Sidebar With an Expert Capital Litigator
The State of Oklahoma executed Michael Lee Wilson yesterday by lethal injection.
News media reports are that almost immediately after the injection process began (within 20 seconds), Wilson said, ‘I feel my whole body burning‘ yet his body didn’t react in such a way that any of the witnesses could see his…
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Yesterday at six o’clock in the evening, Darius Kimbrough was executed by the State of Florida Department of Corrections after being sentenced to death in 1994 for the 1991 murder of Denise Collins of Orlando. Once again, Florida execution practices were hampered regarding the method of execution involving a lethal injection cocktail because Florida no…
We’ve been monitoring how it’s getting harder and harder to execute people in this country by lethal injection because the lethal drugs for the lethal injection just aren’t available to the states any longer, or at least not much supply is left.
There’s been chatter about returning to earlier forms of execution (like the firing…
As executioners are finding it more and more difficult to find drugs to use in lethal injections (see our prior post on this), discussion has begun on an alternative to injection as a way of killing for capital punishment.
Recently, an opinion piece on CNN.com written by Robert Blecker, a law professor at New York…
Two years has passed since we posted about the shortage of sodium thiopental in Florida and Texas and elsewhere, and how this necessary component of the three-drug "cocktail" used in death penalty executions was causing all sorts of problems with criminal justice officials in different parts of the country.
The Food and Drug Administration has filed an appeal of the judicial opinion entered by U.S. District Judge Richard J. Leon for the District of Columbia that blocks the use of sodium thiopental in executions.
In the decision, 21 Death Row inmates from…
Right now, the Florida House of Representatives has before it a bill that would end lethal injections as a method of execution. This bill doesn’t end the death penalty, though (that’s a different bill): this proposed legislation, if it becomes law, will return Florida to its prior methods of carrying out capital punishment.
That’s right. Old …
Mike Thomas of the Orlando Sentinel wrote an editorial earlier this month that gives a good overview on where the State of Florida is (and was) in its methods of executing inmates on Death Row. In "The death penalty: A dead end in Florida," Thomas discusses the various methods that the state has used…
Now, not only is the U.S. Department of Justice going state-by-state and scooping up any remaining supplies of sodium thiopental (see our earlier post for details), it has informed the State of Arizona that Arizona cannot legally use its sodium thiopental supply because it is the opinion of the Justice Department that Arizona got that…