Not The Onion: AZ introduces DIY executions.

As states have faced challenges to carrying out executions by lethal injection, various work-arounds and alternatives have been proposed, including the return of electric chairs and firing squads. Arizona may have come up with the most original concept yet: an invitation for lawyers to help kill their own clients.

The rest of the story:
Arizona's execution protocol invites death row inmates'lawyers to provide drugs to kill their own clients – a suggestion attorneys describe as ludicrous: Arizona unveils new death penalty plan - bring your own lethal injection drugs by Tom Dart (The Guardian)

Barbarism in Louisiana

Glenn Ford, a black man wrongfully convicted of murder by an all-white jury in Louisiana in 1984, a man who has spent the last 30 years on death row for a crime he did not commit following a trial filled with constitutional violations, is on the verge of being set free. Once that happens (and it could happen as soon as tomorrow after a hearing in the case) he will become one of the longest-serving death row inmates in modern American history to be exonerated and released.

Ford’s dogged lawyers and enlightened parish prosecutors in Shreveport both filed motions late last week informing a state trial judge that the time has come now to vacate Ford’s murder conviction and death sentence. Why? Because prosecutors now say that they learned, late last year, of “credible evidence” that Ford “was neither present at, nor a participant in, the robbery and murder” of the victim in his case, a man named Isadore Rozeman. -- Andrew Cohen (The Atlantic)

“After 30 years, Louisiana’s longest-serving death row prisoner will get his freedom soon. Glenn Ford is living proof of just how flawed our justice system truly is. We are moved that Mr. Ford, an African American man convicted by an all-white jury, will be able to leave death row a survivor. We are more determined than ever to put an end to the death penalty, once and for all.” -- Thenjiwe Tameika McHarris, Amnesty International USA Senior Campaigner

The rest of the story:
✓ Death Penalty (Amnesty International)
✓ A case involving a black man convicted by an all-white jury in Louisiana decades ago may be reopened: Freedom After 30 Years on Death Row by Andrew Cohen (The Atlantic)

Clip File: High Cost of Death Row

"To the many excellent reasons to abolish the death penalty — it’s immoral, does not deter murder and affects minorities disproportionately — we can add one more. It’s an economic drain on governments with already badly depleted budgets." -- Editorial (The New York Times 2009-09-27).

Resource: Death Penalty Information Center

Health Care: The Future Costs of the Afghanistan War

The pro-empire policies of the ruling elite have distorted our national priorities for 60 years. Finally, they have become too much to bear.

We can no longer permit American citizens to suffer and die because they can't get health care. The condition of our collapsing infrastructure courts catastrophe. Our schools and our prisons have become warehouses for people without futures.

Beginning now, federal revenues must be expended on programs and policies that increase national wealth and well-being. Profit can no longer be the sole measure of value. The role of national government must be redirected toward the common weal. But this will only happen if the American people make it happen.

We are engaged in two debates today that our leaders will try to keep separate. But they are not separate: in the short run, they are about how we will allocate scarce resources: in the roughest sense, we can't afford both universal health care and world dominance, and so we will be forced to choose. In the long run, we will decide who we are, a social democracy whose first priority is the well-being of its people or a corporatist oligarchy that uses the trappings of democracy to put the interests of a tiny minority ahead of the good of the country and of its people. As Jeff Ley writes, "The choice is clear: health care or warfare; the Common Good or Common Destruction."

On Wednesday, President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress on health care. Later this year, he will decide whether to deploy additional troops to the war in Afghanistan on top of the 69,000 troops already deployed. The struggle for health care and the struggle to end warfare are inextricably linked. The cost for substantive (though imperfect) health care reform, as envisioned in the House of Representatives approach (with the public option), is projected to average $100 billion per year for the next ten years. The cost to continue the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are projected to cost anywhere from $55 billion to $100 billion a year, with a few modest reductions to the baseline military budget, and the difference is paid.

The rest of the story: Health Care vs. Warfare: The Future Costs of the Afghanistan War by Jeff Leys (truthout 2009-09-12).

Resource: Executions, Deterrence and Homicide - A Tale of Two Cities

Abstract: We compare homicide rates in two quite similar cities with vastly different execution risks. Singapore had an execution rate close to 1 per million per year until an explosive twentyfold increase in 1994-95 and 96 to a level that we show was probably the highest in the world. Then over the next 11 years, Singapore executions dropped by about 95%. Hong Kong, by contrast, has no executions all during the last generation and abolished capital punishment in 1993. Homicide levels and trends are remarkably similar in these two cities over the 35 years after 1973, with neither the surge in Singapore executions nor the more recent steep drop producing any differential impact. By comparing two closely matched places with huge contrasts in actual execution but no differences in homicide trends, we have generated a unique test of the exuberant claims of deterrence that have been produced over the past decade in the U.S. -- Boalt Working Papers in Public Law, University of California, Berkeley,

Download: Executions, Deterrence and Homicide - A Tale of Two Cities (pdf)