Former Ill. Governor George Ryan was at the Sundance Film Festival in Utah this weekend to promote the film Deadline, directed by Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson, a chronicle of the demise of the capital punishment system in Illinois.

"Deadline," directed by Katy Chevigny and Kirsten Johnson, follows the turbulent debate that erupted when Northwestern University journalism students showed that innocent men had been condemned to death row. Thirteen men were eventually found to have been wrongly convicted and Ryan, a Republican and supporter of the death penalty, declared a moratorium on capital punishment in the state.

Ryan, his wife and three former death row inmates were expected to attend a launch party Sunday night for the film, a contender in the Park City festival's documentary competition. The film mixes interviews with Ryan and other figures in the legal debate with archival footage.

Death row inmates interviewed in the documentary include Gabriel Solache, a Mexican national who speaks no English, yet was convicted of murder and kidnapping based on an alleged English-language confession; Robbie Jones, who was the youngest man on death row at 19; and Grayland Johnson, who claimed to have been tortured into a false confession. Ryan commuted the sentences of all three to life in prison without parole.

China's Civil Rights and Justice System is poised to become better, fairer and less lethal than Texas:

The Chinese government is planning to implement judicial reforms that could sharply reduce its use of the death penalty and is debating new legislation to abolish the power of police to send people to labor camps without trial, according to Chinese legal scholars who have participated in the deliberations.

The moves would weaken two of the ruling Chinese Communist Party's most notorious instruments of state power and begin to address longstanding international criticism of China's justice system. More people are executed in China than in the rest of the world combined, and police order tens of thousands every year to undergo what the party calls "reeducation through labor."

The government has not announced a final decision on the measures, and the scholars said many conservative police and provincial officials were resisting the changes. But they said that key bureaucracies, including the courts, the Justice Ministry and the legislature, had backed the measures. For the first time in years, they said, the momentum appears to be with advocates of judicial reform.

Last week we were quite disturbed by reading about an Ohio man who screamed his innocence and physically struggled with guards as he was dragged to the execution chamber where he was injected with lethal drugs and killed. The execution made an impact on the nation, which is undergoing a shift in its attitudes on capital punishment. The Ohio Mansfield News Journal today has this editiorial on the disturbing nature of the execution, offering possible explanations to these questions:

Why are so many people disturbed that a man who was about to enter the death chamber for execution didn't want to die? Why were people surprised and bothered when Lewis Williams Jr. struggled with prison personnel on the way to the room where he was killed by lethal injection?

The editorial notes:

What is more surprising is that more inmates haven't fought back to prevent their execution. People normally don't want to die and try to stop it....It reminded people of just how ugly it is to execute another person. Even those who favor the death penalty prefer to think of it as a quiet, humane event. Calmness somehow makes us feel better about what we are doing.

Some friends and family members of murder victims may enjoy seeing pain and terror on the face of the condemned killer. But we suspect even a good portion of these folks don't want to know the execution got messy. Another factor that probably makes people uncomfortable with the kind of struggle that took place last week is a nagging doubt about the guilt of the person executed. Was he unable to come to grips with his death because he knew he was innocent?

Williams proclaimed his innocence until the end. That certainly doesn't mean he was innocent. But that proclamation and his struggle have probably made some people wonder who wouldn't have been concerned otherwise....Lethal injection was adopted in Ohio and other states to make execution more humane for those being killed. It certainly also helped people feel better about their involvement in what is still an act of violence.

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We've written several times about Mexico's challenge to the imposition of U.S. death sentences to 52 Mexcian nationals in the International Court of Justice in the Hague, see here, here, here and here. Essentially, the dispute is this (from our prior post):

Mexico filed suit against the US in the International Court of Justice in the Hague over the U.S.’s failure to comply with the Vienna Convention’s guarantee of allowing foreign nationals access to consular officials prior to interrogation. Mexico is also seeking provisional measures, essentially a temporary restraining order, against all capital prosecutions in the US against Mexican nationals until the case is resolved.

Adam Liptak of the New York Times brings us up to date:

There is little dispute that the United States violated the treaty in most or all of the 52 cases before the court in The Hague. The core issue during several days of arguments before the court last month was what should follow from that.

In March, the [State] department's top lawyer acknowledged in a speech to state attorneys general that the pending executions were a matter of concern. "We have had a number of conversations with government lawyers in both states about these cases," the lawyer, William Howard Taft IV, said. In November, Mr. Torres asked the United States Supreme Court to honor the international court's interim order staying his execution. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case. Justices John Paul Stevens and Stephen Breyer indicated that they would be inclined to consider it once the international court rendered its final judgment.

"The answer to Lord Ellenborough's famous rhetorical question, `Can the Island of Tobago pass a law to bind the whole world?,' may well be yes," Justice Breyer mused, "where the world has conferred such binding authority through treaty."

While the 52 inmates sit on death row, awaiting a ruling from the 15 judges in the Netherlands, the parties positions are clear:

For those of you going through withdrawal since the Texas Department of Criminal Justice pulled its list of death row inmates' last meal requests from its website, you'll soon be in luck. Coming soon to a bookstore near you, is Meals to Die For, by the former prison chef at Huntsville (LA Times, free subscription required):

Before it was discontinued, the Texas list of last meals provided fascinating if macabre reading. In fact, Brian Price, who prepared 220 final meals in the Huntsville, Texas, prison kitchen while an inmate himself before he was paroled last year, has written a book featuring recipes for some of those last bites before oblivion. "Meals to Die For," scheduled for publication next month, will have 42 recipes, including those with such jarring names as "post-mortem potato soup," "Uh-oh I'm dead meat loaf" and "rice rigor mortis."

"Meals to Die For" will be published by Paige Corp. of San Antonio, whose president, Frank Wesch, is Price's nephew. The 504-page book will contain Price's personal recollections of the execution day for each of the 220 killers whose last meals he cooked, as well as his accounts of the cases that led to 42 of the executions.

John Kerry just rose quite a few notches in our estimation--he supports a mortorium on the federal death penalty.

Sen. John Kerry: "I oppose the death penalty other than in cases of real international and domestic terrorism. We know we have put innocent people to death; 111 innocent people have already been released from death row. As president, I'll enforce the law but I'll also have a national moratorium on federal executions until we use DNA evidence to make sure those on death row are guilty."

All of the Democratic candidates responded to a question by the Associated Press, "Do you support the death penalty."

This is an awful story, be forewarned:

A convicted killer, struggling with guards and pleading for his life until the last moment, was executed today for killing a woman during a robbery 11 years ago. Lewis Williams continued to profess his innocence even as he was carried into the death chamber in Ohio by four guards.

“I’m not guilty. I’m not guilty. God, please help me,” Williams said as he was strapped to the execution table to face death by lethal injection. He continued to cry out as his mother, Bonnie Williams, sobbed in a room separated by windows from the death chamber.

He kept pleading even in his final official statement, given at 10:07am . “God, please help me. God, please hear my cry,” Williams said. Williams continued to cry out even after warden James Haviland pulled the microphone away. Williams continued yelling until 10:08am when he abruptly stopped speaking. His chest rose and fell a couple of times.

Haviland ordered the curtains drawn at 10:14am for the coroner to determine that Williams was dead. Williams, 45, was executed for shooting a 76-year-old woman in the face in a 1983 robbery. He was the first Ohio inmate whose mental retardation claim was rejected to be executed. For the first time, witnesses, including Williams’ mother, watched members of the execution team insert the needles that delivered the lethal drugs.

Turkey has officially abolished the death penalty:

The Turkish ambassador to the Council of Europe made the pledge on Friday by signing protocol number 13 of the European Convention on Human Rights. The protocol obliges countries to abolish the death penalty in all circumstances, including times of conflict.

Now Turkey is closer to admission to the European Union which requires that its members do not impose the death penalty.

"The death penalty is the ulitimate cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment. It violates the right to life. It is irrevocable and can be inflicted on the innocent. It has never been shown to deter crime more effectively than other punishment".

There has been a moratorium on the death penalty in Turkey since 1984. Turkey previously agreed to ban the death penalty in peacetime, but it now has agreed to ban it in all instances, including war time.

The EU is to decide in December 2004 if Turkey, a secular but mainly Muslim country, has made enough progress in democratic reforms to open membership talks.

The Supreme Court has reversed the stay of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and federal court in North Carolina, thereby allowing an execution to proceed, despite defense arguments that one of the lethal injection drugs is so painful the execution would amount to cruel and unusual punishment.

The execution is set for 2am Friday. Background on the issue is here.

Charles Singleton was mentally ill. The courts declared him too unfit to be executed because he couldn't understand why he was being executed. Then the state forcibly medicated him with anti-pyschotic medication. Under medication, the Court ruled, he could understand and the execution could proceed. In other words, the court ruled that it's okay to forcibly medicate a mentally ill prisoner to make him sane enough to execute.

Singleton had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment by a federal appeal court panel on the grounds of mental illness. But the full court ruled last year that he could be executed if forcibly treated with drugs. The court decided that "involuntary medication followed by an execution" was preferable to "no medication followed by psychosis and imprisonment".

"Eligibility for execution is the only unwanted consequence of the medication" and did not have to be taken into account, it said. A minority of the judges presiding over the case took issue with the ruling, saying it was wrong to execute a man who is psychotic when not on medication.

"I am left with no alternative but to conclude that drug-induced sanity is not the same as true sanity," Judge Gerald Heaney wrote in a dissenting opinion. "Singleton is not 'cured'; his insanity is merely muted, at times, by the powerful drugs he is forced to take."

A 1986 US Supreme Court judgment banned the execution of the insane as one of the "cruel and unusual punishments" outlawed in the Bill of Rights.

Charles Singleton, age 44, was executed tonight. He heard voices until the very end.

Update: Here's an article explaining the issues.

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Bill Von Poyck is on death row. He's waiting to hear if his last appeal will be granted. He's 48, and has been on death row for 16 years. He's written a memoir, Checkered Past, in which he writes of his squandered life.

Bill Van Poyck, a muscular, good-looking man with a mind that Florida criminal defense attorneys call ''brilliant,'' was raised in the well-to-do South Miami neighborhood of Pinecrest. In 1988, Van Poyck, now 48, was convicted of felony murder and sentenced to death -- not for killing anyone but for shooting at police from a speeding getaway car, after his friend, Frank Valdes, shot and killed Fred Griffis, a state prison guard in West Palm Beach. Now, Valdes is dead, killed by Florida prison guards, and Van Poyck is near the end of the line -- hoping the U.S. Supreme Court will hear his appeal.

At the end of the day, what does Van Poyck have to say about his life?

``I've squandered away my entire life. . . . I could have spent my life doing good and helping others. And yet I chose this. . . . How did I lose the good I once had? Slowly day by day. What do I have to show for my life at the end of the day? Nothing.''

Van Poyck gives all proceeds from the book -- about 150 copies have sold for $14.50 each -- to the prison ministry of Bernie DeCastro, who lives in Ocala and runs a 60-bed halfway house for convicts just out of prison. ''If you don't reach these guys and support them right away, they're likely to go back,'' DeCastro said.

If you are in Seattle, we recommend you stop by the Frye Art Museum and view a new exhibit on the brutality of the death penalty by University of Washington Professor and artist Zin Liu. You can view one of the paintings and learn more about the exhibit here. The exhibit runs through January 25. A fully illustrated color catalogue is available in the museum store.

In a group of 12-by-7-foot paintings titled "Five Capital Executions in China," Lin makes us party to shocking, almost off-hand executions played out among crowds of people who show little emotion as they cluster to watch or simply pass by on their daily routines. The paintings — which show decapitation, starvation, flaying, drawing and quartering, and shooting — aren't modeled on actual events. But Lin's fictional scenes do depict real methods of execution, past and present, which for him represent a long history of human cruelty not confined to any one nation. Because of the large scale of the paintings and Lin's clever compositional tricks, we end up feeling like passive onlookers to the carnage.

As the reviewer of the exhibition points out, it's tempting to think this can't happen in America. But, as the exhibition catalog points out,

The death penalty has been abolished in 106 nations, and 80 percent of the world's recorded executions take place in China, Iran, Saudi Arabia and the United States.

The artist's message:

I feel strongly about capital punishment," he says. "It's government sanction of killing, a vicious cycle that doesn't end."

Here's more on the art: