocent people. "That risk alone should be enough to repeal it and substitute it with life without parole," he said.

A death penalty repeal bill has also been introduced in Nebraska.

The Caribbean island of St. Kitts has reinstituted the death penalty for violent crimes, hoping to deter a recent increase in murders on the tiny island.

They came for the condemned man on the stroke of midnight. But for Charles Elroy Laplace there was no slap-up last supper of the type served on Death Row in America, nor the company of a reassuring pastor. Instead, he was bound hand and foot and cast on to a grubby mattress in the corner of his fetid cell, then left for eight hours to contemplate his impending fate.

Paralysed and rendered incontinent with fear, Laplace lay there all night, begging the Lord for mercy and pleading for someone to call his mother or his lawyer - anyone who might save him at the last. But his wretched entreaties were drowned out by the singing of his prison guards, who saw fit to celebrate his coming execution with a rum-fuelled 'gallows party' that lasted long into the small hours.

The article goes on to describe the hangman and reasons the island is resuming hangings. [More...]

While some Georgia politicians are unhappy that the state's jurors don't return a verdict of death in every capital trial, the state's legislators remain unwilling to fund an adequate defense in death penalty cases. The result may be tragic for Jamie Weis, who -- despite being charged with a capital crime -- has gone eight months without representation because Georgia doesn't want to pay for his defense.

The two lawyers initially appointed to represent Weis withdrew when they discovered that the state's public defender system didn't have money to pay them. Staff attorneys who were appointed in their stead also withdrew, citing a lack of time and resources to give Weis the adequate defense that is his constitutional right. The initial lawyers were reappointed with the agreement that the Georgia Public Defender Standards Council would sign a contract authorizing their payment. Weis has now filed suit, contending that the contract was never signed and that he therefore has no counsel working on his behalf.

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With the execution of Darold Ray Stenson on the horizon, Dr. Marc Stern resigned his position as the top medical officer employed by the Washington Department of Corrections.

Dr. Marc Stern, who lives in Olympia, said the American Medical Association and Society of Correctional Physicians oppose physician involvement in executions, "and they say physicians should not supervise somebody who is involved in executions."

One of the department's assistant secretaries disingenuously "characterized Stern's objections as more individual than professional."

The American Medical Association says physicians shouldn't take part in "an action which would assist, supervise, or contribute to the ability of another individual to directly cause the death of the condemned."

Following the AMA's ethical guidance sounds professional, doesn't it?

Worth noting:

• Following a nationwide trend, death sentences have been declining in North Carolina over the past ten years. Only one North Carolina defendant was sentenced to death in 2008, the smallest number since the Supreme Court reinstated capital punishment. The jury rejected death in eleven of the state's twelve capital trials.

• An 18-year-old who set fire to a house in Youngstown, killing two women and four children, was sentenced to life without parole after a jury rejected the death penalty.

• The Boston Globe chastises New Hampshire for imposing its first death sentence since 1939.

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If a unanimous verdict is required to convict, it is sensible to think that a unanimous verdict should be required to impose a death sentence. Sensible thought has eluded Georgia's conservative politicians who (as Jeralyn noted here) have declared war on the unanimity requirement because only nine jurors voted to kill Brian Nichols.

Now, just days after the decision, Georgia legislators have begun lining up to introduce bills eliminating the requirement that juries be unanimous for a death sentence. Hard-on-crime lawmakers have long favored easier rules on death sentencing, but the Nichols sentence has given new urgency to their cause.

The argument that some "death qualified" jurors are secretly opposed to the death penalty in all circumstances would be easier to swallow if only one juror dissented from death. When a quarter of the jurors think the case for death hasn't been made, only those overcome by blood lust could believe the defendant should be executed. [more ...]