Sunday Focus: Executions

  

   NPR rebroadcast a Terry Gross interview with The Equal Justice Initiative's Bryan Stevenson recently, and he talked about the state's conviction and eventual freeing of a death row inmate in one of Alabama's favorite towns. Monroeville. Yes, TKAM's Monroeville:

"....if you go to Monroeville, you'll see a community that's completely enchanted by that story. They love the story. They have all of this "To Kill A Mockingbird" memorabilia. The leading citizens enact a play about the book. And you can't go anywhere without encountering some aspect of that story made real in that community. And yet when we were trying to get the community to do something about an innocent African-American man wrongly convicted, there was this indifference - and in some quarters hostility. This is one of the few cases I've worked on where I got bomb threats and death threats because we were fighting to free this man who was so clearly innocent. And it just reveals this disconnect that I'm so concerned about when I think about our criminal justice system."

                                                                                                 Bryan Stevenson
                                                                                                 Equal Justice Initiative

     Alabama is near the top when it comes to executing inmates:

189 inmates are awaiting execution on Alabama's death row.

     The inmate Stevenson represented had been there for thirty years, and won his freedom by forcing  police to test the gun he supposedly used in the murders. Results: it was not the murder weapon.

Alabama wants to resume executing condemned inmates. It has asked a Federal Court to clear the way. The AP reported this Summer:

The state attorney general’s office asked a federal judge in U.S. District Court filings Monday to dismiss a death row inmate’s lawsuit claiming the sedative midazolam is ineffective.
A divided Supreme Court last month ruled 5-4 in a case from Oklahoma that the same drug can be used in executions without violating the constitutional prohibition on cruel and unusual punishment.
However, a lawyer for Alabama inmate Tommy Arthur says the case should still go to trial. Attorney Suhana S. Han says Oklahoma’s lethal injection protocol differs substantially from Alabama’s.
Alabama has not carried out an execution in almost two years.

The Death Penalty Information Center is an anti-death penalty group with information on state death penalty laws, including Alabama.

EJI has additional information, including statistics showing that the top factor determining whether a convicted murderer is sentenced to life in prison without parole or to be executed is this: the race of the victim. The way Alabama carries out the death penalty contributes to a devaluation of the lives of black residents.


[Sunday Focus is a regular feature of www.TimLennox.com]