A new grass roots movement is underway to change Puerto Rico's status--it is the outgrowth of Ashcroft's insistence on seeking the death penalty in a gang-related murder case in which jury selection is now underway.

The last execution in Puerto Rico, a hanging, took place in 1927.

Two years later, Puerto Rico's legislature — like those throughout much of Latin America — outlawed the death penalty. The 1952 Constitution, which defined Puerto Rico's status as a self-governing commonwealth associated with the United States, reiterated the unconditional ban on capital punishment.

The federal death penalty trial of the gang members now underway has "brought objections from some islanders that the United States is behaving like a semicolonial ruler."

"We don't believe in capital punishment, and they are trying to impose it on us," said Arturo Luis Davila Toro, president of the Puerto Rican Bar Assn.

....some people in Puerto Rico, who are questioning whether the defendants belong in federal court at all, want the trial to become another rallying point for demanding a change in the island's status — just like the successful struggle to shut down the U.S. Navy's bombing range at Vieques island. Following a four-year campaign that landed more than 1,200 protesters behind bars, the Navy last month abandoned the lands it had held since World War II.

Professor Juan Pablo de Leon has developed an action plan:

As president of a citizens' committee opposing capital punishment, De Leon is planning to take the dispute over the San Juan trial before the United Nations. He also hopes the popular backlash will become so great that Puerto Rico's elected leaders will lobby Congress to exempt the island from the 1994 Federal Death Penalty Act.

"Behind this case is the reality of the relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States," he said.

Teresa Lewis, 34, pleaded guilty to murder in Virginia and the judge sentenced her to die. If she had gone to trial, her penalty would have been what?

The last woman executed in Virginia was in 1912--a 17 year old. There are no other women on death row in the state, but there are 48 on death row nationwide, as of April 1, according to the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, Inc.

What's wrong with this picture, asks the National Coalition Against the Death Penalty?

Seven of the eight people facing serious execution dates in June are African American or Latino, demonstrating unfair bias in the way the death penalty is applied, the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty said today.

Between June 5 and June 27, eight people face serious execution dates in the states of Indiana, Ohio, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Texas and Utah. (A ninth person, Troy Kell of Utah, also has an execution date pending but is expected to receive a stay.) Of the eight people with serious dates, six are African American, one is Latino and one is white.

The lethal cocktail of intravenous drugs given to Tennessee death row inmates to kill them is the subject of a new court challenge. At a court hearing Thursday, Lawyers for Abu-Ali Abdur'Rahman argued that the combination of successive injections of sodium pentothal, Pavulon and potassium chloride, is a flawed process that can result in a tortuous execution, amounting to cruel and inhumane treatment.

The drug under attack is Pavulon, which paralyzes the recipient's muscles so that he cannot respond.

University of Tennessee veterinarian, Dr. Dennis Geiser, testified that Pavulon is not fit for use in putting down a household pet.

....[He] described how Pavulon makes it impossible to tell whether an animal is, in fact, conscious or unconscious and therefore is not approved for use by Tennessee veterinarians for euthanizing domesticated animals.

The drugs are administered in this order: sodium pentothal, then Pavulon to stop the breathing and finally potassium chloride to stop the heart.

Another expert testified that Pavulon is unnecessary in the execution process. A woman who received the drug during an operation testified:

...about what it is like to be paralyzed while surgeons — who wrongly assumed she was unconscious — operated on her eye. Carol Wiehrer described the scorching pain and experience of being awake at her own operation as ''worse than death.'' She was not able to tell the doctors that she was awake.

An expert anaesthesiologist testified that:

...he became intrigued by the lethal-injection protocol when convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was put to death. Heath said he thought then it was odd to use Pavulon and was alarmed when witnesses reported that McVeigh's eyes began tearing during the execution, a ''hallmark sign'' that he was either conscious or under light anesthesia — and not unconscious as expected.

Surely there must be a better way--we suggest choosing life.

By a final vote of 56 to 3, the Illinois Senate passed a sweeping death penalty reform bill. The bill was passed last week by the Illinois House with a 117-0 vote. The bill now goes to Governor Rod Blagojevich for his signature.

The measure proposes refining the capital justice system at nearly every point from investigation to post-conviction legal wrangling, with a multitude of changes meant to prevent execution of the innocent.

Here are some of the provisions of the bill:

It would change police procedures regarding disclosure of their investigative field notes, set up a system to get rid of police officers who lie and create pretrial hearings to help determine the credibility of jailhouse informants.

In addition, the proposal would create a presumption that anyone with an IQ lower than 75 is mentally retarded and not eligible for the death penalty.

The law would reduce the number of situations that qualify a convicted murderer for the death penalty and would create a pilot project for certain police lineup procedures to make them more fair. The law also would require police to inform witnesses that the person administering a lineup doesn't know which person in it is the suspect and that the person who committed the crime may not be in the lineup.

Another condition, called the "fundamental justice" provision, would empower the Illinois Supreme Court to overturn a death sentence if justices thought it was not called for in a particular case. The high court would not be required to jump through the legal hoop of finding a procedural error to justify throwing out the death penalty, which it must do now.

Governor Blagojevich has not committed to signing the legislation. He says it sounds like something he will support, "But I haven't studied it. I haven't looked at it." We're fairly confident the Governor will sign the bill. Days after being elected in November, he announced he would retain the death penalty moratorium instituted under former Governor George Ryan, at least until the legislature addressed the problems pointed out by Illinois Death Penalty Commission.

For more on why this legislation is so sorely needed, we recommend Thomas Sullivan's article, Think Now, Execute Later. Sullivan served on the Illiniois Commission.

Wisconsin banned the death penalty 150 years ago. That doesn't mean anything to Attorney General John Ashcroft, who is considering directing his minions to file federal death penalty charges in a Wisconsin kidnapping-murder case, whether they want to or not.

That's because the case is being prosecuted in federal court, where U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft makes the final decisions on whether to seek capital punishment. Since Ashcroft took office in 2001, he has overturned local U.S. attorneys' decisions not to seek the death penalty 31 times - often in places like Wisconsin, where the maximum punishment in state court is life in prison.

"It appears that the attorney general is trying to impose his personal beliefs on areas of the country that are less enthusiastic about the death penalty than he is," said Kentucky attorney Kevin McNally, who helps run the Federal Death Penalty Resource Counsel Project.

Every time U.S. attorneys prosecute an offense for which the federal death penalty is an option, they must report to the attorney general whether they wish to seek the death penalty and why. A federal committee reviews each case and may consult with the U.S. attorney and defense counsel before making its own recommendation. Ashcroft has the final say and may disagree with the U.S. attorney, the committee, or both.

Robert Blecker and James Liebman are professors at New York Law School and Columbia Law School, respectively. The two have have frequently taken opposing sides in public debates on the death penalty. But here they agree on reforms that are needed, in Texas and elsewhere:

One of us is morally certain some people deserve to die and that society has an obligation to execute them. The other opposes the death penalty. But when we stopped debating and started discussing, we found real common ground.

Despite our different perspectives, we agree that death as a punishment should be inflicted, if at all, only upon the worst of the worst; that society can incapacitate without killing, so future dangerousness and deterrence alone are never sufficient reasons to punish someone with death; and that a state-ordered execution is a terrible, solemn act that should occur only after the greatest deliberation. We agree that legislators in Texas and elsewhere should adopt the following reforms:

Most importantly, drop the felony-murder category for a death sentence...

Stop creating capital crimes undeserving of death in knee-jerk reaction to public outrage at a particular offense or to score political points....

Don't miss the spring issue of MS Magazine with its special report on women and the death penalty by Claudia Driefus. It's available free, on-line.

Since 1976 when the Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, 131 women have been sentenced to death. Ten women have been executed, nine of them within the past five years.

As this is being written, there are 44 women sitting on death rows in some 14 states, less than 2% of the total among the condemned. In the 27 years since the Supreme Court revived capital punishment, ten women have been put to death. As the nation continues to debate the use of executions as a crime prevention strategy, the fate of these women is mostly absent from public discussion. They are a policy afterthought, as invisible in their potential deaths as they were in their lives.

The broad arguments against capital punishment, male and female, are widely known: It is applied unequally to the poor and unequally by race; innocent people have likely been executed; it does nothing to deter crime; it brutalizes all of society by heightening the general ambiance of violence. But when one examines the stories of the women on death rows around the country, all the rest seems doubly true. The females who draw death sentences seem to be the poorest of the poor, the most socially marginal, the least able to protect themselves in court with a well-funded and coherent defense.

Excellent news on the death penalty front out of Illinois:

State lawmakers adopted a measure Friday to make Illinois' death penalty system fairer, virtually assuring a sweeping overhaul of the capital punishment process will go to Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

The House bill covers many of the recommendations made by a commission appointed by then-Gov. George Ryan, who suspended all executions in 2000 and cleared out death row of all 167 inmates at the end of his term earlier this year.

The measure makes it easier for murder defendants to get evidence that could help them in their trials, allows judges to second-guess jury death sentences and lets the Supreme Court set aside sentences it deems unjust.

It also sets up a pilot program for police to videotape interrogations and prohibits executing the mentally retarded.

The bill has now gone through both state houses. The amendments added by the House "are all but assured of passing" and the Governor is for it.

We know we just wrote about this last week, but it's so outrageous, we want to keep it in the forefront. From today's AP wire story:

The only state that dispatches condemned inmates by firing squad is assembling gunmen for back-to-back executions next month.

....Anti-death penalty forces are protesting, arguing that the firing squad amounts to cruel and unusual punishment. And the prison is bracing for large crowds of protesters.

....Utah's use of firing squads predates statehood in 1896 and is a remnant of the early Mormon belief that bloodshed is a required punishment for taking a life, said Richard Dieter, director of the Death Penalty Information Center, which says it is neutral about the death penalty but critical of its application.

....The Utah Corrections Department is recruiting law enforcement officers for two five-person firing squads, asking the police departments in the communities where the crimes were committed to nominate volunteers.

....A hood will be put over the condemned man's head and a target will be pinned over his heart. The executioners will fire simultaneously from gun portals in a separate room at the inmate, seated in a chair about 30 feet away. One of the five rifles will contain a blank so that no one will know who fired the fatal shots.

Jeb Bush and Republican legislators in Florida are closing the state offices that provide legal counsel to those facing the death penalty. We wrote about this at length, here.

The St. Petersburg Times takes Bush and cronies to task today for their misguided action in The Wrong Counsel:

In one of the most short-sighted and callous moves yet in this year's budget process, Gov. Jeb Bush and Republican leaders in the House have begun to dismantle the state offices that provide legal representation to death-row inmates. In his budget proposal, Bush recommended defunding the three Capital Collateral Regional Counsel offices and replacing them with attorneys in private practice willing to take these complicated post-conviction death penalty cases - a move that, in most cases, would guarantee prisoners less qualified, less experienced and less commited counsel.

...This is a done deal, but it is a bad one for Florida. The CCRC is without question the most effective way to provide competent representation to indigent prisoners on death row. Eliminating even part of this program will further weaken Florida's commitment to fairness in its criminal justice system.

....Florida leads the nation in the number of death sentences set aside due to constitutional errors - mistakes that include convicting the innocent. It takes the dogged work of experienced counsel to uncover these errors and set things right. But Bush and House Speaker Johnnie Byrd apparently aren't interested in getting things right. Their interest is in having executions come fast and cheap.

Utah still retains the firing squad as a means of execution, and two death row inmates have recently chosen it over lethal injection, according to Pravda.Ru. The reason? To ridicule the system.

On schedule to die are Troy Kell and Roberto Arguelles. Arguelles will be shot June 27 and Troy next day. Both men have chosen to stop any pending appeals and to die the rough way.

It is not uncommon that prisoners on death row take that course. Earlier this year, Earl Bramblett was executed in the electric chair of the state Virginia. He could have chosen to drift into sleep on the execution gurney, will death be pumped in his arm by an injection needle, but went out in a blaze of electricity to state his innocence. Other motives for preferring a terrible death like hanging on the gallows, the firing squad or the electric chair are simply a call for attention, the hope that its cruelty will lead to a stop of execution or even a pardon or even to brag in public about how tough someone is. And sometimes, it can be asked, it may not be clear to the condemned was he is choosing.

How does it work?

....They will be strapped to a chair in dark clothing. Five men or women, mostly peace officers of the district the murders occurred will take aim and fire four bullets and a blank in a human body. Death will be instant, if the aim is all right.

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