Even in Texas they are having their doubts.
Here's a modestly clever idea that will never come to pass in a thousand years because it's absolutely not the way modern life or America work right now, but it's nevertheless all sorts of delightfully ironic fun to ponder anyway.
But Muhammad will die on Nov. 10 by lethal injection. He will be
executed under the laws of the state of Virginia. No one will save him.
Not the U.S. Supreme Court. Not Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine. Not President
Obama. Each could do so but won't.
I understand why families of Muhammad's victims want him to die: He
terrorized a city, he ruined lives and he destroyed futures. I was
living in Washington, D.C., at the time, and I can still recall my own
fear - for myself, my family and my friends - that there was a random
shooter on the loose.
It is unlikely you've ever heard of Cameron Todd Willingham. He was an out of work Texas mechanic in the state's poor rural north-east who cared for his three small children while his 22-year-old wife worked in bar. He died at 36 in 2004; executed by lethal injection at the infamous Huntsville prison – the oldest in Texas – and where 362 people died in the electric chair before it was replaced with lethal injection in 1964.
WASHINGTON — US executions are meant to be clinical and humane, but
for some they end up resembling medieval torture, complete with the
smell of burning flesh, screams, and scenes so gruesome that witnesses
faint.
"We put animals to death more humanely," reporter Carla
McClain said of a 1992 execution she witnessed, in which Donald Eugene
Harding writhed and thrashed in an Arizona gas chamber for over 10
minutes before dying.
The European Union is to renew its call on the United States to abandon the "cruel and inhumane" practice of capital punishment.
Speaking in Washington, high-ranking officials from the EU will challenge all countries - including America - still employing the death penalty to fall in line with the rest of the world.
John Bruton, former Irish Taoiseach and current head of the EU delegation to the United States, will state that the use of capital punishment represents an "unacceptable denial of human dignity".
You want to know how barbaric the death penalty is?
Ask Romell Broom.
The convicted rapist and murderer was brought into the execution chamber at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility on Tuesday.
But the executioners could not manage, over the course of two hours, to get the IVs in right so the lethal injections could do their dirty work.
They tried finding a vein in his arms. They tried finding a vein in his legs.
Broom himself assisted the executioners by sliding rubber tubing up his arm and flexing his hands.
To no avail.
Sitting on death row in Georgia, Troy
Davis has won a key victory against his own execution. On Aug. 17, the
U.S. Supreme Court instructed a federal court in Georgia to consider,
for the first time in a formal court proceeding, significant evidence
of Davis' innocence that surfaced after his conviction. This is the
first such order from the U.S. Supreme Court in almost 50 years.
Remarkably, the Supreme Court has never ruled on whether it is
unconstitutional to execute an innocent person.
The power of racial bias has long loomed over the death penalty, yet
has seldom been directly confronted in the courts. But in North
Carolina, a race analysis of capital punishment is now being written
into law.
Marvallous Keene, 36, who was convicted in five of the murders, chose not to file a late appeal over his death sentence.
He died by lethal injection at the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville - seven days after Ohio's last execution. It was the fastest turnaround since the state executed two inmates in six days in 2004.
The European Union presidency, currently held by Sweden, released a statement noting the 1,000th lethal injection execution and calling on the US to halt executions, pending the abolition of the death penalty.
