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Obama Troubled by Oklahoma Execution
Okla. AG agrees to 6-month execution delay
Texas set for first execution since botched case
Stay of execution granted for Texas inmate
UPDATE: Texas to shield drug-supplier names
They can kill you in secret now.
"Officer fired after elderly woman shot
HEARNE — Officials in a small Central Texas town have decided to fire a police officer who shot and killed an armed 93-year-old woman during a confrontation at her home. The city council unanimously voted Saturday to fire Officer Stephen Stem, who shot and killed Pearlie Golden on Tuesday. Golden’s nephew, Roy Jones, said his aunt became upset when she was denied a driver’s license renewal, and she armed herself. Jones says his aunt fired two shots before the officer shot her (AP)."
No stay granted for her.
"‘Fossil free’ isn’t folly free" by Jeff Jacoby | Globe Columnist May 14, 2014
IF OKLAHOMA prison authorities had been able to carry out Clayton
Lockett’s execution using sodium thiopental, his death on April 29 would
likely have been swift and relatively painless. The powerful sedative
used to be part of the standard lethal-injection drug combination, but
when its only American manufacturer stopped production in 2010, European
governments barred pharmaceutical companies on the other side of the Atlantic from exporting sodium thiopental to the United States.
As the British business secretary, Vince Cable, made clear at the time, the point of the ban was to strike a moral pose.
“This move underlines this government’s and my own personal moral
opposition to the death penalty in all circumstances,” he said. The
practical effect, however, has been to drive death-penalty states to
devise new lethal injection protocols, sometimes with gruesome results.
Many Americans would say that Lockett’s prolonged death was no less than he deserved
for the vicious murder of 18-year-old Stephanie Neiman in 1999. But
justice for murder victims isn’t what the Europeans have in mind. They
just want to demonstrate their antipathy to capital punishment. Refusing
to sell the drugs that can make lethal injections the most humane form
of execution enhances their self-image. It also turned Lockett’s death
from a rapid act of euthanasia into a grimacing, teeth-clenching ordeal that finally ended with a heart attack after more than 40 minutes.
There is a lesson here about the unintended consequences of economic
boycotts that backers of the fossil-fuel divestment movement would do
well to contemplate.
On college campuses across the country, activists have been urging
administrators to adopt “fossil-free” investment policies and rid their
endowment funds of shares in coal, oil, and gas stocks. Last week,
Stanford became the first major university to join the boycott,
announcing its intention to stop investing in “companies whose
principal business is the mining of coal.” Though Stanford’s endowment,
about $19 billion, is substantial, its actual investments in coal stocks
are minimal. Divesting them will have no real financial impact on
either the university or the companies. But it strikes a moral pose, and
adds to the pressure on other universities to do likewise.
The biggest target of the divestment movement is Harvard, with its
$32 billion endowment and outsize reputation. A student group, Divest
Harvard, is
pressuring the school
to get rid of its fossil-fuel holdings. So far the university has said
no, on the grounds that the endowment’s purpose is to earn the income on
which many Harvard priorities rely, and that “barring investments in a
major, integral sector of the global economy would . . . come at a
substantial economic cost.”
Students clamoring for divestment may be convinced they’re on the
side of the angels. But are they convinced enough to risk the
consequences of a weaker endowment? Such as less of the financial aid
with which Harvard helps 70 percent of its students?
You don’t have to be an especially savvy investor to realize that
divestment for ideological reasons doesn’t increase your leverage; it
eliminates it. Sell your profitable fossil-fuel stocks to show your
concern about climate change, and the odds are they’ll be snapped up by
investors who care much less about the issue than you do. “It’s like
believing that pornography is evil,” writes economist Todd Hirsch, “so you sell your stash of nudie magazines to the teenager next door.”
Using economic weapons for ideological reasons so often leads to unintended and unwanted consequences. Prohibition triggered a host of negative outcomes
that its promoters never anticipated, from a wave of restaurant
failures to the elimination of thousands of blue-collar jobs to an
explosion of crime and corruption.
To stigmatize fossil fuels and the corporations that extract them is
to stigmatize the energy on which the modern world runs. This is moral
preening, the hypocrisy of activists who want to strike a noble pose
without paying a real-world price. Were they to get their way, the
consequences would be disastrous, above all for the planet’s poorest
human beings, still mired in energy poverty, with all the misery it
entails. A “fossil-free” future is a chimera, and the divestment
campaign can’t make things better by pretending otherwise. But don’t be
surprised if it makes things worse.
--more--"
I say the state should stop putting people to death. No way to make up for a mistake, and there are far to many innocent people in jails.
Turns out I'm not alone, even on my "side."
"The conservative case against the death penalty; Can a few thinkers convince their party that a winning GOP issue is actually a costly, ineffective, anti-life government boondoggle?" by Leon Neyfakh | Globe Staff May 25, 2014
Richard Viguerie was driving last Tuesday morning to Washington, D.C., where the 80-year-old founder of ConservativeHQ.com
would be meeting with about 100 like-minded leaders as part of a summit
on the right’s approach to criminal justice policy. Newt Gingrich would
be in attendance, along with Texas Senator John Cornyn and former
attorney general Ed Meese. Given the influential guest list, you might
have expected Viguerie to use the occasion to try and spread the word
about one of his most deeply held ideas about criminal justice reform.
But Viguerie, who was closely involved in the recruitment of
evangelicals into the Republican Party during the late 1970s and ’80s,
was planning to do no such thing. Though many of the attendees were
friends he’d made over the course of his long career in conservative
politics, he knew most of them would not be receptive to what he had to
say. The fact of the matter, Viguerie said, is that most conservatives
just aren’t ready to accept his belief that the United States should
abolish the death penalty.
This is not a typical position for a devoted conservative to hold.
But Viguerie feels strongly about it, having arrived at it more than 35
years ago by way of his Catholic faith. Since then he has come to see
the issue in broader terms, and now believes that capital punishment
constitutes a violation of conservatism’s most basic principles.
Viguerie is part of a small but expanding group of conservatives
publicly arguing that true conservatism points away from, not toward,
the death penalty. One former NRA employee helps lead an organization
called Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty,
and has been giving speeches promoting abolition at right-wing
gatherings around the country. A Republican state representative in
Kentucky has introduced a bill to get rid of capital punishment in the
state. Conservative commentator S. E. Cupp recently devoted her column in the New York Daily News to the idea that “conservatives...should lead the charge to abolish” the death penalty.
The
argument they put forward is, overall, extraordinarily straightforward:
People who share a deep worry about government overreach, who believe
in the sanctity of life, and who place great importance on fiscal
responsibility should not support a policy that empowers the state to
spend large sums of money killing people.
“This is a program that conservatives should be uncomfortable with,”
said Marc Hyden, the 30-year-old organizer at Conservatives Concerned
About the Death Penalty. “The question is not whether people who commit
heinous crimes deserve to be executed—it’s whether we trust the
government to efficiently and effectively carry that out.”
That a conservative case for abolishing the death penalty even exists
will likely come as a surprise to people who recall the last time the
issue was discussed by politicians on the national stage, back in the
1980s. In those days, being in favor of the death penalty was a
front-and-center pillar of conservative policy. Anyone who didn’t
subscribe to it, like 1988 Democratic nominee Michael Dukakis, was portrayed as woefully soft on crime and inclined toward coddling rapists and murderers.
Politically speaking, conservatives who have come out against the death penalty are up against a lot: According to a 2013 Gallup poll,
more than 80 percent of Republican voters are in favor of capital
punishment. However it plays out over the coming years, the struggle to
overcome that consensus will serve as a demonstration of what happens
when a set of clear moral principles collides head-first with the
beliefs that make up a party’s political identity....
In this case I find they are both were the party willing to listen to me. They are not.
--more--"
Also see: Tennessee brings back electric chair
That shocked me.
"Court keeps execution drug maker a secret in Georgia | Associated Press May 20, 2014
ATLANTA — Georgia’s law that keeps secret the source of its execution drug is constitutional, the state’s highest court ruled Monday, though two justices worried that confidentiality could lead to botched executions like the one in Oklahoma last month.
In a 5-to-2 decision, the Georgia Supreme Court reversed a lower court ruling that granted a stay of execution to convicted killer Warren Lee Hill. His lawyers argued they need to know where the drug comes from so they know whether they have grounds to challenge it on the basis of the constitutional protection against cruel and unusual punishment.
The source of execution drugs has become contentious in the United States since major drugmakers, many based in Europe, began refusing to sell their products if they were to be used in an execution.
Like some other states, Georgia used a compounding pharmacy in July to get pentobarbital for Hill’s planned execution. The state has declined to identify the compounding pharmacy, citing the 2013 law.
It wasn't located in Massachusetts, was it?
Similar laws in other states face challenges, including a lawsuit filed by several media outlets challenging Missouri’s law that prohibits disclosing the name of anyone who is part of the ‘‘execution team,’’ which the state interprets to include the drug provider.
Hill was sentenced to death for the 1990 beating death of fellow inmate Joseph Handspike. At the time, Hill was already serving a life sentence for the 1986 slaying of his girlfriend, Myra Wright.
A lawyer for Hill, Brian Kammer, said he plans to ask the high court to reconsider and will turn to the US Supreme Court if that is denied.
--more--"
That created quite a storm, huh?
"Shelter sales soar after tornadoes; Oklahomans face long wait times for installations" by Kristi Eaton
| Associated Press May 09, 2014
OKLAHOMA CITY — Last year’s tornado season wasn’t the worst in Oklahoma history, either in the number of twisters or the number of lives taken.
But the deadly barrage that killed more than 30 people scared Oklahomans in a way that previous storms had not, moving them to add tornado shelters or reinforced safe rooms to their homes.
There’s just one problem: The surge of interest in tornado safety has overwhelmed companies that build shelters, creating waiting lists and forcing many people to endure the most dangerous part of this season without added protection.
‘‘Pretty much anywhere you go right now, the soonest anyone can install is about mid-June,’’ said Kayli Phillips, who works in sales and accounting at Norman-based Thunderground Storm Shelters.
Thunderground, which opened about two years ago, is part of a booming new industry that has taken shape as more Americans seek to shield their families from severe weather. The demand intensified last year after the series of deadly twisters in central Oklahoma, where a single tornado May 20, 2013, killed 24 people and destroyed 1,100 homes in Moore....
See:
Astonished at Oklahoma Tornado
Obama in Oklahoma
Moore community honors tornado dead on anniversary
Oklahoma is not the only state where families are confronting their twister fears....
Related: May is the New April
--more--"
Also see: Two big storms could make landfall this hurricane season, forecasters say
Forecasters got it wrong last year when they predicted an unusually busy hurricane season
I'm going to be putting the blog to sleep for the day, but promise I will be back tomorrow with many posts ready to roll.
