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Thread: Mississippi Capital Punishment News

  1. #11
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    Mississippi among nation's leaders with 6 executions in 2012

    Just four states carried out more than three-fourths of the executions in the United States this year, while another 23 states have not put an inmate to death in 10 years, an anti-capital punishment group reports.

    The Death Penalty Information Center says in its annual report that Texas led the nation, as it does every year, with 15 executions. Arizona, Mississippi and Oklahoma had 6 each. Together, the four states accounted for 33 of the 43 executions in the United States in 2012.

    The report also says that a handful of states were responsible for nearly two-thirds of death sentences imposed in 2012.

    Both executions and new death sentences are far below their peaks since executions resumed in 1977 following a halt imposed by the Supreme Court. Texas' 492 executions since 1977 are the most, by far. No more executions are scheduled before the end of the year, the group says.

    "By every count, the death penalty is declining and becoming less relevant. It's not turned to even in states that have been strong proponents of the death penalty. I'd even include Texas, which is sentencing many fewer people to death," said Richard Dieter, the center's executive director and author of the report.

    Dieter singled out Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South Carolina and Virginia, none of which carried out an execution this year. And among those states, the only new death sentences were two in Georgia and one in Louisiana.

    The exoneration of people wrongly convicted, the availability of prison terms of life without parole and the cost of capital trials and the appeals process all are factors in the decline, Dieter said.

    The 43 executions equal the total in 2011 and were roughly half as many as in 2000. Ninety-eight prisoners were put to death in 1998, the busiest year for U.S. death chambers since 1977.

    Only nine states in all performed lethal-injection executions. Delaware, Florida, Idaho, Ohio and South Dakota were the others.

    The steady, reduced pace of executions was similar to the persistent decline in new death sentences imposed in 2012.

    Seventy-eight people convicted of murder have been sentenced to death so far, with another two such sentences possible, according to the report.

    Again, just four states accounted for nearly two-thirds of death sentences nationwide. Florida added 21 inmates to death row, California had 15 death sentences, Texas had 9 and Alabama, 7.

    California hasn't executed anyone in nearly seven years because of problems with its old death chamber, a shortage of one of the execution drugs and a broad challenge to executions. California's death row of more than 720 inmates is the largest in the nation. As of April, 3,170 people were on death rows across the United States, the report said.

    Last month, California voters narrowly rejected an effort to abolish the death penalty.

    In April, Connecticut became the fifth state in five years, and 17th overall, to abolish the death penalty for future crimes, although it did not change the status of 11 people who were previously sentenced to death.

    http://blog.gulflive.com/mississippi...ions_lead.html
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  2. #12
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    Miss. Set to Add Terrorism to Death Penalty Law

    Mississippi is set to add terrorism to the list of crimes that could lead to the death penalty, if a victim is killed.

    "The governor intends to sign this public safety measure," Gov. Phil Bryant's spokesman, Mick Bullock, told The Associated Press.

    Mississippi prosecutors already can pursue the death penalty if a victim is killed while certain other felonies are committed — crimes such as rape or armed robbery. The new law will add terrorism as one of the other, aggravating crimes.

    Senate Bill 2223, which will become law July 1, defines terrorism as an act committed to influence government by intimidation, coercion, mass destruction or assassination, or to intimidate or coerce civilians.

    It specifies that such intimidation or coercion would not include "peaceful picketing, boycotts or other nonviolent action."

    The bill's sponsor Sen. Chris McDaniel, R-Ellisville, said the definition of terrorism in the state law will mirror the definition in federal law.

    "Lord forbid, if there were a federal prosecution and a severe enough penalty were not imposed, we'd probably want to bring our own case," McDaniel said Monday in a phone interview from his law office.

    McDaniel said he has tried to get this change enacted into law for several years. He said he considers terrorism "a very real threat."

    Matt Steffey, a constitutional law professor at Mississippi College School of Law, said Tuesday that he doesn't foresee many instances for a state law to be used.

    "Significant acts of terrorism are typically prosecuted as federal offenses," Steffey said.

    Steffey also said the state law could be challenged on grounds of being too vague and "may be applied in a way that is not sufficiently predictable."

    Mississippi's history includes the June 1963 assassination of state NAACP leader Medgar Evers in Jackson and the June 1964 slayings of civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, James Chaney and Andrew Goodman in Neshoba County. Could acts such as those be considered "terrorism" under the new law?

    Steffey said the law could not apply retroactively in old civil rights-era slayings. However, Steffey said if he were writing a law that could cover a renewal of Ku Klux Klan-style killings in the future, "I'd want to make sure it covers the notable instances of terrorism in Mississippi's history in a way that is certain to be enforceable."

    McDaniel said he'd have no problem with prosecutors using the updated law to pursue the death penalty if there are new cases of racially motivated killings that could be considered a form of terrorism.

    "Terrorism, no matter its intent, is still terrorism and should not be condoned in a civilized society," McDaniel said.

    The House and Senate both passed the final version of the bill April 3. The House vote was 113-1, and the Senate vote was 52-0.

    http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news...h-penalty-law/
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  3. #13
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Analysis: Mississippi officials unclear when next execution might be

    By Jack Elliott, Jr.
    The Commercial Appeal

    JACKSON, Miss. - Mississippi hasn’t had an execution in two years, and state Atty. Gen. Jim Hood says he can’t predict when another might occur.

    No Mississippi death row appeals are presently pending before the U.S. Supreme Court, he said.

    “We usually make predictions on timing based on cases pending before that court,” Hood told The Associated Press last week.

    “There is no way to really know an exact time line on any of these type cases,” he said. “They are all making their way through the system at various paces. We have some nearing the end of their normal track of appeals, but there is just no way to know when we might have a case that would warrant the filing of a motion to set an execution date.”

    The U.S. Supreme Court often is the last stop for inmates seeking a last-minute reprieve from execution. They rarely succeed, a function of the need for five votes on the nine-justice court and the reluctance of appellate judges to disturb lower court rulings unless they are demonstrably wrong.

    The most recent execution in Mississippi was June 20, 2012. Gary Carl Simmons Jr., a former grocery store butcher, was executed for dismembering a man during a 1996 attack in which he also raped the man’s female friend.

    Before that, Jan Michael Brawner was executed on June 12, 2012, for fatally shooting his 3-year-old daughter, his ex-wife and her parents in a crime in which authorities say he also stole his slain mother-in-law’s wedding ring and used it to propose to his girlfriend.

    The Mississippi Supreme Court blocked executions in 2013 and 2014.

    It appears Mississippi is headed for another execution hiatus, but one that may not last as long as in the 1990s.

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1990 in a Mississippi death penalty case that described a capital crime to juries as “especially heinous, atrocious or cruel” without further definition was unconstitutionally vague. The ruling resulted in nearly two dozen Mississippi death sentences being overturned.

    For the rest of the 1990s, no executions took place in the state. The July 2002 execution of Tracy Allen Hansen was Mississippi’s first since 1989. Hansen was executed for gunning down a policeman in 1987.

    From 1955 to 1964, Mississippi executed 31 men. Another four were put to death in the 1980s. Since 2002, including Hansen, 17 executions have taken place.

    Mississippi had 60 inmates on death row as of Friday.

    In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down existing death penalty laws across the country but did not declare capital punishment unconstitutional. Four years later, the justices approved several rewritten state laws, and executions soon resumed.

    Since then, 1,385 inmates have been executed in 34 states through August. More than a third of those were in Texas alone, and in recent years, only a handful of other states have carried out executions on a somewhat regular basis, among them Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Missouri, Ohio and Oklahoma.

    The number of death penalty prosecutions has been dropping, in large part because of the availability of lifetime prison sentences without parole.

    Mississippi’s longest-serving inmates still have appeals moving through state and federal courts, as Hood noted.

    Richard Gerald Jordan, 68, has been on death row the longest — 37 years calculated from his date of conviction, according to Department of Corrections’ records. Jordan was convicted of capital murder committed in the course of a kidnapping.

    James Billiot, 53, has been on death row 31 years. He was convicted of using a sledgehammer to kill his mother, stepfather and 14-year-old stepsister.

    Roger Thorson, 56, has been on death row 25 years. He was sentenced to die for killing a former girlfriend on the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

    http://www.commercialappeal.com/news...ht-be_74995702
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  4. #14
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    Prosecutors' wish list seeks to broaden death penalty

    Mississippi prosecutors are asking the Legislature to broaden the death penalty to include mass shootings and terrorist acts.

    "We're trying to make the killing of two or more persons in a single instance capital murder so that the death penalty may be used," District Attorney Ricky Smith of Vicksburg told The Vicksburg Post (http://bit.ly/14pfVyH ).

    The Mississippi Prosecutors Association's proposal is a response to mass shootings across the county, specifically acts like the July 20, 2012, attack on a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado.

    "Right now in Mississippi, that would not be a death penalty eligible case," said Smith, a past president of the prosecutors' group.

    Current capital murder statutes cover the deaths of a peace officer, firefighter or county, municipal, state of other officials. It can also include murder purported by an inmate serving life in prison, a death caused by a bomb, or any death related to the commission of rape, burglary, kidnapping, arson, robbery, sexual battery, child molestation or child abuse.

    The death penalty is also legal under Mississippi law for treason or hijacking of an aircraft.

    Smith said prosecutors also want to rework some parts of the criminal justice overhaul that went into effect last July by making felony shoplifting easier to prosecute and updating legal definitions.

    Under the law, shoplifting is only a felony if an offender has stolen more than $500 in merchandise on three or more occasions.

    "As long as the perpetrator steals less than $500 every time, it can never be a felony," Smith said.

    The association is proposing to make any third offense shoplifting a felony, he said.

    The Legislature convenes Tuesday in Jackson.

    http://www.sunherald.com/2015/01/06/...#storylink=cpy
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  5. #15
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    It is passing strange that a Deep South state such as Mississippi has never applied the death penalty to murders of multiple victims. I wonder what's taken them so long.

  6. #16
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    State Asks Judge to Keep Source of Execution Drugs Secret

    Lawyers for Mississippi's prison system asked a judge Monday to declare that the name of any pharmacy that supplies a crucial execution drug is a secret that must not be revealed publicly.

    But those seeking that information say such secrecy violates the state's public records law. They demand the Department of Corrections release the information.

    "If we're entitled to it under the clear terms of the Public Records Act, then we should get these documents," said Jim Craig, a lawyer for the Roderick and Solange MacArthur Justice Center. That legal group filed a records request in November seeking information about Mississippi's execution drugs and death penalty procedures.

    Both sides made their case Monday before Hinds County Chancery Judge Denise Owens, who says she will rule soon on the issue.

    Special Assistant Attorney General Paul Barnes says those suing are trying to halt executions in Mississippi by using public pressure to cut the supply of pentobarbital, a barbiturate used to render prisoners unconscious before they're injected with a paralytic agent and a drug that stops their heart.

    "The supply of pentobarbital has dried up and it has dried up because of the efforts of death penalty opponents," Barnes said.

    He argued that under state law, Owens can declare a record to confidential, privileged or exempt. Craig said such an interpretation "eviscerates" the public records act.

    The argument comes as Attorney General Jim Hood is pressing state lawmakers to approve a bill cloaking many aspects of Mississippi executions in secrecy. House Bill 1305 would do much more than just conceal the name of the pharmacy. It would make the names of the executioner and anyone "assisting in the execution in any capacity" exempt from public disclosure. It would also bar the release of names of witnesses without their consent. The proposal says names of drug suppliers and others couldn't even be released in lawsuits, and that anyone releasing any secret information could be sued for monetary damages.

    In 2012, the state bought pentobarbital from a compounding pharmacy in Grenada, called Brister Brothers, which mixed the drug. But state lawyers said the pharmacy refused to do further business and that the drug maker cut off the supply to Brister Brothers after Craig's group exposed it following an earlier records request.

    Barnes said Mississippi has nine units left which will expire in May. Two units are typically used per execution.

    Craig said the Grenada pharmacy wasn't harassed or harmed when it was named, and that protesters have a right to target the pharmacy in the same way people protest Mississippi's sole abortion clinic.

    The MacArthur Center made another public records request for information and got back 10 partially blacked-out pages, without any of the required legal explanation of why information was redacted. Craig said he believed there were other records that the department has withheld, but Barnes said that wasn't so.

    Craig alleged that the department's response is "a stall tactic" to keep information secret until the bill can be passed.

    "Our view is that it is willful disobedience and that it is mainly to try to run out the clock," Craig said, arguing the department should have to pay attorney's fees for purposefully breaking the law.

    http://www.jacksonfreepress.com/news...n-drugs-secre/
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  7. #17
    Moderator mostlyclassics's Avatar
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    Just to clarify matters for those of us who don't live in Mississippi: Grenada is a town in the county of Grenada in Mississippi. The Brister Brothers' compounding pharmacy is not some outfit operating on the island of Grenada in the Grenadine Islands off the coast of Venezuela.

  8. #18
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    Suit says Mississippi lethal injections are unconstitutional

    By Jeff Amy
    The Associated Press

    JACKSON, Miss. — Two Mississippi prisoners condemned to death are challenging the legality of the state's lethal injection procedures.

    A lawyer for Richard Jordan and Ricky Chase writes in a suit filed Thursday in U.S. District Court in Jackson that Mississippi prisoners face risks of excruciating pain and torture during an execution that violates the U.S. Constitution's Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

    A prison spokeswoman declined to comment.

    Mississippi plans to execute prisoners by mixing pentobarbital from ingredients it purchased from a compounding pharmacy in Grenada. Lawyer Jim Craig said Mississippi doesn't seem to have ever used the drug in an execution before and questioned whether the state can mix a safe and effective anesthetic for prisoners.

    Even if it can, Craig warns that the drug may act more slowly than drugs used previously, meaning that prisoners could be conscious as a paralyzing agent is injected, causing them to know they're unable to breathe. They might remain conscious as potassium chloride is injected to stop their hearts.

    "The defendants' untried and untested drugs create a substantial risk that plaintiffs will suffer unnecessary and excruciating pain, either by injection of the compounded pentobarbital causing a painful reaction itself, or by the compounded pentobarbital failing to work, resulting in a torturous death by life suffocation and cardiac arrest," the suit states.

    The prisoners also allege using pentobarbital is illegal under state law, because it doesn't meet the legal mandate for an ultra-fast-acting barbiturate. Mississippi formerly used a different drug, but the supplier cut off use in executions.

    Craig has fought the state Corrections Department in court seeking information about Mississippi's suppliers of execution drugs. The new lawsuit argues that the secrecy is a separate constitutional violation, because it retards prisoners' ability to mount Eighth Amendment challenges.

    "Under the due process clauses of the United States and Mississippi constitutions, plaintiffs are entitled to notice of the defendants' intended method of execution," the suit states.

    Craig argues that under evolving standards of decency, U.S. District Judge Henry T. Wingate should bar Mississippi from using the paralytic agent and potassium chloride, though they are required by state law. He said executing people using only barbiturates, as Texas now does, could meet these standards.

    Jordan was convicted of capital murder committed in the course of kidnapping Edwina Marta in Harrison County in 1976. At 68, Jordan is the oldest inmate on Mississippi's death row, having won three successful appeals only to be resentenced to death. He's also the longest serving, having spent 38 years in death row. What would likely be Jordan's final appeal is pending before the U.S. Supreme Court. Hood's office could ask the state Supreme Court to set an execution date within weeks if Jordan's appeal is refused. That's important, because Mississippi's current supply of pentobarbital is supposed to expire May 20.

    Chase was convicted and sentenced to death in 1990 for the 1989 killing of an elderly vegetable salesman in Copiah County.

    http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/arti...re-6211391.php

  9. #19
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    Analysis: Mississippi battling execution issues on 2 fronts

    By JACK ELLIOTT, JR.
    The Associated Press

    JACKSON, Miss. — On June 20, it will be three years since Mississippi's last execution.

    On that date in 2012, Gary Carl Simmons Jr., a former grocery store butcher, was executed for dismembering a man during a 1996 attack in which he also raped the man's female friend.

    Mississippi has gone through similar hiatuses.

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1990 that a Mississippi law that described a capital crime to juries as "especially heinous, atrocious or cruel" without further definition was unconstitutionally vague. The ruling resulted in nearly two dozen Mississippi death sentences being overturned.

    For the rest of the 1990s, no executions took place in the state. The July 2002 execution of Tracy Allen Hansen was Mississippi's first since 1989. From 1955 to 1964, Mississippi executed 31 men. Another four were put to death in the 1980s. Since 2002, including Hansen, 17 executions have taken place.

    The state is battling execution issues in two federal courts.

    The U.S. Supreme Court has pushed back a decision on the appeal of death row inmate Richard Gerald Jordan to at least May 14. Jordan's arguments of prosecutorial vindictiveness and ineffective assistance of counsel have been pending before the nation's high court since January.

    In those months, the court has asked for case documents from the Mississippi Supreme Court, the U.S. District Court in Jackson and the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. That indicates at least one justice had questions about Jordan's earlier appeals.

    Jordan was convicted of capital murder committed in the course of kidnapping Edwina Marta in Harrison County in 1976. Now 68, Jordan is the oldest inmate on Mississippi's death row, having won three successful appeals only to be resentenced to death. He's also the longest serving, having spent 38 years in death row.

    The attorney general's office was poised to seek an execution date for Jordan if the Supreme Court had denied the appeal.

    In April, Jordan and fellow death row inmate Ricky Chase filed a federal lawsuit in Jackson challenging the legality of the state's lethal injection procedures. They are opposing the state's plans to execute prisoners by mixing pentobarbital from ingredients it purchased from a compounding pharmacy in Grenada. Lawyer Jim Craig said Mississippi doesn't seem to have ever used the drug in an execution, and he questioned whether the state can mix a safe and effective anesthetic for prisoners.

    Mississippi's current supply of pentobarbital is supposed to expire May 20. If the state cannot obtain pentobarbital, there is no backup method of execution. Hangings ended in 1940 as a means of execution. Mississippi stopped using the electric chair in 1954 and use of the gas chamber ended in 1998.

    Faced with similar challenges, Oklahoma recently enacted a law allowing execution by nitrogen gas as a backup to lethal injection. Utah reinstated the firing squad.

    Department of Corrections spokeswoman Grace Fisher said neither MDOC nor Corrections Commissioner Marshall Fisher "are making statements about execution drugs because of the ongoing litigation."

    The state has not filed a response to the lawsuit.

    Whatever decision is rendered locally in the execution drug case will likely be appealed to the 5th Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court. Attorneys for death row inmates not involved in this case would argue no execution dates should be scheduled while the lawsuit is pending.

    The U.S. Supreme Court often is the last stop for inmates seeking a last-minute reprieve from execution. They rarely succeed. That's a function of the need for five votes on the nine-justice court and the reluctance of appellate judges to disturb lower court rulings unless they are demonstrably wrong.

    On Friday, there were 47 inmates on death row, according to the MDOC website.

    http://www.sunherald.com/2015/05/10/...ling.html?rh=1

  10. #20
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    Court's ruling may not impact MS lethal injection case

    The U.S. Supreme Court ruling legalizing state's right to use a controversial drug in executions won't likely impact a legal challenge to Mississippi's legal injection drug combination, an attorney for group that filed the lawsuit says.

    The high court ruled in a 5-4 decision that states have the right to use the drug midazolam in executions.

    To prohibit the use of midazolam, a sedative that has left some death row prisoners apparently able to feel pain from the next two drugs in a three-drug cocktail, would have unfairly tied the states' hands, the justices ruled.

    Death penalty opponents argued that the drug was inhumane.

    "While most humans wish to die a painless death, many do not have that good fortune," Alito wrote. "Holding that the 8th Amendment demands the elimination of essentially all risk of pain would effectively outlaw the death penalty altogether."

    The MacArthur Justice Center in New Orleans has a federal lawsuit on behalf of some Mississippi death row inmates over the state's three-drug protocol in lethal injections.

    "We are studying the Court's opinion, but unlike the Oklahoma case, in Mississippi, the state has sought to execute prisoners using a drug that is made from unknown and unregulated substances, which creates a much greater risk of torture than the drug challenged in Glossip," said Jim Craig, co-director of the MacArthur Justice Center. "The Mississippi case is also different from the case the Supreme Court decided because Mississippi prisoners challenge the continued use of a three-drug protocol when there is a feasible alternative: the use of one anesthetic in a massive dose, which many other states have been using. There is simply no excuse for Mississippi continuing to using secret, unregulated drugs and it violates the Constitution."

    http://www.clarionledger.com/story/n...ippi/29464145/
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