A bad month on death row
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It’s been a bad month for executioners in America. Yesterday, we learned of how Romell Broom, sentenced to death by lethal injection, lay strapped on a gurney for two hours, quietly sobbing while the Ohio execution team prodded and poked at him to find a vein. Earlier in September, the New Yorker published a remarkable report about Cameron Todd Willingham, executed in Texas in 2004. Willingham was convicted of killing his three daughters by setting their house alight. Forensic evidence now suggests that he was almost certainly innocent. Both cases illustrate fundamental issues with the administration of capital punishment. On all kinds of levels, the death penalty depends upon abstractions. Far more people support capital punishment as a vague generality than when they must consider, say, the specifics of Nguyen Tuong Van’s fate in Singapore. The “humane executions” promised by a modern justice system are part of that comforting abstraction. Yet because the death chamber kills real people — that is, individuals with their own individual idiosyncrasies — scenes such as the one that played out in Ohio are inevitable. Fred Leuchter, the man who designed much of America’s execution equipment, explained it to me like this: “If I build the system and we do everything right, there’s probably a 20% chance that there’s going to be a problem. The human physiology varies so much. I can do it in most cases, [but] there are some cases where it just isn’t going to work.” Lethal injection — a procedure introduced primarily because it makes the execution easier to watch — is particularly problematic. The ease or otherwise with which executioners can insert a needle depends on many factors. Prisoners who lift weights or inject drugs or are morbidly obese or suffer from a host of other conditions, will pose problems. Furthermore, the execution teams are not properly trained — and this, too, is not an accident. The American Medical Association insists that its members do not kill and so, in lieu of a real doctor, the needles are generally inserted by incompetent guards. There’s similar problems with the drugs themselves. Because so few people actually want to think about what happens in a death chamber, the lethal cocktail injected into prisoners was devised by unqualified officials. The drugs cause paralysis; nobody knows whether they cause pain. The Willingham case raises a slightly different set of issues. Texas yields to no one in its fervour for capital punishment, despatching four times as many prisoners as any other state. But its wild west for retributive justice corresponds, not coincidentally, with a cowboy indifference to due process. Willingham’s execution was underpinned by forensic evidence that allegedly proved the fire had been lit with an accelerant. But Craig Beyler, a specialist who re-examined the case, concluded that the initial researchers had discarded “rational reasoning” and relied on methods “characteristic of mystics or psychics”. In fact, the scientific data was entirely consistent with Willingham’s testimony. Willingham was supposed to have confessed the murder to another prisoner. Yet that informant turned out to be mentally ill; he later recanted. The fact that a man could die on the basis of so little illustrates a central dynamic of capital punishment. Yes, as everyone knows, the death penalty is partly about race. Even more than that, though, it’s about class. The New Yorker story makes clear that the prosecution saw Willingham as white trash, the kind of person who would do something like burn his own house down. Despite evidence of Willingham’s devotion to his kids, the district attorney provided him with a simple motive for their murder: “The children were interfering with his beer drinking and dart throwing.” The image of a sociopathic deadbeat was bolstered by testimony from Tim Gregory, a psychologist, who happened to be a hunting buddy of the assistant DA. Gregory discussed an Iron Maiden poster that hung in Willingham’s house. “This one is a picture of a skull, with a fist being punched through the skull,” Gregory said; the image displayed “violence” and “death.” Gregory looked at photographs of other music posters owned by Willingham. “There’s a hooded skull, with wings and a hatchet,” Gregory continued. “And all of these are in fire, depicting — it reminds me of something like hell. And there’s a picture, a Led Zeppelin picture of a falling angel … I see there’s an association many times with cultive-type of activities. A focus on death, dying. Many times, individuals that have a lot of this type of art have interest in satanic-type activities.” Typically, Willingham was unemployed; typically, he relied on public defenders; typically, they didn’t do a very good job. The death rows around American contain, almost exclusively, society’s detritus. It is disposable people who are disposed of: the poor, the crazy or the simply forgotten. That doesn’t mean that they’re all innocent. Clearly, most of them aren’t. But the Willingham case illustrates how easily you can be railroaded to death if you’re the wrong sort of person. Yes, it’s been a bad month for executioners. But it’s been worse still for inmates. |
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21 Comments
I remember reading a very good article about torture by Raimond Gaita; one of his points against it was that we shouldn’t ever ask another person to be a torturER. Same argument goes for executions - what kind of person are we asking those prison guards to become?
Sign a petition to Governor Rick Perry and the State of Texas to acknowledge that the fire in the Cameron Todd Willingham case was not arson, therefore no crime was committed and on February 17, 2004, Texas executed an innocent man.
“…Yesterday, we learned of how Romell Broom, sentenced to death by lethal injection, lay strapped on a gurney for two hours, quietly sobbing while the Ohio execution team prodded and poked at him to find a vein…”
Fascinating.
So is the account of what Rommell Broom did to warrant his stay on Death Row.
http://www.drc.state.oh.us/Public/Broom%20Clemency%20Report.pdf
Tryna Middleton, a ninth-grade student at Shaw High School in Cleveland, was walking home from a football game with two friends.
They were pursued by a car without lights that stopped behind them.
An assailant tried to grab all three girls and during the struggle shouted “[c[ome here bitch” and pulled a knife.
Tryna, at five foot tall and the smallest of the three, could not break free.
The other girls ran to the nearest house to call the police.
The girls described the assailant as a young black male, possibly in his early twenties, weighing approximately 165lbs and 5’9”.
Approximately two hours later (a remarkable coincidence!!) Tryna’s body was found in a parking lot adjacent to an abandoned swimming pool.
Sperm cells were found in her vagina and rectum.
She had been stabbed seven times in the chest and abdomen.
Five of the stabbings perforated her heart and lungs causing instantaneous death.
Tryna also had an incised wound on her right forearm which the coroner testified was the result of Tryna’s efforts to defend herself.
Subsequent eyewitness testimony from a later failed kidnap attempt, positive identification from a police line-up and DNA samples from the scene of the murder and from Tryna Middleton’s body all led to the conviction and sentencing to death of Rommell Broom in October 1985.
He was 29 years old.
His victim was 14.
I’m sure he was terrified during his ordeal as they struggled to find a suitable vein.
I’m sure he will be terrified again as the hour approaches this week when hopefully they will again attempt to serve justice.
The world will be a better place at his passing.
“The drugs cause paralysis; nobody knows whether they cause pain.” - volunteers to test? Pass.
How about doing it this way. Convict them to life, and give them the option to convert to execution of their choice …
ACannon - is this the quote you are looking for?
“Capital punishment turns the state into a murderer. But imprisonment turns the state into a gay dungeon-master. ” - Jesse Jackson
No doubt Broom would be a good candidate for execution if you still believe, despite evidence to the contrary, that execution serves a useful social purpose. But what I find most repugnant, apart from capital punishment itself , is that the scheduled execution was for a crime committed 25 years ago, I repeat 25 years ago.
An excellent article. It is chilling to consider just how cruel the “land of the free” can be. And horrific as it makes you think- would a bullet to the head actually be more humane? Well only you if you believe in levels of humanity I guess. The sooner the death penalty is put to death the better.
Please tell me it isn’t true that it took prison guards - untrained I might add - two hours to find the vein. I can not believe that a system could be so cruel and inhumane. What he went through would technically be torture. Its like the state is just playing with him, “will we” or “won’t we kill this guy today”! Nobody should have to go through with that and I don’t care what type of crimes they may have committed.
It’s still crazy to think that a taste for Iron Maiden or Led Zeppelin (!) could be a material factor in deciding someone’s guilt or innocence. Clearly the original trial happened in the late 80s or early 90s, in the midst of PMRC hysteria. It was laughable then, and would still be were it not for tragic cases like this.
“…what I find most repugnant, apart from capital punishment itself , is that the scheduled execution was for a crime committed 25 years ago, I repeat 25 years ago…”
Which would make Tryna now 39 years old.
Still impossibly young.
She would’ve been in the prime of her life; maybe with kids; maybe a loving husband; a good job and a stable family life?
Instead, she was ruthlessly murdered by Broom.
Twenty-five years ago the Middleton family lost a daughter and have endured 25 years of grief and anguish waiting for the slow wheel of justice to turn.
There is an old saying, paraphrased, “it is better that all the guilty men go free, than to imprison one who is innocent”. Sometimes the phrase references 10 guilty men, but still the sentiment is the same.
Perhaps you can argue against that in regards to imprisonment. But you really cannot in the case of execution.
Execution (assuming you agree with it), should require the convicted to be 100%-absolutely-without-one-shred-of-doubt guilty of the crime which he/she is charged.
MPM - the heinous nature of his crime has nothing to do with capital punishment. Advocates must also decide how low the bar is to be, 1,2 0r 3? Manslaughter? Rape? Speeding? Dangerous Driving? Jay-walking? Or, like FirstDog recently, bad parkers?,
Hey MPM, how come you decided to post in this topic as ‘Most Peculiar Mama’ and not as ‘JamesK’. Thanks.
Jeff Sparrow’s informative exposure of even more cracks in the bogus “humane executions” claims of the violent right is welcome. Accurate facts can do more to puncture the notion that killing someone is so terrible that we must kill the killer that well meant diatribe.
It is therefore regrettable that Sparrow quotes Fred Leuchter, describing him as ” the man who designed much of America’s execution equipment” when this is not true. Leuchter has no engineering qualifications and designed very little, making his living as a self-proclaimed expert on executions. He would offer to “consult” on a State’s execution equipment and, if not hired, would give evidence for the inmate against the State. American courts rejected his evidence as unreliable.
He became notorious after preparing a defence report for Canadian court action against Holocaust denier Ernst Zundel “proving” that the gas chambers in Auschwitz were not used for gassing Jews and that therefore “the Holocaust story is not true.” Zundel is now in a German prison for his Holocaust denial.
Leuchter’s “opinion for hire” technique with State governments finally collapsed when he was charged with fraudulently practising engineering, a charge which resulted in a sentence of two years probation. He has subsequently attempted to keep the flame alive by speaking at denial events and blaming his demise on “the organized world Jewish community”.
“The world will be a better place at his passing.”
Perhaps. However, the brutality of Broom’s crime has no bearing on the purpose of this article, which is to question the method and morality of the death penalty. If society approves of the death penalty in the form of humane execution, then it must be as humane as possible. There is evidence that executions in the United States are not humane, for the reasons listed in this article. Nobody is arguing for Broom’s innocence, merely questioning the method in which justice was meted out.
Of course and then there is the Willingham case, in which the state is perhaps responsible for the killing of an innocent man. Executed at 36 years old, an age some would call “impossibly young” and “the prime of one’s life”.
“waiting for the slow wheel of justice to turn…”
Hmm. MPM equates killing with justice. Can’t say I’m surprised, MPM, can’t say I’m surprised.
Texas eh?
No doubt this killin’s done in the name of his holiness the invisible sky fairy…
Meanwhile, the State has yet again banned the sale of personal sex aids.
Apols for defaulting to a wikipedia link.
The death penalty says, ‘it is wrong to kill people - so we are going to kill you’. Not very logical.
Even if you agree with the concept of an eye for an eye, it is not possible to be 100% sure of a person’s guilt 100% of the time. Many innocent people have been executed, and this cannot be considered an acceptable risk.
Hey Daniel, [citation required] for this MPM / James K thing. I’m too lazy to do the network analysis that would prove this, but you could post it …
@MPM What’s the pro arguement you’re putting? By killing this guy the world goes back to rights and Tryna comes back to her family? No, so maybe if we kill him others won’t committ such heinous crimes? No, that’s not true either. By killing him we stop him hurting others? No, cause he’s already locked up. So maybe it’s just revenge? I don’t want my justice system based on revenge thanks and neither does the overwhelming majority of Australia.
When this odious criminal is dead three or for working men will go home with the burden that they too, are now killers. That’s not the way to make a better world.
It’s worth noting that the Willingham case is hardly unique. There are estimates that a third of people executed in Texas are innocent of the crime for which they were charged. This estimate is obviously rough, but given the high proportion of inmates in death row in Illinois, before the death penalty was suspended there, its credible.
So, Most Peculiar Mama, does it bother you at all that Texas routinely executes people for the crime of not being able to afford a good lawyer.