Tennessee To Use Electric Chair When Lethal Drugs Unavailable

Read the CNN article here | Ed Payne, CNN | Friday, May 23, 2014

Electric Chair Haunts US Former Executions Chief

Dr. Allen Ault tells HARDtalk why he is still haunted by the executions

BBC: Most guests come into the HARDtalk studio with their guard up, their defences prepared. Dr Allen Ault simply faced the cameras and bared his soul.

His account of supervising executions in the US state of Georgia was one of the most painful, searingly honest and courageous testimonies I have ever heard.

Dr Ault is a soft-spoken Midwesterner with steel-grey hair and a steady gaze.

As he spoke about his years as corrections commissioner for the US state of Georgia, he appeared to forget the artifice of the TV studio and relive his experiences in the execution chamber.

"I still have nightmares," he told me.

"It's the most premeditated form of murder you can possibly imagine and it stays in your psyche for ever." » | Stephen Sackur | HARDtalk | Sunday, February 23, 2014

The American Way of Death
TIMES ONLINE – Leading Article: A botched execution in Ohio should quicken the end of capital punishment

America is the only big democracy — apart, occasionally, from Japan — that still carries out capital punishment. The botched attempted execution in Ohio this week of a murderer should prompt America to join the rest of the developed world in consigning judicial killing to history. There is inadequate evidence that it acts as a deterrent, it ignores the risk of miscarriages of justice and allows no room for repentance or correction. But above all it is a barbarity that stains civilised society.

There is no question but that the crime committed by Romell Broom was vile. He was sentenced to die for the rape and murder in 1984 of a 14-year-old girl. But his execution on Tuesday was halted when technicians failed, after a two-hour-long search, to find a vein sturdy enough to deliver the three-drug lethal injection.

A one-week reprieve granted by the Governor of Ohio may well be extended indefinitely, partly because it is half a century since any inmate was subjected to more than one execution, and partly because some justices of the US Supreme Court have now begun to wonder if botched lethal injections might not violate the eighth amendment ban on “cruel and unusual punishment”. Last year the court upheld the use of lethal injections. But Justice John Paul Stevens, while concurring, said that imposing the death penalty represented “the pointless and needless extinction of life with only marginal contributions to any discernible social or public purposes”. Other justices are believed to share this view.

When Texas became the first US state to introduce lethal injections in 1982, they were thought more humane than the electric chair, gas or hanging. It is time that they went the same way. [Source: Times Online / Comment here] Leading Article | Thursday, September 17, 2009