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The National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty applauds Governor O’Malley and the Maryland General Assembly for introducing and considering Senate Bill 276 and House Bill 295: Death Penalty Repeal and Appropriation from Savings to Aid Survivors of Homicide Victims and urges its passage...
Read Governor O’Malley’s testimony
View NCADP's Website for the full article
A federal judge in Washington has issued a preliminary injunction barring the United States government from carrying out four executions scheduled for December 2019 and January 2020. The opinion, issued November 20, 2019, temporarily halts the federal executions pending completion of court challenges to the government’s execution process and is a major blow to the Trump administration’s plan to resume carrying out the federal death penalty after a sixteen-year hiatus.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) appealed the district court’s order on November 21, and Attorney General William P. Barr (pictured) told the Associated Press that he would take the case to the U.S. Supreme Court, if necessary.
On July 25, the Department of Justice announced that the federal government intended to restart federal executions and that Barr had directed the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to adopt a new protocol specifying that federal executions would be carried out using the drug pentobarbital. Barr also directed the BOP to schedule five executions in a five-week period, setting execution dates for Daniel Lewis Lee (December 9), Lezmond Mitchell (December 11), Wesley Ira Purkey (December 13), Alfred Bourgeois (January 13), and Dustin Lee Honken (January 15).
The prisoners sought to stay their executions on a variety of procedural and constitutional grounds. However, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, found it necessary to address only one: whether the Department of Justice had legal authority to unilaterally establish a federal execution protocol. Judge Chutkan ruled that it did not. In a fifteen-page opinion, she wrote that the government’s proposed execution process conflicted with the provisions of the federal death penalty statute Congress passed in 1994 and that the prisoners were likely to prevail on their claim that the DOJ had “exceeded its statutory authority” in adopting the protocol.
Chutkan is presiding over a 14-year-old lawsuit that challenges the U.S. government’s execution procedures. An injunction has long been in place preventing the government from executing the prisoners who brought that suit. The five prisoners whom DOJ selected for execution were not parties to the suit, leading to criticism that the Trump administration had chosen them as an end-run around judicial oversight of its proposed execution protocol. Four of the prisoners moved to join the litigation and sought to enjoin their executions until the case could be resolved. The fifth federal prisoner, Lezmond Mitchell, did not join the lawsuit. A federal appeals court stayed Mitchell’s execution on October 4 so it could complete review of an appeal that was already before the court when his death warrant was signed.
In granting the preliminary injunction, Chutkan wrote that, without it, the prisoners "will suffer the irreparable harm of being executed under a potentially unlawful procedure before their claims can be fully adjudicated.” She rejected the government’s argument that it would be harmed by further delaying the executions, saying that “the public is not served by short-circuiting legitimate judicial process, and is greatly served by attempting to ensure that the most serious punishment is imposed lawfully.”
Shawn Nolan, one of the lawyers for Honken, praised the order: “By granting the preliminary injunction, the court has made clear that no execution should go forward while there are still so many unanswered questions about the government’s newly announced execution method.”
Pennsylvania has agreed to end its policy of mandatory incarceration of death-row prisoners in permanent solitary confinement. The policy change was part of a proposed settlement agreement of a federal class action lawsuit brought by a coalition of prisoners’ rights organizations on behalf of the Commonwealth’s 136 death-row prisoners, most of whom are housed in the State Correctional Institution-Greene (pictured from Google Earth image).
The federal settlement agreement, filed with the federal court on November 18, 2019, provides death-row prisoners with at least 42.5 hours a week out of their cells and 15-minutes of phone access each day, and allows prisoners to have contact visits, outdoor exercise, daily showers, group religious services, jobs, and access to educational programs. It also ends the degrading practice of subjecting death-row prisoners to body cavity searches whenever they leave their cells and requiring 24-hour illumination of the prisoners’ cells.
“This settlement brings Pennsylvania out of the penological dark ages and makes it a national leader in treating all incarcerated persons humanely,” said Witold Walczak, legal director of the ACLU of Pennsylvania, in a statement.
The lawsuit, which was filed by the national ACLU, the ACLU of Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh-based Abolitionist Law Center, and two Philadelphia law firms in January 2018, challenged the Commonwealth’s policy mandating permanent solitary confinement for all death-sentenced prisoners. The prisoners were confined 22-hours per day in cells the size of a parking space, with lights that never turned off, allowed out for a maximum of two hours per day for exercise, and denied human contact with family members during prison visits.
In a news release announcing the settlement, ACLU National Prison Project deputy director Amy Fettig described the state’s use of long-term solitary confinement as “torture.” The five prisoners in whose names the suit was filed had spent between 16 and 27 years each in solitary confinement. According to the lawsuit, 80% of the state's death-row prisoners had been in solitary confinement for more than a decade.
The Pennsylvania settlement, which still requires approval from the court, is part of a national effort to end the use of mandatory solitary confinement for death-row prisoners. In May 2019, a federal appeals court in Virginia ruled that the Commonwealth’s former policy of 23- or 24-hour per day solitary confinement of death-row prisoners constituted cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth Amendment. Two months later, in the midst of a federal lawsuit challenging its death-row conditions, South Carolina ended its practice of housing death-row prisoners in as much as 23-hour per day solitary confinement in windowless cells the size of a parking space. In September 2019, Oklahoma ended its policy of housing its death-row prisoners in solitary confinement in an underground facility that civil rights groups had called “inhumane and oppressive.” The groups had threatened legal action if the state did not institute reforms.
Previously, Arizona settled a federal death-row conditions lawsuit, agreeing to end its policy of automatically and indefinitely incarcerating death-row prisoners in solitary confinement. Prompted by other court challenges, other states including California, Colorado, Louisiana, Nevada, North Carolina, and Tennessee have provided death-sentenced prisoners more time out of their cells and, in some cases, now allow them to eat meals and exercise with other inmates, have contact visits with family members, and hold prison jobs.
