Subject: The global shift against the death penalty Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:57 am
Last week's UN vote for a moratorium on the death penalty is a welcome step.
Rome - Next year the world will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights. The intense discussions preceding the adoption of the 1948 declaration exposed the divide between nations that favored the death penalty and those that opposed it.
In the minority then, opponents failed to add the death penalty to the violations of human rights listed in the final text of the declaration. Since 1948, however, the ranks of the opposition have grown – and so have their efforts to end the ultimate punishment.
Last Tuesday marked a major milestone in this effort, when the United Nations General Assembly approved a nonbinding global moratorium on the death penalty. This resolution failed repeatedly in past years, so it was heartening to see 104 nations affirm its value.
The debate on the death penalty has raged since ancient Greece. Believing in the proportionality between crime and punishment, Plato favored the death penalty for individuals who committed crimes against their parents and in all cases of intentional murder. Centuries later, philosophers Immanuel Kant and G.W.F. Hegel also asserted the merits of the death penalty. On the opposing side, 18th-century Italian philosopher Cesare Beccaria believed the death penalty was neither useful nor necessary: The certainty, rather than the cruelty, of the punishment was what counted most.
Today, those who hold fast to the death penalty – the retentionists – regard it from a moral standpoint as a "just" punishment. They also see it as a useful deterrent to protect the "common good" – society's overall security.
Those against – the abolitionists – argue that the death penalty does not help to deter crime, contending that there is no objective evidence to support the claim that the death penalty reduces crime. Moreover, they say, it violates the mother of all human rights: the right to life. Last but not least, it might lead, in some cases, to executions of individuals who are wrongfully convicted.
These are the very reasons why Italy belongs to the camp of the abolitionists.
The rapidly changing international context demands that we take a fresh look at the death-penalty debate. Three factors are particularly relevant: the effect of the death penalty on the war on terror; the new role of transnational justice; and the strength of transnational civil society.
Recent experience indicates that the death penalty is certainly not a valid remedy against terrorism. The threat of capital punishment is clearly not sufficient to deter extremists who are ready to blow themselves up to pursue their objectives.
Second, the UN criminal tribunals on former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, and the International Criminal Court, have excluded the death penalty from their statutes. This creates an odd asymmetry: It means that individuals guilty of the highest form of crime – crime against humanity – are not punishable with the death penalty, whereas those who have committed crimes that are horrendous but more circumscribed (not against humanity) can be sentenced to death.
Third, the voice against the death penalty raised by citizens around the world has greatly aided the cause of abolition. This voice cannot be ignored. The trends are encouraging. According to Amnesty International, two-thirds of all nations have now abolished the death penalty in law or in practice. And more than 45 countries have abolished the death penalty for all crimes since 1990.
Italy, along with the European Union, was proud to lead the effort that led to last week's successful resolution. It's important to note that this moratorium does not interfere with domestic legislation. It only asks retentionist states to suspend its application. The moratorium also allows for a "pause for reflection." This is a widely felt need. And not only in Europe.
It is significant that the resolution was also supported by new African democracies, such as Gabon and South Africa, not to mention Rwanda, which suffered a tragic genocide during the 1994 civil war.
The affirmation of this resolution by the United Nations opens a window of opportunity for a broader and civilized debate about the death penalty. It's a debate that should move from a simple and common objective: making our world a more human place.
• Massimo D'Alema is Italy's deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs.
Subject: Justices Hear Arguments in Lethal Injection Case Mon Jan 07, 2008 6:21 pm
Published: January 7, 2008
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday heard starkly different descriptions of Kentucky’s method of putting people to death, with a lawyer for a condemned prisoner asserting there is an unacceptable risk of agony and a lawyer for the state saying nothing could be further from the truth.
“The risk here is real,” Donald Verrilli, the lawyer for Ralph Baze, the death-row inmate, told the justices, noting that the three-drug protocol that Kentucky uses in executions is illegal for euthanizing animals.
Mr. Verrilli argued that there are too many things that can go wrong in Kentucky executions, largely because poorly trained people are carrying them out, creating too much risk that a prisoner will die in great pain even though he is unable to cry out.
But Roy Englert, arguing on behalf of the state, said there is very little risk of that happening. “Kentucky has excellent safeguards in place,” he said.
A technician with broad experience inserting needles in inmates’ arms in a medical setting — “This person places 30 needles a day in the prison population” — attaches the needles to the condemned person, then joins other participants in “the next room, watching carefully to see nothing goes wrong,” Mr. Englert said.
The issue in the case of Baze v. Rees is not the constitutionality of lethal injection as such, but a more procedural question: How should judges evaluate claims that the particular combination of drugs used to bring about death causes suffering that amounts to cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the Eighth Amendment to the Constitution?
Several members of the court appeared to be troubled by the questions raised in the case, as they heard Mr. Verrilli suggest that Kentucky should use a single, overwhelming dose of a barbiturate to put prisoners to death, and Mr. Englert counter-argue that a single-drug procedure has never been tried, and that Kentucky’s three-drug procedure is effective and humane.
Mr. Baze, one of two Kentucky death-row inmates challenging the state’s procedure, was condemned for killing a sheriff and deputy sheriff who were trying to serve him a warrant. Executions have been halted in the United States since last September as officials in states that have capital punishment have awaited a decision in Base v. Rees (John D. Rees is the Kentucky corrections commissioner).
Consequently, the case is among the most closely watched in the high court’s current term. The Bush administration has sided with the state of Kentucky.
Mr. Verrilli cited several botched executions in recent years as evidence that the usual three-drug protocol is anything but foolproof. Sodium pentothal is supposed to render the condemned unconscious; pancuronium bromide is supposed to paralyze him, and potassium chloride is supposed to stop his heart.
Why not just use a huge dose of barbiturates, Mr. Verrilli said. That way, if something goes wrong, the prisoner will feel no pain, since he will simply be asleep and can be sent to a peaceful death with more barbiturates.
But Mr. Englert said “it takes a very long time to death with a single-drug protocol,” and that the “botched executions” mentioned by Mr. Verrilli were ones in which the veins of the condemned could not be found, or the inmate’s body went into contortions — not executions in which the inmate felt pain.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy asked Mr. Verrilli to assume for a moment that the three drugs are handled correctly in every instance. “Would you have a case here?” Justice Kennedy asked.
But Mr. Verrilli was reluctant to engage in conjecture. “There can be no guarantee they will be properly administered,” he said.
Several justices seemed to be grappling for some kind of factual standard to evaluate the questions before them, and complaining about the absence thereof. But several members of the court also voiced concern that, if the questions in Baze v. Rees are not answered, other inmates will raise challenges.
“We’ll be right back here in a year or 18 months,” Justice John Paul Stevens said.
Justice Antonin Scalia noted that execution methods that have fallen out of use — the electric chair, the firing squad, the hangman’s noose — have been abandoned in part because of fears that they were not pain-free.
But where is it written that the state must choose “the least painful method,” Justice Scalia demanded. “Is that somewhere in the Constitution?”
The three-drug execution method has been used for three decades. As for why it has not been abandoned in favor of an overwhelming dose of phenobarbital, an anesthetic used to put down animals, two explanations were offered by death penalty-watchers in advance of Monday’s arguments: Each state is reluctant to try something new, and no state wants to embrace a method used to euthanize animals, despite the possibility that potassium chloride will inflict excruciating pain as it courses through an inmate’s veins if he has not been rendered unconscious by sodium pentothal.
And an exchange between Mr. Englert and Justice Stevens suggested that a paralyzing agent is used in the execution of humans not just for the sake of the condemned but to spare witnesses the sight of involuntary thrashing, a sight that might detract from the “dignity” of the procedure.
“It takes a very long time to die with a single-drug protocol,” Mr. Englert said
At one point, an exasperated Justice Scalia said, “This is an execution — not surgery.”
Subject: The global shift against the death penalty 
Mon Dec 31, 2007 3:57 am
