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Thread: Arizona Capital Punishment News

  1. #171
    Moderator Bobsicles's Avatar
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    I’d like those judges to spend a few minutes alone with the family of Vicki Lynn Hoskinson and tell them why Atwood shouldn’t be executed
    Thank you for the adventure - Axol

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  2. #172
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Neil View Post
    All that talk Brnovich did only for the executions to get shot down.
    Poser Era.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  3. #173
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    So Texas and Georgia have been using Pentobarbital for years with no problems and Arizona's drugs will expire after 45 days? And that's why they can't schedule executions?

  4. #174
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Arguments for Ramirez and Jones's case before SCOTUS can be heard here. At 10 am today.

    https://www.supremecourt.gov/oral_arguments/live.aspx


    US supreme court to hear case that could have dire consequences for death row inmates

    Arizona will ask highest court to bar two death row inmates from presenting evidence that could prove their innocence

    The US supreme court will hear arguments from two Arizona death row inmates on Wednesday in a case that could have devastating consequences for prisoners attempting to prove their innocence before they are sent to the execution chamber.

    State officials in Arizona are asking the nation’s highest court to bar the two condemned prisoners – one with a strong claim of innocence, the other with a history of intellectual disability and family abuse – from presenting evidence in federal court that could save their lives.

    The Arizona officials argue the prisoners should not be allowed to put forward the evidence because they failed to do so in state court at an earlier stage in their legal proceedings.

    But the prisoners protest they had no chance of seeking redress at state level because the lawyers they were assigned by Arizona were so woefully incompetent at trial that they failed to uncover crucial evidence that could have spared them from death row. After conviction, they were assigned a second set of lawyers who were equally ineffective and who as a result made no challenge to the gross mishandling of their defense at trial.

    Death penalty experts warn that if the country’s highest court sides with Arizona it would erect new hurdles that could impede all convicted prisoners, including death row inmates, from seeking redress in federal court for possible miscarriages of justice. At its most stark, individuals who should have been exonerated or who should never have been put on death row because of their intellectual disabilities would face increased risk of being unjustly executed.

    “An adverse resolution in this case could present crippling obstacles to wrongfully convicted prisoners in proving their innocence and winning their freedom,” said Robert Dunham, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center.

    Almost 3,000 prisoners have been exonerated in the US since 1989 – including 186 innocent people who were condemned to death. Christina Swarns, executive director of the Innocence Project, estimates that between them they spent more than 25,000 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.

    Swarns said that if Arizona prevails, “untold thousands of wrongfully convicted innocent people will be left in the nightmarish situation of having no court to whom they can turn for justice.”

    At its most visceral, the Arizona case, Shinn v Ramirez and Jones, is a matter of life and death. But the hearing is also being seen as profoundly important by close observers of the supreme court as a litmus test of how radical the new court is intending to be.

    The supreme court is in the first full term with its new six to three conservative majority seated. That rightwing composition is the product of Donald Trump having remolded the court by appointing three new justices under highly contentious circumstances.

    “This is a bellwether case for how extreme this supreme court might be,” said Leah Litman, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Michigan law school.

    Last week the court sent jitters across America when it heard arguments in a case that could overturn Roe v Wade, the landmark 1973 ruling that established the constitutional right to an abortion up to the point of fetal viability. Conservative justices indicated that they are contemplating restricting or even abolishing abortion rights.

    Critics have warned that if the new supreme court curtailed abortion it could severely damage the legitimacy of the court by giving the appearance that it is swayed by partisan politics – in the abortion case from extremist Republicans in Mississippi.

    The Arizona death penalty case carries similar dangers for the standing of the court and with it the state of American democracy. Were the conservative justices to rule in Arizona’s favor they would be backing a radical partisan move by Republican state lawmakers.

    In 2012 the supreme court ruled in Martinez v Ryan that prisoners should be allowed to present claims in federal court that they had ineffective lawyers at trial and post-conviction stages of their cases. That precedent has never been questioned by an appeals court or by any justice on the supreme court.

    Now Arizona Republicans are trying to impose a new impediment. Prisoners can present claims that their lawyers were ineffective as Martinez requires, but they can’t produce any evidence to back up those claims.

    “Obviously, presenting a claim with no evidence at all isn’t much of a claim,” Litman said.

    She added: “It is important to understand that the antics in this case are the same antics that are happening elsewhere on the court’s docket this term, asking for extreme aggressive maneuvers that threaten the court’s institutional integrity.”

    Barry Jones, one of the two death row inmates at the centre of Wednesday’s arguments, has always claimed his innocence. He was sentenced to death for the May 1994 killing of his girlfriend’s daughter, aged four, in Tucson, Arizona.

    In 2017, a federal judge ruled that there had been a “rush to judgment” in prosecuting Jones. Prosecutors had relied on junk science, telling the jury that the victim’s injuries could scientifically be shown to have been inflicted a day before her death when she was in the sole care of Jones.

    Jones’s trial lawyer did not challenge that testimony at trial, which in effect amounted to an admission of the defendant’s guilt. But in the federal hearing in 2017 the court was told by a medical expert who had reviewed the forensics that the girl’s injuries “could not possibly have been inflicted on the day prior to her death”.

    The judge ordered that Jones be released or have a new trial. But Arizona is so determined to execute its prisoner that the state has appealed all the way to the supreme court.

    Cary Sandman, one of Jones’s legal team, said that his client had spent “over 25 years on death row despite never having got a fair trial. Arizona is now arguing that Jones must suffer that wrongful conviction without recourse to federal courts.”

    https://www.theguardian.com/world/20...h-penalty-case
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  5. #175
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Jewish community group sues Arizona over gas executions

    The plaintiffs say cyanide gas executions are unconstitutional and bring back horrendous memories of the Holocaust

    By Michael McDaniel
    Courthouse News Service

    PHOENIX (CN) — The Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix is asking a state court to declare executions by cyanide gas — the same gas used to murder people during the Holocaust — unconstitutional.

    In a lawsuit filed Tuesday in Maricopa County Superior Court, the plaintiffs say using cyanide in executions, as the state once did and plans to do again, would be insulting to the Jewish community in Arizona, which includes Holocaust survivors.

    “Approximately 80 Holocaust survivors currently call our state their home, and many of these survivors are horrified at being taxed to implement the same machinery of cruelty that was used to murder their loved ones,” said Tim Eckstein, chairman of the board of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix, in a statement. “It is appalling that Arizona has chosen to use the very same chemical compound that was used by the Nazis in Auschwitz to murder more than one million people.”

    The suit, which names the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation & Reentry, its Director David Shinn and Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich as defendants, also claims cyanide gas poisoning causes egregious pain and suffering.

    The complaint cites the gas executions of Don Harding and Walter LaGrand in the 1990s, which witnesses described as drawn out and excruciating for the prisoners. Harding’s execution took 11 minutes to complete, and LaGrand’s took 18 minutes.

    “This case does not challenge the State’s authority to impose capital punishment in certain cases; rather, Plaintiffs seek to prevent the grievous moral and constitutional injury of taxing Arizonans, including victims of the Holocaust, and effectively forcing them to subsidize and relive unnecessarily the same form of cruelty used in World War II atrocities,” the complaint states.

    Federal courts across the country have previously struck down the use of gas in death row executions, determining it is cruel and unusual punishment under the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments. But Arizona is one of five states authorized to use the gas chamber as a secondary means of execution.

    The complaint also describes the brutality of gas executions during their peak legal periods of the 1970s and 1980s.

    “The witnessed horrors included strenuous convulsions, agonizing gasps, agonized shrieking and thrashing, and one individual in so much pain he repeatedly smashed his head into a metal pole," the complaint states.

    The Arizona Constitution was amended in 1992 to eliminate lethal gas as a method of execution, but Arizona prisoners condemned to death row prior to that have the option to choose between death by lethal injection or lethal gas.

    Of the 115 prisoners on death row, 17 were convicted before 1992, and the state is now seeking warrants to execute two prisoners from that group.

    The Arizona Department of Corrections has already spent thousands of dollars in taxpayer money to pay for the gas, inspect the gas chamber inside a prison in Florence, Arizona, and run tests, the complaint claims, adding that this process must happen every time the state seeks to execute one of the 17 people convicted before 1992.

    "This process must be completed before anyone has even made an election on method, meaning that regardless of whether any of the remaining individuals eligible to elect lethal gas does so, additional Arizona taxpayer funds will be spent to further Defendants’ cyanide gas protocol," the complaint states.

    The plaintiffs are represented by attorneys with DLA Piper and the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona.

    “Under no circumstances should the same method of execution used to murder over one million people, including Jews, during the Holocaust be used in the execution of people on death row,” Jared Keenan, senior staff attorney with the ACLU of Arizona, said in a statement. “Arizona has acknowledged the horrors of cyanide gas as a method of execution and eliminated it in all but a narrow set of cases — it’s time the court eliminates the use of cyanide gas for execution once and for all. Regardless of where people stand on the matter of capital punishment, it’s clear that use of this barbaric practice is cruel and must be abolished.”

    Arizona's execution practices have been under heavy scrutiny since 2014, when it took almost two hours to execute convicted murderer Joseph Wood, who received an experimental cocktail of midazolam and hydromorphone because the preferred drug of lethal injections became unavailable following an export ban by the European Union in 2011.

    Spokespeople for the Arizona Attorney General's office and the Arizona Department of Corrections were not immediately available for comment.

    https://www.courthousenews.com/jewis...as-executions/
    "I realize this may sound harsh, but as a father and former lawman, I really don't care if it's by lethal injection, by the electric chair, firing squad, hanging, the guillotine or being fed to the lions."
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    “There are lots of extremely smug and self-satisfied people in what would be deemed lower down in society, who also deserve to be pulled up. In a proper free society, you should be allowed to make jokes about absolutely anything.”
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  6. #176
    Senior Member CnCP Addict maybeacomedian's Avatar
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    February 28, 2022

    Arizona Moving Towards Resumption of Death Penalty

    By Peter D'Abrosca
    The Tennessee Star

    After a process that took more than a year, Arizona’s Attorney General Mark Brnovich (R) is one step closer to resuming the use of the death penalty in the state.

    Friday reports said Brnovich requested execution warrants for convicted killer Clarence Dixon and Frank Atwood, but it’s a process that has been long in the making.

    Last year, Brnovich explained that process in a January 2021 press release.

    “The [Attorney General’s Office] is asking the Arizona Supreme Court to establish firm briefing schedules before filing the execution warrants to ensure the Arizona Department of Corrections, Rehabilitation and Reentry (ADCRR) can comply with its testing and disclosure obligations,” he said at the time. “This will guarantee strict compliance with the current lethal-injection protocol and a related settlement.”

    The Supreme Court agreed to the briefing terms, and now that they have been met, Brnovich is filing his warrants. Per those warrants, the inmates will be allowed to select death by lethal injection or cyanide gas.

    “Justice has been a long time coming in some of the most heinous crimes committed in our state,” Brnovich said. “It is our solemn duty to fulfill these court-ordered sentences on behalf of the victims, their loved ones, and our communities.”

    Arizona has not executed an inmate since 2014.

    Dixon and Atwood were convicted of heinous crimes.

    The former strangled, raped and killed an Arizona State University student in 1978. The latter murdered an 8-year-old girl in 1984.

    The American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona (ACLUAZ) did not immediately return a comment request from the Arizona Sun Times, but it has already taken some action in the case.

    The group is representing the Jewish Community Relations Council of Greater Phoenix, which objects to the potential use of cyanide gas as a means of death.

    “Approximately 80 Holocaust survivors currently call our state their home and many of these survivors are horrified at being taxed to implement the same machinery of cruelty that was used to murder their loved ones,” Tim Eckstein, chairman of the board of that group reportedly said.

    “It is appalling that Arizona has chosen to use the very same chemical compound that was used by the Nazis in Auschwitz to murder more than one million people.”

    “Regardless of where people stand on the matter of capital punishment, it’s clear that use of this barbaric practice is cruel and must be abolished,” ACLUAZ senior staff attorney Jared Keenan said.

    Currently, there are more than 100 death row inmates in Arizona, and according to Brnovich’s office, 20 of them have exhausted all of their potential appeals.

    https://tennesseestar.com/2022/02/28...death-penalty/
    https://archive.is/a0y51

  7. #177
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    Arizona violates journalists' rights to witness executions, attorney says

    By Jimmy Jenkins
    The Arizona Republic

    The Arizona Republic is demanding the Arizona Department of Corrections follow their own protocols and give the press its legally mandated access to serve as witnesses to executions.

    The Department of Corrections violated the law and its own policies by denying The Republic access to the execution of Clarence Dixon, and for failing to allow other witnesses who were granted access to see the entirety of the execution, attorney David Bodney said in a letter sent Monday to Arizona Department of Corrections Director David Shinn and Gov. Doug Ducey.

    Bodney represents Phoenix Newspapers, Inc., which publishes The Republic and azcentral.com.

    While the state’s guidelines allow Corrections director David Shinn to invite up to five members of the media, only three reporters were given access to the May 11 execution of Clarence Dixon, the first execution in Arizona since 2014.

    Shinn is “allowed by Arizona law to select ‘at least twelve reputable citizens ... to be present at the execution [of an inmate],’” Bodney wrote, citing Department protocols. The protocols also state: “In addition ... up to five members of the media may be present for executions as members of the press pool.”

    The procedures define those five official media witnesses as “representatives, from

    media-print, television/cable, radio, and the local market where the crime occurred.” Reporters selected to be a part of the press pool are asked to relay what they saw to other media in a press briefing conducted at the prison after the execution.

    “It merits note that The Arizona Republic, which is printed in Maricopa County and is the largest daily-circulation newspaper in Arizona, has been denied access to be present at the State’s most recent executions – one, administered this month, the other scheduled for next – as a member of the press pool,” Bodney wrote.

    Nationally, courts have ruled media witnesses are central to the legal protocols governments must follow to conduct executions.

    In Dixon’s case, media witnesses described how the execution team struggled to insert IVs into Dixon’s body, eventually resorting to making an incision into his femoral vein.

    They took notes on what Dixon said, and provided important details on the length of time it took to put him to death.

    They also reported that, in violation of protocols, witnesses found it hard to hear or see all aspects of the execution.

    Paul Davenport, a veteran reporter with the Associated Press who witnessed Dixon's execution and has witnessed previous executions, said the audio feed was not crystal clear. “I had a hard time making out his voice,” he said of Dixon.

    There were screens on two sides of the witness room, Davenport said, but the execution was hard to follow on those closed-circuit monitors.

    “You had the same image of the - looking down on him shot - as it were,” he said. “And then in the middle, you had one screen that has a tight close up of the sets of injection drugs. And that's all you saw. You occasionally saw some hands - blue gloved hands reached down and manipulated one or two of them at a time. I had a hard time actually discerning what was happening and in what order.”

    Several media witnesses reported that Dixon asked the execution team if they were doctors and they appeared to answer him, however, witnesses could not hear the replies. Dixon seemed to indicate they had responded in the affirmative because he then asked them if they were violating their Hippocratic oath.

    Dixon’s attorneys reported it took 40 minutes and an incision in Dixon’s groin to get the IVs into his body, during which time he grimaced in pain and struggled against the restraints. It is unclear whether this was due to a lack of medical experience of the execution team, but the public would have known if reporters could clearly hear what was said in the room.

    Additionally, Dixon’s attorney, federal assistant public defender Amanda Bass, stated in a declaration that her first view of Dixon was after he had been restrained to a gurney in the execution chamber.

    “I entered the viewing room at 9:27 AM,” Bass wrote. “At 9:32 AM the curtains to the execution chamber opened. Clarence was strapped to the gurney.”

    But the right of press access “extends from the moment the condemned person enters the execution chamber,” Bodney wrote, citing a 2016 ruling from U.S. District Chief Judge G. Murray Snow.

    “In fact, the U.S. District Court entered a permanent injunction against ADOC requiring that it ‘allow execution witnesses to view the entirety of the execution, including each administration of drugs,’” Bodney wrote. “Based on the evidence at hand, PNI believes ADOC violated the Permanent Injunction, legal precedent on point and its own policies during the course of the Dixon execution.”

    The Republic was one of several news outlets that were denied requests to serve as media witnesses for the Dixon execution. Reporters from The Phoenix New Times and KOLD in Tucson confirmed to The Republic their requests to serve as media pool witnesses were denied.

    “This is about more than just access for the Republic,” said Republic Executive Editor Greg Burton. “This is about having as many members of the press as possible conduct oversight on behalf of the public of the ultimate act of any government; taking someone's life. There is no undoing a mistake."

    After the Department of Corrections denied the Republic's request just days before the Dixon execution, Burton said he contacted the Governor’s office to express concern about the process.

    “I reached out to Gov. Ducey to let him know that his agency is playing games with a process that could not be more grave – and legally prescribed," Burton said. "His chief of staff, Daniel Ruiz, just scoffed."

    Burton said Ruiz told him if The Republic did not print “false information,” the news organization might be treated differently.

    In the demand letter, The Republic calls upon the Department of Corrections “to ensure that the forthcoming execution of Mr. [Frank] Atwood comports with the clear mandates outlined by the courts, ADOC’s own policies and the rights secured by the Federal and Arizona Constitutions.”

    In the letter, Bodney asks the Department to grant The Republic access to Atwood’s execution, scheduled for June 8, as a member of the media pool “to erase the appearance of impropriety and enhance the public’s right to observe the entirety of the capital punishment process in Arizona.”

    Anticipating the Department of Corrections would again limit full media access, a Republic reporter asked Atwood’s attorney to attend the execution as a witness for his client. But department protocols are ambiguous as to whether witnesses for the prisoner receive the same access as media pool witnesses.

    “The Department’s refusal to permit a journalist from Arizona’s largest-circulation newspaper to witness the execution as a media representative raises serious concerns,” Bodney wrote. “It is imperative that a full complement of five media witnesses be permitted to attend all executions, and that a reporter for The Republic be among them so the public can have full confidence in the State’s administration of justice.”

    https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...ns/9900645002/
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

  8. #178
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    "Up to five" doesn't mean they have to have five. And Jenkins is attending Atwood's as a "colleague." But yeah, sure, fair and impartial witnesses.
    Don't ask questions, just consume product and then get excited for next products.

    "They will hurt you. They will hurt your grandma, these people. The root cause of this is there's no discipline in the homes, they don't go to school, you know, they live off the government, no personal accountability, and they just beat people up for no reason, and it's disgusting." - Former Hamilton County Prosecutor Joe Deters

  9. #179
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Neil's Avatar
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    So is this state going to jam through any other executions this year or are they going to do a 3 year process thing like Missouri and Oklahoma did? No reason Brnovich can’t jam at least 5 more for the year.
    Last edited by Neil; 06-11-2022 at 10:40 AM.

  10. #180
    Senior Member CnCP Legend Mike's Avatar
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    AZ is having elections this year and it's highly likely that the Democrats will win meaning they probably won't ever have executions again after this year. So it's all about whether or not Brnovich is going to go hard anti crime or not.
    "There is a point in the history of a society when it becomes so pathologically soft and tender that among other things it sides even with those who harm it, criminals, and does this quite seriously and honestly. Punishing somehow seems unfair to it, and it is certain that imagining ‘punishment’ and ‘being supposed to punish’ hurts it, arouses fear in it." Friedrich Nietzsche

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