The out of step debate on the death penalty

Published May 3, 2015

By Chris Fitzsimon

by Chris Fitzsimon, NC Policy Watch and NC SPIN panelist, April 30, 2015.

One emerging theme of this General Assembly session as it reached its midpoint with a flurry of questionable decision making early Thursday morning before the crossover deadline is the extent to which legislative leaders are out of step with the prevailing wisdom of the era in which they are leading and are either oblivious or unconcerned with the events swirling around them.

The fierce efforts to undermine the expansion of solar energy in the state is an obvious example, as is the refusal to acknowledge the growing acceptance of same-sex marriage and equal rights for gay North Carolinians.

It’s true that the misnamed religious freedom act may be stalled– for now—but legislation allowing magistrates to refuse to marry same-sex couples has passed the Senate and is very much alive.

There are several other examples and none more illustrative than the passage of a bill on the House floor Wednesday night designed to restart executions in the state.

No one has been executed in North Carolina since 2006 as the courts consider the role of doctors in executions and the drugs used in putting an inmate to death.

The legislation that passed the House, sponsored by Rep. Leo Daughtry, would allow other medical personnel to play a role in the lethal injection procedure and would keep the details of the drugs used unavailable to the media and the public.

As Rep. Rick Glazier pointed out, the House debate came the same day the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a case challenging the drug cocktail used to execute inmates in Oklahoma after a series of horrifically botched executions across the country that clearly seemed to violate the constitutional ban on cruel and unusual punishment.

The courts and the nation are wrestling with the issue of how to perform executions in the states that still allow them. Daughtry’s bill would respond by simply making it a secret, an outrageous move that would prevent advocates and taxpayers from know what was happening with their money and what was being done in their name.

The provision removing the requirement that a doctor be present when the state’s intentionally kills someone has its own set of problems too, as other medical professionals also have ethical issues with being part of the process.

The discussion did prompt a bizarre comment from Daughtry who told the News & Observer that doctors wouldn’t participate in executions and “he didn’t know why.” Surely Daughtry can figure that one out.

The debate on the House floor also included rare comments by House Speaker Tim Moore, who supported the bill as a way to get executions going again.

Moore cited the case of one inmate who has been on death row for almost 25 years and told the House that justice was overdue.

The name of Daughtry’s bill is the Restoring Proper Justice Act, but neither Daughtry nor Moore mentioned the case of Henry McCollum and Leon Brown, who were released last fall after spending 31 years behind bars for a rape and murder they did not commit. No proper justice there.

An investigation by the N.C. Innocence Inquiry Commission found DNA evidence that proved another man had committed the crimes. Brown spent 5 years on death row before his sentence was changed to life in prison for the rape after the murder charge was dismissed at a retrial.

McCollum spent all of his 31 years in prison on death row awaiting his execution and hearing demands like the one that Speaker Moore made this week that justice was overdue and that he be put to death.

The death penalty system is broken in North Carolina and around the country and people now understand that. Recent polls show its support at historic lows and that a majority of Americans favor life in prison without parole as the punishment for first degree murder instead of the death penalty.

States that still execute people can’t figure out how to do it and innocent people continue to be released from death row every year.

Simply making the process a secret to speed it up is not the answer. Henry McCollum is living proof of that.

The days of the state using its implicitly flawed system to put someone to death to show that killing is wrong are waning and someday the folks running the General Assembly will realize that and stop fighting so hard to be on the wrong side of history.

http://www.ncpolicywatch.com/2015/04/30/the-out-of-step-debate-on-the-death-penalty/

May 5, 2015 at 1:29 pm
Frank Burns says:

It is proper that we continue to have the death penalty and that we reduce the number of appeals so that executions may happen more expediently. For heinous crimes, it is important to society that those criminals be removed from the company of society. Criminals need to know that there will be die consequences for their decision to commit those crimes.