Lethal injection in question

Death penalty held up in court due to ruling it could violate the Eighth Amendment

Ryan Orr January 01, 2007

Saddam Hussein was convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death on Nov. 5. Fifty-five days later he was hanged.

In April of 1981 Philip Lucero was convicted of murdering two young girls in Calimesa and was sentenced to death. On California’s death row, is where he remains, awaiting his execution.

The already lengthy process of appeals that death row inmates go through in California, could be delayed even more after a judge ruled that the lethal injection process could violate the eighth amendment.

On Dec. 15, U.S. District Judge Jeremy Fogel ruled that California’s process of lethal injection was “broken,” and violated the Eighth Amendment’s ban on cruel and unusual punishments. The judgment came just two days after the Florida execution of Angel Nieves Diaz, which took twice as long as normal and required two rounds of lethal chemicals. Gov. Jeb Bush halted all executions in the state and launched an investigation into what went wrong.

“At the time the constitution was signed and made into law, methods of execution would have been such things as hanging, and firing squads, and those methods were not cruel and unusual,” said San Bernardino County Chief Deputy District Attorney Dennis Christy. “It’s difficult to see the drafters of the constitution would have held that, lethal injection, as it’s administered in California would be unconstitutional.”

Bonnie Buckqueroux is the executive director of Crime Victims for a Just Society, based out of Michigan. “The death penalty is a horrible stress on families, having a family member murdered is a life altering event from which your life is never the same,” she said. “Sometimes families think that they want to implement the death penalty, to get that old fashion word, closure. But it won’t bring you back to where you were.”

Since the death penalty was reinstituted in California in 1979, only 12 out of the over 636 people on death row in California have been executed, said Chief Deputy District Attorney John Kochis, who is the death penalty advisor for San Bernardino County. Only one of the 12 has come from San Bernardino County. “More people on death row have died of natural causes or suicide than have been put to death in accordance with their sentence,” Kochis said. He attributes that fact to the extremely lengthy appeal process.

Christy believes that with the advancement of science there will always be a quicker and faster way to put somebody to death. “Just because there’s a less painful way of doing something doesn’t mean that the method is cruel and unusual,” he said. “In California judgments of death are given tremendous scrutiny.”

Delays or holds on executions have now been implemented in ten states while the process of lethal injection is examined.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenneger said he will to whatever it takes to fix the problems that are found in the current process of execution in California.

“I would hope that sometime in 2007, they are able to submit a procedure that is acceptable,” said Kochis.

While Iraq — in the infancy of it’s democracy — has proved it’s efficiency in carrying out sentences in a timely matter, convicted murders on death row in California will continue to endure years of appeals before the possibility of their sentences being carried out.