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They Are Terminally Ill. States Want To Execute Them Anyway.
https://www.themarshallproject.org/2021/05/06/they-are-terminally-ill-states-want-to-execute-them-anywayAcross the country, executions are growing less frequent each year. But many of those facing execution are terminally ill, or simply very old. While courts try to ensure that innocent people aren’t executed and guilty people don’t face violations of their constitutional rights, the appeals process has grown longer and longer. Federal data show that people executed in 1987 had spent an average of just over seven years in prison; by 2017, those executed had been on death row for an average of nearly 20 years.
“We’ve got death rows that are starting to feel like assisted living,” said Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia law professor whose own client, Doyle Hamm, was 61 and terminally ill with lymphatic cancer when Alabama tried to execute him in 2018. Hamm’s failing health rendered it impossible for prison officials to find a usable vein, even after hours of poking that left him with a punctured bladder. Two months later, the state executed 83-year-old Walter Moody, the oldest person put to death in recent times.
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For more than two decades, defense lawyers for death row prisoners have argued that long prison stays under the impending threat of death amount to “cruel and unusual punishment,” and that lethal injection methods can cause excessive pain to prisoners in ill health.
The most successful of these efforts have been about dementia. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that people cannot be executed if they don’t understand why. In 2018 the court agreed to hear the case of Vernon Madison, who was facing execution in Alabama even though he could not remember his crime, the 1985 murder of a police officer. Alabama officials had argued that executing Madison would still fulfill the primary purposes of the death penalty — retribution and deterrence — and attorneys general in 14 other states took their side in the case.
“We’ve got death rows that are starting to feel like assisted living,” said Bernard Harcourt, a Columbia law professor whose own client, Doyle Hamm, was 61 and terminally ill with lymphatic cancer when Alabama tried to execute him in 2018. Hamm’s failing health rendered it impossible for prison officials to find a usable vein, even after hours of poking that left him with a punctured bladder. Two months later, the state executed 83-year-old Walter Moody, the oldest person put to death in recent times.
(snip)
For more than two decades, defense lawyers for death row prisoners have argued that long prison stays under the impending threat of death amount to “cruel and unusual punishment,” and that lethal injection methods can cause excessive pain to prisoners in ill health.
The most successful of these efforts have been about dementia. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that people cannot be executed if they don’t understand why. In 2018 the court agreed to hear the case of Vernon Madison, who was facing execution in Alabama even though he could not remember his crime, the 1985 murder of a police officer. Alabama officials had argued that executing Madison would still fulfill the primary purposes of the death penalty — retribution and deterrence — and attorneys general in 14 other states took their side in the case.
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