“On all levels, the U.S. experiment with the death penalty has surged, resulting in botched execution outcomes that are worse than they ever have been,” Deborah W. Denno maintains in her Fordham University School of Law article, “Why Are Executions Becoming Crueler?”. According to Denno, states move from method to method when their protocols are constitutionally challenged, and not “to enhance greater humaneness.” The result, she states, is a lack of concern about the humaneness of methods, with the real focus “nearly exclusively on their mere perpetuation.”
In their AL.com Op-Ed, “Four different faiths, one moral call. Why mercy must prevail for Alabama’s Sonny Burton,” Imam Aswan Abdul-Addarr, Rabbi Scott Looper, The Rev. Shane Isner, and Archbishop Mark Rivituso write that despite “their distinct religious traditions, each with its own teachings and moral frameworks,” they find themselves “led, from within our respective traditions, to a shared moral conclusion” that “the power to take a life” involves “irreversible harm” and “When such harm is at stake, mercy is not weakness; it is moral strength.” And, in the case of Sonny Burton, who, despite the fact he did not kill anyone, is set to be killed by the State of Alabama, while the person who did kill Doug Battle was resentenced to life in prison where he later died, “Clemency would not be a failure of justice, but a humane expression of it,” they write.
In his podcast episode, “The Wrongfully Convicted Football Fan Who’s Running Out of Time,” Pablo Torre interviews Charles Flores, a devoted Dallas Cowboys fan, whose games he follows from solitary confinement on Texas death row. Wrongfully convicted based on the testimony of a witness who was hypnotized, “Flores’s case is an exemplar of the plague of wrongful convictions in Texas. His 25-year-old wrongful conviction, like so many others, turned on junk science: in his case, the testimony of a hypnotized witness,” Texas Defender Service Executive Director Burke Butler says. The hypnotized witness initially described two other people as perpetrators who did not resemble Flores, and didn’t identify Flores until he was mid-trial, “after she had been subjected to ‘investigative hypnosis,’ and after she had been shown Flores’s photo multiple times,” Butler notes. Flores is appealing his innocence claim to the U.S. Supreme Court.
“In 2004, on February 10th, at one minute after midnight, California was planning to torture and murder me via poisonous lethal injection drugs. However, at 11 a.m. on February 9th, the late Reverend Jesse Jackson came to San Quentin prison with one of my attorneys and brought me the stay of execution paperwork from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals,” Kevin Cooper, sentenced to death in 1985 for a quadruple murder in San Bernardino County in 1983, writes on his Facebook page, “Free Kevin Cooper.” Cooper, who is still imprisoned under a death sentence, explains that the Reverend Jackson then stayed with him and other visitors in the visiting room throughout the night, doing “everything he could to take my mind off of the fact that I still could be executed if the Supreme Court lifted the stay of execution. He told jokes and made me laugh. He prayed with me and for me. He told me about the struggles we Black people have in the criminal justice system and that the death penalty was no more than a modern day lynching. He told me that we had to have faith that one day we would put an end to the death penalty and I believed him. I believe that still.”