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Thread: Wesley Ira Purkey - Federal Execution - July 16, 2020

  1. #21
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    Actually killing someone to make him regret his actions or to make him realise what they've done sounds weird. You cannot feel or think about anything after you die.

  2. #22
    Administrator Helen's Avatar
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    Do you have anything to say that is remotely pro DP, or is everything out of your mouth critical of capital punishment?
    "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."
    - Oklahoma Rep. Mike Christian

    "There are some people who just do not deserve to live,"
    - Rev. Richard Hawke

    “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.”
    - Rowan Atkinson

  3. #23
    Administrator Moh's Avatar
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    Trump Federal Execution Revival Back at Supreme Court

    By Jordan S. Rubin
    bloomberglaw.com

    The U.S. Justice Department’s determination to resume federal executions after a decade-plus hiatus is back in Supreme Court justices’ hands, with the filing of a petition from death row prisoners challenging the way the government wants to execute them.

    Their appeal, filed on June 5, presents the latest test for the high court on the hot-button issue of capital punishment, a subject that’s split the court along ideological lines and sparked some of the most tense exchanges between justices in recent years.

    Attorney General William Barr announced last summer that the government would resume executions, but the petitioning prisoners are fighting that move in court, raising technical challenges.

    The case, which involves several prisoners that the government wants to execute—all of whom were convicted of murdering children—was before the justices in December on a preliminary matter. While the court sided with the prisoners then, Justices Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh made clear in a separate opinion that they thought DOJ had the better of the argument.

    Now with the issues more squarely presented to the high court, if those three justices still hold the same view, then the question could be how the rest of the court comes down on the sensitive subject.

    The petitioner-prisoners are challenging a 2-1 April ruling by the influential U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

    An internal split

    President Donald Trump’s two appointees, Neomi Rao and Gregory Katsas, diverged in their reasoning before arriving at the same conclusion: a trial judge shouldn’t have blocked the government from carrying out the executions. Bill Clinton-appointee David Tatel dissented.

    The high court may want to weigh in, regardless which side it favors, to clarify the issue one way or the other. Four justices are needed to grant review.

    The federal death penalty act says the U.S. marshal “shall supervise implementation of the sentence in the manner prescribed by the law of the State in which the sentence is imposed.” The government’s lethal injection protocol doesn’t duplicate the minutiae of every aspect of how every state carries out executions.

    Katsas said “manner” in the act only refers to the “method” of execution, like lethal injection as opposed to electrocution. It doesn’t regulate “various subsidiary details cited by the plaintiffs and the district court.”

    Rao disagreed with Katsas’ "manner” analysis, saying that the act requires the government to follow state execution statutes and formal regulations, but not less formal state procedures.

    Tatel said in dissent that he agreed with Rao that “manner” means more than just general execution method, but he disagreed with her beyond that, saying that the law requires executions to be carried out by state procedures “not just in statutes and regulations, but also in protocols issued by state prison officials pursuant to state law.”

    ‘Grave uncertainty’

    The D.C. Circuit’s “very different opinions” create “grave uncertainty about what the Federal Death Penalty Act means and what rules the federal government must follow when it carries out executions,” said Hogan Lovells’ Cate Stetson, lead counsel for the prisoners Alfred Bourgeois, Dustin Lee Honken, Daniel Lewis Lee, and Wesley Purkey.

    “The panel’s decision, if uncorrected,” she said, “will have significant effects on both future death-penalty litigation and administrative law more broadly.”

    The prisoners’ petition argues that the circuit panel ran afoul of administrative law by adopting a reading of the protocol that the agency never advanced and by deeming the protocol a procedural rule exempt from notice and comment requirements.

    “The Supreme Court should grant review,” Stetson said, “to resolve this confusion and hold that the statute means what it says, requiring the government to follow state execution protocols.”

    The Justice Department didn’t respond to a request for comment on the petition. It will have the opportunity to file a brief opposing high court review, due July 9, before the justices decide whether to take the case.

    Noting the disagreement even within the appeals court majority, Death Penalty Information Center executive director Robert Dunham said “if you’re looking for clarity, I would think the court would want to review the case.”

    Dunham said it should be clear “whether the protocol follows the law and why. And I think that benefits everybody to have clarity. When there is clarity, one side or the other isn’t going to be happy. But that’s better than having confusion.”

    ‘Unusual aspect’

    Death penalty proponent Kent Scheidegger observed that the court might not take up the case because there’s no circuit split and the panel reached the right result, in his view.

    “Normally that would indicate a denial of certiorari,” said Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation.

    “The unusual aspect, though, is that the odd panel split will lead to an incorrect result in a future case unless corrected,” he said, referring to a potential situation where, in light of that D.C. Circuit precedent, a prisoner raises a challenge from a state where formal statute or regulation would control the analysis.

    He said that could be a reason for the court to take the case now, “rather than decide the issue on an eve-of-execution basis later.”

    The case is Roane v. Barr, U.S., No. 19-1348.

    https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law...-supreme-court

  4. #24
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    New execution date set for July 15.

    https://twitter.com/keribla/status/1...992837120?s=19
    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

  5. #25
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    Federal death row inmate with Alzheimer's seeks stay

    Attorneys for a federal death row inmate scheduled for execution next month have requested a stay, saying their client's advancing Alzheimer's disease prevents him from understanding his punishment.

    Wesley Purkey, 68, is scheduled for execution July 15, 22 years after he killed 16-year-old Jennifer Long in Kansas City, Kan.

    In a filing made in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia on Monday, Purkey's lawyers said executing him in his current condition violates the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects against cruel and unusual punishment.

    "Wes Purkey is a severely brain-damaged and mentally ill man who suffers from Alzheimer's disease," defense attorney Rebecca Woodman said.

    "He has long accepted responsibility for the crime that put him on death row, but as his dementia has progressed, he no longer has a rational understanding of why the government plans to execute him. He believes his execution is part of a large-scale conspiracy against him by the federal government in retaliation for his frequent challenges to prison conditions, and he believes his own lawyers are working against him within this conspiracy."

    Purkey's lawyers said two medical experts -- Dr. Bhushan Agharkar and Dr. Jonathan DeRight -- have both diagnosed Purkey with dementia and Alzheimer's disease.

    The stay request also cites the current coronavirus pandemic and the danger it poses to those who will be brought to the U.S. Penitentiary, Terre Haute, Ind., for the execution, including lawyers and family members.

    Purkey is also part of a lawsuit on behalf of four death row inmates challenging Attorney General William Barr's efforts to resume federal executions. The suit also names Daniel Lewis Lee, Alfred Bourgeois and Dustin Lee Honken as plaintiffs.

    The 4 sued the Trump administration last year after Barr ordered the Bureau of Prisons to resume carrying out death sentences 16 years after the last federal execution. The plaintiffs were among the 1st batch of executions scheduled to take place starting in December 2019, but a federal judge imposed a temporary moratorium in response to their lawsuit.

    The District of Columbia U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals lifted the injunction in April, giving Barr the green light to reschedule the executions of Lee (July 13), Purkey (July 15), Honken (July 17) and Keith Dwayne Nelson (Aug. 28). Bourgeois' has not been rescheduled.

    The plaintiffs appealed the case to the Supreme Court, where it was awaiting litigation when Barr scheduled the executions.

    At issue in the lawsuit is the Justice Department's plan to institute a uniform lethal injection protocol rather than follow the individual protocols used by each state, which the law requires. Barr proposed using a single drug, pentobarbital, rather than the common three-drug cocktail used in many state executions.

    Under a 1994 statute, all federal executions must be carried out in a "manner prescribed by the law of the state in which the sentence is imposed." Government attorneys had argued the drugs used in the protocol are irrelevant, since the method of execution -- lethal injection -- is the same.

    Cate Stetson, an attorney for one of the death row inmates who challenged Barr's plan, told UPI earlier this year the federal government "rushed" its execution protocol in order to carry out death sentences.

    "The district court's injunction was aimed at preventing the government from 'short-circuiting legitimate judicial process' and serving the public interest by 'attempting to ensure that the most serious punishment is imposed lawfully,'" she said.

    In 2014, former President Barack Obama ordered then-Attorney General Eric Holder to review the use of the death penalty in the United States, effectively implementing a moratorium on executions.

    The last federal execution was that of Gulf War veteran Louis Jones Jr. in March 2003 for the rape and murder of a fellow soldier, Pvt. Tracie McBride in 1995.

    Jones admitted kidnapping the young female recruit at Goodfellow Air Force Base in San Angelo, Texas, but his lawyer sought clemency by arguing Jones suffered behavior-altering brain damage from exposure to nerve gas during the Gulf War that gave him uncontrollable, violent urges.

    Purkey was sentenced to death in 2004 for raping and killing Long. He was also convicted of the 1998 murder of 80-year-old Mary Ruth Bales in Kansas City, Kan.

    (source: United Press International)
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  6. #26
    Senior Member Frequent Poster Ted's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Heidi View Post
    ...he believes his execution is part of a large-scale conspiracy against him by the federal government in retaliation for his frequent challenges to prison conditions, and he believes his own lawyers are working against him within this conspiracy."
    I imagine Timothy McVeigh believed similar things, would that have made his execution unconstitutional?
    Violence and death seem to be the only answers that some people understand.

  7. #27
    Administrator Aaron's Avatar
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    Obviously his attorneys are blowing smoke, and even if true he still needs to be executed. That being said, I think he might win a stay.

    Might as well just say "I identify as a non death row inmate and am in the wrong body" at this point. Someone will try to pull that one eventually
    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

  8. #28
    Senior Member CnCP Legend JLR's Avatar
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    If the diagnosis of alzheimers and dementia is accurate then a stay seems likely following the decision in Madison.

  9. #29
    Senior Member Frequent Poster joe_con's Avatar
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    I hope not, the inmates who need to be executed the fastest are the older ones whose continued appeals based on something other than factual disputes of their crimes allow them to get to old age where such aliments become common.

  10. #30
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    I am having troubles understanding the Alzheimer's, dementia, and other conditions used as defense in the court rooms. Does the inmate actually have the right to use that as a defense no matter when he/she was diagnosed? What if the inmate was diagnosed 2 or 3 weeks ago? Could the inmate still use that as a defense? I might be able to understand using those conditions if the inmate was diagnosed before offenses like these were done, but after?? This long after? Can a person survive conditions like this for that long. I just believe that the inmates should not be permitted to use conditions like this as their defenses.

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